A Chronicle of Grudges

...No wonder Joshua marries Pauline, the daughter of a pedigreed senator from Upper Westmount...

...Don't be a grud-gy type...

...Joshua Then and Now darts back and forth between past and present-between Montreal, Ibiza, London, and Hollywood-in a kind of nervous frenzy that may at first disconcert or even confuse the reader...

...Esther, wife to Reuben, Joshua's "loopy" mother, nee Leventhal, is best known to her latter-day hard-core admirers as Esty Blossom...

...Reuben observes them, and the book signs off with Reuben's trademark, "Well, yeah, right, he thought...

...Vengeance is the Lord's, not yours, Joshua," Reuben advises his son...

...She is supporting him...

...He seems, however, to accept this diminution stoically...

...Joshua is the son of Reuben, who has dabbled in small crime and boxing, whose heart is a crock of gold...

...Mueller...

...When occasionally this finds its way out, the reader's laughter runs salt down his cheeks...

...Whether or not Kevin was the blackguard he reasonably took him to be, Joshua cannot help being reminded of his own unjust vilification by the horrid Dr...

...Pauline, back home after her breakdown, is at work in her vegetable garden...

...Of course, the book's dominant mood is anything but conciliatory...

...Joshua, who has also just returned from the hospital after a car accident, comes up to her, touches her hair...

...Poor Pauline is recovering from a nervous breakdown occasioned by the suicide of her playboy brother, Kevin...

...In the 1970s, against his wife's pleas Joshua resolves to confront his tormentor and returns to the island, only to learn that Mueller has quietly died of cancer...

...But more often the sting is of venom...

...To each his Ibiza...

...The two concoct a literary correspondence that evokes Auden's relationship with Chester Kallman...

...After Ypres, following the Battle of Britain, never had so many adolescents owed so much to so few libertarians...

...A very funny book...

...The world is much diminished, and so in the end is the book's hero...

...In Joshua's preposterous response to the woes of Jewish history lies the key to Mordecai Richler's humor...

...It has the dignity of understatement...

...Whatever nicks and jabs your sensibilities may suffer, you will not be able to resist the tug of Richler's narrative drive, his boundless inventiveness, his savage wit...

...Reuben with a penchant for spooning out mineral oil doses of Everyman's Old Testament spiked with his own brew of homey proverbs to an incredulous Joshua...

...Mueller (the double "Dr...

...He is not leaning on his cane...

...After a modest career as a journalist, with occasional TV spots, he is catapulted to "fame" as the result of a youthful ruse perpetrated to help a fellow-writer out of financial straits...

...At times, Joshua Then and Now seems a chronicle more of grudges than of grief...

...And who can hurl the word "offensive" at an author whose aim it is to offend, to shake you out of your complacency...

...No joshing matter for a Joshua who is trying, at that very moment, to retrieve his wife from the shores of Lethe...

...One of Richler's pet peeves is the puniness of liberal ideals after World War II...

...Thus Joshua must again leave Ibiza feeling very much "a mouse...

...That is a pity, because beneath the author's angry snarl lurks a deep sadness...

...Interesting, eh?'" Esther comments sourly on her son's marriage, "'He married up.'" Joshua is a notable who becomes a notoriety...

...Nevertheless, Joshua is powerless against his own compulsions...

...Don't be a grudgy type...

...He has digested his father's sermon on Mordecai and Esther: '"But nowhere in the Book of Esther do you find God hollering because she married a goy, and so if I interpret the law correctly, you are not allowed to marry out of the faith unless it's into a royal family...

...Soon, though, we come to recognize it as an effective device, reflecting the hero's own restless mind...

...The method serves especially well toward the end, when the rhythm is speeded up just as the actual plot is winding down...

...If the reader thinks back to the Auden epigraph- "Lay your sleeping head, my love,/ Human on my faithless arm...

...He chose suicide rather than face a prison term for shady dealings-After Pauline, under Joshua's moral influence, refused to give false testimony to save him...

...The object of Joshua's hatred is one Dr...

...This document, when it comes to light, along with photos of the men kissing, is quickly seized upon by the scandal-mongers, and suffices to turn Joshua overnight into a "hero" of Gay Lib...

...Forget it, Joshua thought, wandering through the old quarter...

...She ends up managing a massage parlor called "Oral is Beautiful," while having a finger, so to speak, in Women's Lib...

...The response gains in resonance when we realize it is precisely because of a small personal grudge, nursed over 20 years, that the hero has come back to Spain...

...There is real bitterness in Joshua's pronouncement, paraphrasing Churchill: "For the sake of Ralph's generation, Joshua, Murdoch and the others had won a famous victory...

...But no one reads Richler as a palliative...

...So his mind circles and hovers, turning from cynicism to remorse and back again...

...sounds doubly absurd in English), a man with a hinted Nazi past who once humiliated Joshua and ran him off the Island of Ibiza...

...11.95 Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg "Inflamed by the vicious sermons of the Archdeacon Ferran Martinez, a mob descended on the Juderia of Cordoba shortly after Ash Wedesday 1391, and reduced the quarter where Mai-monides had been born to ashes...

...Ouch...

...Worse, he shouted a cruel taunt that lodged in Joshua's breast: "Are you a man or a mouse...

...the quiet acceptance of these last pages seems less sentimental than resigned...

...Joshua is not entirely spared his share of guilt...

...And Richler...