Treating the Trivial with Panache

...He convinces us, instead, that he consorted with a rather unengaging crew, and that descriptions of "rat-infested rooms" no longer have much interest, even if they are evidences of what the book jacket calls "grubby but glorious vie de boheme...

...Who wants to read, these many years later, some scattered comments on the Montreal Expo...

...Both the Bohemian past and a protracted loyalty to juvenile literature are badges for the author's persona, possibly the most conspicuous creation of this collection...

...He didn't sweat, he perspired...

...But when it is joined to the generally trivial matter of these essays, it becomes facile and excessive...

...Then, his perspective starts to waver, and his tone often topples into mere self-indulgence...

...In a hilarious sketch on Intimate Behaviour, with minimal but skillful prodding he allows the full absurdity of Desmond Morris' zoological analysis of human sexuality to expose itself ("Without actually taking sides, he also ventures that for a man to nibble another man's ear in a public place might lead outsiders to make snap sexual judgments about the pair, which is sensible advice, I think...

...Similarly, in a snippet of a TV interview included here, he is questioned on why he left Canada and first mockingly suggests serious motivations...

...Richler's peculiar concoction of brashness, panache, sentiment, and cynicism works when it is imposed on appropriate material-as it is in his novels...

...Does he really have to go as far as Paris or London to find girls...

...Notes on an Endangered Species has the opposite effect...

...Unfortunately, this restraint is largely lost when Richler writes about things he is sentimentally attached to...

...It asks the reader to condone lapses of taste and dubious motives if accompanied by tough?and presumably disarming-honesty...

...And in an incisive discussion of the James Bond oeuvre, Richler relentlessly pursues the convoluted paths of Bond's anti-Semitism, revealing Ian Fleming as a venal, frightened, pathetic underside of his creation...

...I recognize him...

...After doing them this way, though, he (or somebody) should have resisted the temptation of trying to endow them with anthologized permanence...

...For Richler would sooner admit a multitude of sins than be caught with any of Gary's frailties...

...He presents himself as tough, pragmatic, impulsive, a man of the people, blasphemous, and mercilessly driven by his libido...

...And he certainly never swiped a hard-earned dime from his father's trousers, the price of a brand new comic book...

...The voice in this essay is measured, controlled-and all the more cuttingly persuasive for that...

...The style is also the familiar Richler brand of hard-boiled lyricism...

...Regretably, these essays create the suspicion that serious, intellectual, moral, and sexless Gary still has some hold over Richler, that the "good boy" is still the Enemy...

...That having been born dirty-minded I had thought in London maybe, in Paris certainly, the girls...

...In my day he always did his homework immediately after he came home from school...

...It is robust rather than subtle, immediate rather than finely wrought...

...In "A Sense of the Ridiculous," a reminiscence of his Paris experience as a young man, he tries to evoke the flavor of flavorless days, to carve a niche for himself and friends in the history of artistic expatriation...

...He never ate with his elbows on the table or peeked at his sister in the bath...

...But in a collection where quips and verbal gestures crop up again and again, the effect is to make the reader feel a certain narrowness of reference, a stylistic and thematic claustrophobia...

...Why I Write," for example, is anecdotal and badly organized...

...Then he lets us in on his supposedly real ones: "I daren't tell her that I had no girl friends...

...The language strains continually for the striking irony, the pungent irreverence, the folksy, colloquial cadence...

...Reviewed by Eva Hoffman The essays brought together in this volume first appeared as articles in various magazines, and they range over an assortment of seemingly unrelated topics...

...Or shoplifted...

...it limits both the scope of Richler's writing and his style...

...The novels encourage the reader to notice the strengths of the writing and overlook its faults and foibles...

...Or about the mishaps of a Canadian hockey team in Sweden...

...Practically all, however, hinge on or return to Richler's favorite fixations: being Jewish, Canadian, and a writer...

...Richler's persona irritates in the same way as his cinematic Duddy Kravitz...

...Richler is susceptible to nostalgia for times, habits and rites that were never graceful in the first place, and are not improved by aging...

...When he says he joined academe or wrote screenplays for money or ego-satisfaction, he feels he has squared with the reader, has even endeared himself...

...Most are clearly occasional pieces, perhaps apt and entertaining at the moment of their initial appearance, yet without sufficient substance to justify a prolonged existence...

...Richler gives us a few glimpses into his writing habits and anxieties, but for the motives, for the reasons promised in the title, he resorts to Orwell, to whose ideas he appends some marginalia of his own...

...Or is this a replacement of one pose (pretentious high-mindedness) by another hardly more attractive...

...One gets the impression that if the pieces in this collection had been intended as more than carpe diem journalism, Richler would have done them differently...

...The sources of humor are perpetually the same: sex, Jewishness, Jewish sex and sexy Jewishness...

...There are two or three exceptions...

...In "The Great Comic Book Heroes," Richler draws a vignette of the "good boy" of his adolescence who, unlike the author, does not appreciate Superman or Wonder-woman: "No, no, Gary is no new breed...

...Even those essays on subjects of more lasting interest?Why I Write," "Notes on an Endangered Species" (the species being independent movie producers)-seem to be thrown off cavalierly, casually...

...Richler is at his best here when looking at other people's writing, for he casts a detached satirist's devastating glance at his targets...

...The book's thinness is due partly to the original purposes of the selections...