Barney's Version

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Acclaimed novelist Terry McIver is publishing his memoirs, in which he
tells of his experiences with the powerful and famous he has known, from
author Norman Mailer to TV producer Barney Panofsky, whom he first met
when both were living bohemian lives in Paris in the early 1950s. Barney
is outraged at what he sees as McIver’s “calumnies,” and feels
obliged to give the world his version of events.

Mordecai Richler’s tenth novel is written in the first person, as the
68-year-old Barney—who describes himself as a “cynic, philanderer,
boozer, piano player. And murderer as well, perhaps” —scribbles
away, “trying to impose sense on [his] incomprehensible past.”
Barney is a Montrealer who made money in a variety of legal and illegal
ways before acquiring a “fortune producing crap for TV.” Each of the
novel’s three parts focuses on Barney’s life with a different wife.
Numerous digressions take us back and forth through different times in
Barney’s tempestuous life, in Paris and in Montreal, where Duddy
Kravitz makes cameo appearances.

“I dislike most people I’ve ever met,” Barney writes, but he
still loves deeply a woman identified only as “The Second Mrs.
Panofsky.” Did Barney really commit the murder for which he was
acquitted? The answer to this tantalizing question is reserved until the
last page. En route to this final surprise—in a lengthy afterword
written by Barney’s son who edited his father’s memoir and corrects
its factual errors with explanatory footnotes—we get Richler’s usual
funny, sardonic, and moving portrait of Quebec’s Jewish community and
his caustic skewering of feminists, political correctness run amok, the
expanded NHL, the anti-Semitic Quebec of yesterday, and the tribal
separatism of Quebec today.

Richler won the 1997 Giller Prize for this rollicking, bawdy, poignant,
and frequently hilarious novel.