St Farb's Day

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

The main character here is not the Farb who is canonized in the title of
this comic novel, but Toronto—not the good, rather the burgeoning
metropolis of the 1980s, when off-shore money poured in, speculators
promoted bigger and better deals by the hour, and real estate coffers
swelled after price-bidding wars.

Against this setting and atmosphere, Farb encounters a sea of troubles.
On one particular Friday—when an especially lucrative real-estate deal
is to culminate—he extricates himself from a conflict-of-interest
situation, his wife from whom he is separated wants a property
settlement, he is involved in a convenience-store “stick-up,” and
his aged father wants to remarry and re-enter law practice. In a sense,
Farb is a Canadian counterpart to one of Saul Bellow’s floundering
anti-heroes, a creature beset by marital, professional, and emotional
woes.

Torgov, a lawyer and a novelist, is at his best dealing with the
complexities and mixed feelings of family relationships. The scenes
between the 60-year-old Farb and his father, a resident of an old-folks
home on north Bathurst Street (a thinly disguised Baycrest Home for the
Aged), convey a kind of comic bitter sweetness. Farb commenting on the
family photographs on the wall of his father’s room says of his
grandparents, “Didn’t you people ever smile?”; to which his father
replies, “Those days nobody smiled. You smiled, you were asking for
bad luck, bankruptcy, heart failure, even worse. You smiled, lightning
was sure to strike.”

Appropriate to comedy, the characters throughout are types rather than
individuals. The participants on one side of the real-estate deal are
two wealthy, widowed, mink-coated sisters; on the other side is an
affluent first-generation Canadian dynasty builder; and in the middle
are the sharp entrepreneurial agent and his cohorts (who are promoting
the deal), some old establishment WASP figures, and the honest, but
rather befuddled and pathetic, Farb.

Comic as Torgov’s version of one lawyer’s tribulations is, in the
more sombre, sober days of the economically depressed 1990s it seems
somewhat dated. Nonetheless, it is a good read that offers pleasant
confrontations with many familiar Toronto sights and sites.