Joshua Then and Now
Hoffman, Nancy Yanes
Middle-aged man on the flying trapeze JOSHUA THEN AND NOW Mordecai Richler Knopf, $11.95, 435 pp. Nancy Yanes Hoffman OUR middle AGE offends us. We are not better, only older. Our flesh...
...What promises we thought we'd keep, we broke...
...His book is overlong, overplotted...
...Kevin's get-rich-quick schemes poison everyone he touches...
...Stop seeing her.'" Which Pauline is unable to do...
...He has a problem downtown, say, and he shouts at Tony,' 'Livarsi net patra di la scarpa [Take this stone out of my shoe...
...It's f------ridiculous...
...His ending is hoked-up sentiment...
...In Pauline's hospital room in the psychiatric ward, Joshua, guilty, loving, rueful, tries to pep-talk Pauline out of her paralyzing self-doubts by telling her an apocryphal story in his father's manner: "I asked my father about Tony Vitto...
...Comparisons hurt, but with Reuben at his side, Joshua is bedeviled but undaunted...
...What does he do?' 'Well,' my father said, 'Colucci, you know, has his problems...
...Exboxer, ex-bootlegger, often-on-the-lam, Reuben now provides cash, protection, fatherly friendship, grandfatherly companionship, bawdy unprintable instructions, honor, and a kind of dollaraveraging of the Ten Commandments...
...Jewish Joshua, son of Reuben, created by Mordecai, is married to Pauline, daughter of a Canadian M.P...
...Joshua Now, racked up in an auto accident, his career jeopardized by the publication of an old homosexual correspondence, compares these scurrilous country club sieges with Joshua Then, dreaming of sacrifice in the Spanish Civil War, of fame in London and Paris...
...And that's what he does.' Well, Jane is the stone in your shoe and I wish I could get her out...
...Eitjier in Westmount, Montreal's well-named Cheever Country, or at Lake Memphremagog, a WASP Waterloo masquerading as a smalltime Riviera, where the playing is another kind of killing...
...I'm not ready...
...our spirits slacken and grey...
...He can't resist the one-liner's seductive wink and cock of the head...
...If not more dismayed, more aware, more obsessed with recording age's depredations...
...Our flesh sags and mottles...
...Only Reuben is a man in this book...
...Richler is funny, Rabelisian in his humor, his gusto for life, although even his gusto has its ambivalences...
...talk about symbolic names...
...Richler's Reuben and Joshua are a Canadian-Jewish satire of Hemingway's Tutor-Tyro relationships, complete with personal code...
...Still playing the overgrown Duddy Kravitz, still blaming the Jewish mother (Joshua's mother is a late-blooming porn film star...
...Richler endows Pauline with all the redemptiveshiksa virtues...
...Middle-aged writers, born with one skin too few, add it all up, wonder who jimmied the calculator: how did they, those wonderful boy wonders, become these Grecian-Formula Men Who Wonder...
...Jewish writers, hcving had one skin removed ritually, other skins cauterized socially and economically, seem even more dismayed by age's withering than are the rest of us...
...Except that poor Pauline never felt she was good enough, never felt she had rebelled enough, conformed enough, nor won enough battles from her longtime rival Jane...
...But, like most of us" in our multiple, pyramiding, parlaying midlife crises, Richler talks too much...
...Commonweal: 668...
...We've not so many miles to go before we sleep...
...Except...
...Yeah, with his shoes.' 'His shoes?' 'Yeah, he gets stones in his shoes, see, and Tony gets them out for him...
...now there's a switch...
...Reuben is the father we thought we had or wished we had when we were young, or wished we had now because our fathers couldn't stick around as long as did Reuben...
...Joshua never is ready...
...I can't be 47 yet...
...he's always aiming for the big touch...
...This past year, Philip Roth'sGhost Writer, Bernard Malamud's Dubin's 21 November 1980: 667 Lives, Herbert Gold'sHe/She, Mordecai Richler's Joshua all compare before and after, "then and now...
...Richler even provides the feckless Joshua with a bucket-shop brother-in-law straight out of Fitzgerald...
...In Canadian-writer Richler's eighth novel, Joshua Shapiro, Montreal sportswriter and television star, protests to his father Reuben: "It's absurd...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 21
