Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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With Barney's Version, veteran Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler delivers a cathartic, fictionalized writer's memoir. His protagonist, Barney Panofsky, possesses a spirit dominated by two qualities: extraordinary eloquence and unfailing honesty.

As one might expect, these two tendencies combine to form a powderkeg of an individual. After a young adulthood in the Parisian Left Bank, Barney returns to his native Montreal, convinced that he can dupe the world into making him a rich man by choosing a life of insincerity. While his Left Bank compatriots steel themselves to earnest, literary lives, Barney instead founds a television production company, Totally Unnecessary Productions, whose sole function is to churn out the sort of drivel that pads the executive pocket.

For most of his working life, Barney pledges allegiance to exactly nothing. His career is a well-rehearsed joke that keeps paying off. The piety of his fellow Jews provides him with more ammunition for ridicule-he finds knowledge of his faith truly useful only when he decides to "infiltrate the Jewish establishment" in search of a second wife. And true love, Barney asserts, is similarly a sphere for lesser beings. His first two wives only deepen his native sarcasm. And his first wife possesses a natural facility for writing horrendous poetry (a circumstance Richler exploits marvelously, having her commit such atrocities as, "he peeled my orange and more often me, / Calibanovitch, / my keeper.")

The young, free-wheeling Barney, however, is far from the reflective, occasionally-forgetful grandfatherly figure who narrates Barney's Version. By the September of his years, Barney has made scads of both money and enemies, and has even been corralled into the courtroom as a murder suspect in the disappearance of his best friend. Barney the elder has kept his youthful penchant for devastating one-liners and swift denouncement of the overly earnest, but he now tempers these tendencies with the vague notion that repentance might be in order.

The reader cannot help but wonder whether Richler, too, is atoning for the havoc created by a clever, overly caustic intellect. The practice of airing all of one's dirty laundry-be it sexual, political, or interpersonal-only to assert distance through the creation of a thinly-veiled protagonist, has dominated Jewish storytelling throughout the latter half of this century.

Philip Roth, in his uproarious Portnoy's Complaint (1969), offers a protagonist who feels at once a suffocating attachment to the modesty and frugality with which he was raised, and an irresistible urge to plunge into the glitter of WASP society. Of course, the alternative values Roth's hero seeks carry their own troubling baggage, but the fun with Roth is in following a character so manically self-obsessed that he can acknowledge all his ugliest motivations, and still treat the needs of his id with the greatest gravity.

With this personal and uniquely Jewish method of expression, the observer is always left considering where fiction ends and autobiography begins. The dilemma flared up most recently with the release of Woody Allen's film Deconstructing Harry (1997), in which Allen's protagonist-played by himself, of course-indulges his lecherous taste for taboo sexual experiences. The film's release came within months of the uncovering of Allen's sexual liaison with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his ex-wife. The real-life Allen justified his romance to a pack of smirking reporters with an honesty both admirable and pathetic: "The heart wants what the heart wants." Allen and Previn have since married.

The vanguard of modern Jewish artistes has consistently erased the boundary between personal matters and commercially viable material. The process, as hysterically funny as it may be, thrives on exploring deep wounds. Talents like Roth and Allen cut their professional teeth by picking apart the bogus mores of other people's social codes; they are equally unforgiving in probing their own. Their own lusts cast them in a ridiculous light, but they relentlessly parade them in the public eye, in the name of their art.

Which brings us back to Richler and his fictionalized extension. Like Richler, Barney is a sixty-seven year old Jewish man of letters and a Montreal native. And just as Allen's Deconstructing Harry elicited suspicion of some sort of confession-or even apology-for the writer's own sexual eccentricities, Richler, through Barney, looks into a similarly introspective and unforgiving mirror.

The critical turn in Barney's story arrives when he finds true love with his eventual third wife, Miriam (whom he meets on the night he marries Wife Number Two.) Love has the curious effect of making Barney doubt his previous belief in insincerity. Miriam, he feels, is worthy of his searching for any lingering earnestness, and the process forces a level of self-examination that does not come easily. After years of giddy world-beating, thriving on moments in which he feels "tempted to burst into applause in celebration of my own hypocrisy," Barney's sense of shame suddenly materializes.

It was never really absent. Like the characters of Roth and Allen, Barney never escapes his guilt, even in his most libertine moments. His self-righteous attempts to thwart the prudent mores of his heritage only accentuate their roots within him. When he scrapes away his carefully-crafted rogue's persona, Barney discovers that he is surprisingly old-fashioned: He craves loyalty from his friends, he stands by his oft-mocked production company, and under Miriam's steadying influence, he even becomes-grudgingly-a good family man.

Barney finds, however, with a mixture of comic struggle and sad resignation, that the arrogant, shoot-from-the-hip television producer he chose to become is too deeply entrenched to entertain any midlife metamorphosis. In one of the novel's most bittersweet moments, Barney responds to his doddering father's randy advice to "get as much as you can while the getting is good" with the terse dismissal, "You're a disgusting old man." Only from a character like Barney would a reader be left unsure whether such a statement is meant as excoriation or affirmation. After all, Barney, too, is just such a figure, with a crippling ambivalence about whether his verbal wit and acrobatics can ever atone for his shortcomings as an empathetic partner.

By turns self-absorbed, raucously funny, and sad, Barney Panofsky represents the vanguard of the pop-culture Jewish protagonist, circa 1998. Richler, like Roth and Allen, is getting on in years, and so far-knock on wood-his writing has remained sharp and poignant. But the breadth of Richler's subject matter reflects his colleagues' newly-developed taste for the overtly profound. The strokes are larger now-instead of seeing the world through a single, electric relationship, we are treated to the sweep of an entire life-and the trend toward generality demands increased sensitivity to detail.

Richler's steady hand makes such a feat look easy. His prose rings with so much raw comedy that one barely realizes its deep-seated sadness until the final pages. It is the melancholy of Barney's Version, however, that lends the story its majesty, redeeming Richler from the potential saccharine superficiality of such a sprawling subject.