Something to Tide You Over

Posted 31 March, 2008 in Book Reviews |

My review of Reinhold Kramer’s biography, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain, is online, here.

Rereading this review, I get the sense that I was a bit too easy on the book, particularly regarding Kramer’s critical readings of the novels. His overzealous attempts to slot the fiction into incidents from Richler’s life — something Richler himself warned against, and which Nathan Zuckerman referred to in Exit Ghost as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way” — is a real stumbling block in the book. Kramer is too frequently reduced to temporizing words such as “likely” and “probably” in his attempt to forge parallels between Richler’s fiction and his life; had he stuck to a straight textual analysis, he would have freed himself to be more rigorously analytical and probing in his readings.

His book is also virtually humourless, which is ironic given that his subject is one of the most mordantly funny writers in the CanLit canon.

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