Barney’s version is a mock memoir of a Canadian Jewish hockey-loving TV producer who in his youth had pretensions of being a writer. It is famed writer Mordecai Richler’s last novel, and seemingly a condensation of all he cared about, rolled into one neat volume.
The manuscript is presented as if found by Barney Panofsky’s children after his death, completed with footnotes added by his son correcting errors and occasionally giving his view on Barney’s arguments. In that sense, this is a literary analogue to the hit horror movie “The Blair Witch Project” that came out a few year after this book. Richler must have had fun with the intentional errors and imagining the back and forth between the father’s writing and the son’s amendations.
The book retells Barney’s life, and is divided into three parts, each one named for one of his three wives. The first one recalls Barney’s “lost years” in his 20s an American in Paris (Canadians count as Americans in my world, anyway), the second one seems to make light of a certain kind of Canadian Jewish bourgeois type of family (from which the second wife is extracted). She is only referred to as “the second mrs Panofsky” and is never mentioned by name. It just so happens that at the wedding between Barney and his second wife, he meets and falls in love with the woman who will become his third wife (which I later found out is taken from the real life of this book’s author, whose name is Mordecai Richler, remember?).
The third wife is a radio personality, and at the outset of this book it is revealed that Barney is writing these memoirs to try to make sense of his wretched life, now that he in old age has been abandoned by his true love, the third wife. Also looming in the background is the death of an old friend, which may or may not have been by the hand of Barney Panofsky himself.
The book is expertly written, and full of humorous apercus, anecdotes and raunchy stories. Sometimes it is almost excessively raunchy. It is in its own way also a kind of history of Canada and Canadian politics, commenting on the bickerings between the anglos, the quebecos and the inuit. Maybe not so much commenting on the inuit, come to think of it, but anyway. Another area that is obliquely evaluated is what at the time of writing was called “PC”, or political correctness. Some of the rants on that topic seem prophetic, when viewed from the vantage point of 2020. I liked the phrase “writers of pallor”, which seems to have been conjured up by Richler to counter phrases like “people of color”, a term which is now in full swing in the millennial 20’s. I also recognize some topics that I have learned were in style in the American 90’s, like Benefit galas for various diseases, or life-prolonging coma documents. Most of these things I have gleaned from watching 90’s television, chiefly Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show.
This is the first book I read of Mr. Richler’s, and possibly the only one I am likely to read. I got a sense of his style and get the feeling that this might be his crowning achievement, literature-wise. I would recommend this book to those who take an interest in Jewish Canadian literature from the 90’s, or those willing to try. It is a prose style that lends itself to page-turning and the 400+ pages whooshed by in no time. It’s funny, too.
Kinship of all Species 