Stupidity, hypocrisy, pretentiousness and greed have always been the cardinal sins in his canon, targets of the savage wit that is as acidic and uproarious today as it was when he began to write nearly forty years ago.
"In a time when there really is no agreement on values," he once observed to Tom Harpur, the religion columnist of the Toronto Star, "and a collapse of religious values, which certainly created a certain order, or standard, you are obliged to work out your own code of honour and system of beliefs and to lead as honourable a life as possible."įor Richler, "the honourable life" appears to have meant being a devoted husband and loving father to his family of five grown children (his oldest son, Daniel, a child of his wife's first marriage, is also a novelist and television arts critic) and of writing precisely as he pleases. Caustic, controversial and often crude, he shares with the title character of his novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here, an unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke.īut Richler's acerbic and scatological inventiveness is fired by a secular moralism that is less obvious, though no less important, to an appreciation of his work than is his gleeful obscenity. ONE OF CANADA S MOST OUTSPOKEN WRITERS, Mordecai Richler is probably the best-known author Montreal has ever spawned.
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