Dr. Johnson, Yes. Dr. Leary, No

By Christopher Porterfleld

ST. URBAIN'S HORSEMAN by Mordecai Richler. 467 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

The hero of this splendidly mordant, funny novel is Jake Hersh, a ghetto-liberated Jew from Montreal who, at 37, revels in the expatriate life of London, earns considerable wealth and fame as a TV and film director, still loves his shiksa wife of ten years, but has a bothersome question: "Why am I being allowed to enjoy myself?"

Enjoy? How can he? Jake is a liberal. The higher his stock rises, the more guilt-edged it becomes. Like the author, a Canadian Jew now living in London, he belongs to the generation ("Young too late, old too soon") that grew up without ever getting a chance to go to the barricades, whether in Spain or Israel. Squeezed now in a moral vise between "the old and resentful have-everythings and the young know-nothings," Jake cultivates his own garden, "inflated with love but ultimately self-serving and cocooned by money." Swishing a brandy at his fashionable Hampstead house, he is riddled by an anxiety that retribution is approaching. He looks for it in imagined bodily diseases, in natural disasters, in persecution by "the injustice collectors."

It arrives in the form of his English accountant, Harry Stein, a spiteful little sex deviant and sometime blackmailer who cannot forgive his clients the indulgence that is reflected in the expense accounts he sweats over. Jake accepts Harry's envy as a judgment. When his entanglement with Harry lands him in the dock at the Old Bailey--wrongly accused of bizarre sexual offenses against a German au pair girl--he acquiesces in society's right to demand an accounting from him. To him, the trial is the rack on which his way of life is stretched out for examination.

Richler carries out the investigation with unflagging scatological zest and a deadly, unsparing eye. At the London film colony's weekly softball game, the players' first wives come to jeer, and the scores and strikeouts have more to do with careers and sex than with the game. On Montreal's St. Urbain Street, while sitting in mourning for Jake's father, friends and relatives pass around vulgarities and insults along with the cake. Canadian intellectuals are "reared to believe in the cultural thinness of their own blood. Anemia is their heritage." In gum-gray England, the upper classes are "unaggressively handsome, that is to say, somewhat wanting, like an underdeveloped photograph."

Jewish Batman. If anything, the book is too rich in such details, almost bursting its seams with worked-up mots and comic turns. But it is strung together in the end by the quasi-poetic image of Jake's mysterious cousin Joey, the horseman of the title. Joey is a movie stuntman, baseball player and soldier of fortune whose vaguely charted wanderings seem to take in all the barricades, from Madrid in 1938 to Jerusalem in 1967. Jake, convinced that Joey is now in Paraguay pursuing the infamous Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, also sees him as a kind of Jewish Batman, a conscience, an avenger. Jake's real growth in the novel is an evolution from Joey's advocate to his acolyte, and finally to something like his surrogate.

Horseman offers the secondary pleasure of watching a writer just as he is hitting full stride. Richler, who was born in Montreal, is one of Canadian culture's leading unrepentant truants. He has written five previous novels. Their themes range from sociopolitical consciousness (The Acrobats) through pungently realistic picaresques of Montreal Jewish life (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) to outrageous expatriate satire (Cocksure). Finally, at 40, Richler has brought all these strains together. The result is a resounding war cry, love song and apologia for the fundamentally decent man who can fumble through the depravity of the times and come out saying: "Dr. Johnson, yes. Dr. Leary, no."

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