St. Urbain Street Revisited

By R. Z. Sheppard

JOSHUA THEN AND NOW by Mordecai Richler; Knopf; 435 pages; $11.95

With his eighth and best novel, Mordecai Richler, the wandering Canadian, comes home. It is a place of great vitality, unabashed tenderness, grotesque humor and a grouchy reverence for things as they were. In some respects, the book is a Jewish Brideshead Revisited, the sacred and profane memoirs of an exaggerated autobiographical character named Joshua Shapiro, a Montreal writer and TV personality. A resemblance to Evelyn Waugh's novel is not farfetched. Richler twice borrows the comic master's line about the companions of his youth: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." In addition, the prodigal North American seems to have learned much from Waugh about episodic plotting and mixing poignant and farcical events.

Joshua Then and Now is unequivocally eventful, a circus of family entanglements, class conflicts, foreign and domestic adventures, sexual and criminal escapades, satire about life in literary London and semiliterate Hollywood. Shapiro is not the sort of writer to sit around massaging sexual guilts or nursing orchids of sensibility. He knows his craft but would rather talk about hockey, the Louis-Conn fight and the Spanish Civil War.

Joshua's childhood has left little room for pretensions. Like the author, he was born and raised in the low-rent Jewish section of Montreal, the background for Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain's Horseman. Shapiro's father Reuben is an ex-boxer and oldtime bootlegger who helped the Colucci family collect gambling debts and gave unorthodox religious instructions to his son: "There are ten commandments. Right? Well, it's like an exam. I mean, you get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class." Mother Shapiro is a former stripper and late-blooming porno actress who pops the eyes of Joshua's adolescent friends with a fan dance at her son's bar mitzvah.

Clearly Richler's hero does not have Alexander Portnoy's complaint. There are troubles enough. When first encountered, Joshua, 47, is recovering from multiple fractures suffered in an accident whose cause remains cloaked until novel's end. There are other details with delayed explanations. Why is this father of three and husband to the beautiful Pauline Hornby wearing lacy panties while talking to the police? Why is Pauline hospitalized with a nervous breakdown? Is Dr. Dr. Mueller (he has two degrees) really an ex-Nazi living on Ibiza?

Most questions are answered in due time. In the Richlerian calendar this means flipping back and forth from Montreal of the '30s and '40s, London and Spain of the '50s and la belle province of the present.

It is quite a narrative trick, one that allows the author to hit the emotional highs and bawdy lows of Shapiro's lurch through a world of dubious achievements and even more dubious respectability. Joshua, with his raffish background and inherited street smarts, is an arbiter of such matters. Most of his childhood friends make it to Montreal's affluent suburbs and lose their roots in wall-to-wall carpeting. To put on occasional airs is human, but to be a full-time phony is to risk devastating caricature, like Yossel Kugelman who becomes Psychiatrist Jonathan Cole, author of the bestseller My Kind, Your Kind, Mankind.

As the husband of Pauline, the lithesome daughter of a former member of Prime Minister Mackenzie King's Cabinet, Shapiro gets to see frauds and lechers in both ethnic camps. The exclusive shores of Lake Memphremagog are breeding grounds for scandals, swindles, assignations and humiliations. The perfect patsy for Richler's animus is Pauline's brother Kevin, a Fitzgeraldian golden boy who is rotten at the core.

The heroes of the book belong to Hemingway: Sidney Murdoch, a writer of uncompromising genius from Joshua's London days; peasants and fishermen on Ibiza, where a youthful Shapiro went to write his history of the International Brigades; and, of course, Joshua's two-fisted father, Reuben Shapiro, Richler's best character in this or any of his other novels.

Reuben provides: old banknotes stashed for 30 years in a safe-deposit box; physical protection for Joshua and Pauline; unforgettable companionship for his grandchildren; and even prime whisky buried along country lanes since Prohibition days. The old man also offers Richler's clearest distinction between respectability, as a social fac,ade, and honor, as a personal code. In a world of situation ethics--even situation aesthetics--Shapiro learns that the most important loyalty is to family and friends. It is the one virtue that can withstand the incursions of time.

This point is illustrated in numerous set pieces throughout the book, particularly when Shapiro and his St. Urbain Street cohort gather at their annual bash to forget stiffening joints, hardening arteries and the triumph of gravity over muscle tone. It is a raucous affair known as the Mackenzie King Memorial Society dinner. At one point the group splits into two sides and replays the 1947 Stanley Cup Final, using an empty champagne bottle for a puck. The racket attracts the hotel detective, who reminds the revelers, "You're all grown-up men here." To which Joshua replies: "Don't judge us too harshly."

The same humane appeal could apply to Joshua Then and Now. With its abandoned blend of refined sentiments and gross antics, the book is a wonderful expression of Richler's own precocious middle age. -- R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"A week after Trimble's Guy Fawkes party, Joshua sat in his study unable to work . . . Then [miraculously] the phone rang and something did turn up. Peabody at Playboy. As they couldn't afford Harold Robbins, he said, and Jacqueline Susann wasn't available, would he consider doing a piece for them on the new Hollywood? Only three days later, Joshua flew out to L.A.

Joshua loved Hollywood and its confident hustlers. On a previous visit he had delighted in spinning through the canyons in somebody else's Mercedes, gearing down to consider the more outlandish mansions, each garden perfect. He liked to wander through the unbelievably opulent men's shops on Rodeo, startling the prissy clerks.by bargaining. He enjoyed the tanned, trim, middle-aged producers on health diets, toting scripts to market in Gucci attache cases, even as their East Side grandfathers had once carried sewing machines on their shoulders. They strutted into the Polo Lounge or La Scala or Dominic's, bound in safari suits, blissfully playing the room, death just another sour-grapes rumor out of the East, bad word of mouth, something that used to figure in grainy European-made films, which everybody knew were bum grossers."

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