SINNING FLAMBOYANTLY

By R.Z. Sheppard

If Saul Bellow had remained in Quebec, Mordecai Richler would be Canada's second best Jewish novelist. That would be nothing to agitate a stick at. Most of Richler's 10 novels, which include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain's Horsemen, are inspired comedies about Montreal's Jewish community, of which the author, now 66, remains a member.

The writer's close, conflicted ties to his birthplace give his work its special flavor, not to mention its distinctive sense of the not quite familiar. Richler's raffish characters could be from New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, except that they are nuts about hockey, spice their conversation with French as well as Yiddish and have legal access to Cuban cigars.

The bumptious codger Barney Panofsky of Barney's Version (Knopf; 368 pages; $25) is more than a familiar Richler hero. He is the author's fullest expression of the type: a pleasure-loving scoundrel with a generous romantic streak and a gift that can turn schmoozing into literature. Barney makes his sizable living producing Canadian-content TV series like McIver of the RCMP ("big on bonking scenes in canoes and igloos"). He calls his company Totally Unnecessary Productions, a name that flaunts his self-loathing but, more important, pre-empts the scorn of his artistic betters.

Richler's lusty creation never seems "larger than life," a cliche that underestimates the size of life. Better to say that Barney fills an expansive and unconventional existence. He is the son of Montreal's first Jewish policeman, Izzy Panofsky, who would have been at home in the old Odessa underworld. The younger Panofsky spent the early '50s in Paris, where he debauched with expats and married a crazy poet whose suicide ensured her canonization by academic feminists. What Barney calls "the true story of my wasted life" may seem undisciplined and chronologically impaired. In fact his memoir is cunningly designed for maximum suspense and beaucoup laughs. Going on 67, Barney has total recall of old grudges, past loves and 40-year-old hockey scores. But ask him what he uses to strain spaghetti and he goes blank.

Memory and its creeping loss are the themes that give Barney's Version its depth. The Ten Commandments and their discontents are what keeps the pages turning. Barney is a flamboyant sinner. What can you say about a guy who immediately tries to run off with a woman he meets at his own wedding, or plays practical jokes on the elderly? But did Barney really kill Boogie, an old friend and international moocher who was caught in the act with the second Mrs. P.?

The evidence, as so much else in this exuberant and, by the way, wonderfully written novel, points in more than one direction. Which is how Barney intended it. He has an answer for everything and everyone. He even anticipates the man or, more likely, the woman who would accuse him of feeling sorry for himself: "Don't knock self-pity. There's a lot to be said for it. Certainly I enjoy it." You will too.

--By R.Z. Sheppard