Mordecai Richler: The Last Honest Man, an Oral Biography

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto-based broadcaster and public-relations
consultant.

This biography of one of Canada’s most admired literary icons is
constructed like an autobiography, built around Richler’s own letters
and the thoughts and comments of those who knew him.

Arts writer Michael Posner glues together pieces of Richler’s life
through the author and interviews with 150 of Richler’s “family and
friends, colleagues and rivals, editors, writers, filmmakers, drinking
pals.” Socially inept in large crowds all his life and often
“curmudgeonly,” Richler is shown to be at his most comfortable in
the Montreal bars of the Ritz Hotel or Winnie’s, his favourite.

Never far from controversy for his social and political views and
commentaries in both his works of fiction and non-fiction, Richler is
captured in this work “in all his guises: the grumpy and the
high-spirited man, the observer and the engaged, the generous and the
distanced, the enthusiastic and the sardonic.”

Richler’s birth, in Montreal, into a large and often dysfunctional
extended family (his father was the eldest of 14 children) provided more
than enough fodder for his future novels, particularly The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain’s Horseman. His
eclectic Jewish surroundings and lifestyle in Montreal and his later
residencies in Europe and the United Kingdom provided ample material for
those that followed.

Many of Richler’s schoolmates reminisce about the man who turned them
all into composite characters in so many of his works. Richler’s
youthful adventures in Paris, Ibiza, Spain, and the south of France are
presented through his words and those of his friends, colleagues, and
wives. These recollections are not always in accordance with identical
facts but are riveting just the same.

Throughout this “as told by” biography, Posner has wisely let the
book’s “actors” speak for themselves and has adroitly fashioned a
chronological and sequential work that is as intriguing to read as its
subject himself.