DUDDY DEAREST
Mordecai Richler's son gives him a taste of his own medicine
However much his books are admired elsewhere, Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler's books are greeted by many of his fellow Jewish Montrealers with the aplomb of Inquisition victims about to have their thumbnails yanked out. In such satirical novels as "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," "Joshua Then and Now," "St. Urbain's Horseman" and last year's "Solomon Gursky Was Here," Richler has painted an unforgettably sardonic portrait of Montreal's Jews as vulgar, grasping, nouveau-riche social climbers. But this year the city's Jewish community (about 89,000) is seeing Mordecai Richler get a taste of his own medicine. Revenge has come in the appropriate guise of a book: "Kicking Tomorrow" (McClelland & Stewart), a hilariously wicked first novel by Daniel Richler, Mordecai's eldest son. The younger Richler is a 34-year-old arts writer, TV programmer and former rock critic living in Toronto, Montreal's arch-rival. His chronicle, which lampoons his father mercilessly, is based loosely on his own troubled adolescence. The elder Richler is depicted as a habitually slothful and emotionally ineffectual couch potato, who seems incapable of completing a coherent sentence. "Someone did say to me recently that they had laughed uproariously to realize how I had assassinated my old man in the first chapter," says Daniel Richler. "But I hadn't thought of it as Oedipal revenge. I had no intention of doing anything but tweaking Dad's nose." "Kicking Tomorrow" has reached No. 2 on the Toronto Globe & Mail's best-seller list.
It has been purchased by Random House, which is planning to publish a U.S. edition next summer, and some Canadian filmmakers have expressed an interest in adapting it for the screen. Besides lampooning Dad, the novel probes the distasteful and unwholesome underside of Canadian youth culture. "There aren't many tough books here about youth in Canada," says Richler. "When you write one about a middle-class kid who has all the privileges and benefits of decent Canadian culture and life and still spits in society's face, some people don't like it." The story is set in 1976, a seminal period in Quebec history that saw the election of the separatist Parti Quebecois and the culmination of what appeared to be a genuine cultural revolution within Francophone society. Oblivious to the rumblings of history, the nihilistic teenager Robbie Bookbinder devotes his youthful energies to disrupting his family's Passover Seder, wrecking their home in the largely Jewish upper-class community of Westmount, ingesting copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, mooning for a deeply disturbed and unattainable girl and hanging out with a motorcycle gang. What's most striking in "Kicking Tomorrow" is the younger Richler's refashioning of the mythic Montreal landscape in his father's novels. The book shows something of the same Dickensian scope and feel for the city. But Daniel's Montreal is not his father's the post-war Jewish ghetto, a five-block-or-so expanse bordered by St. Lawrence Boulevard, that was the launching pad for a now-affluent community. Fletcher's Field, which figured prominently as a locale in his father's novels, has been paved over with a shopping mall. Robbie Bookbinder passes Moe Wilenski's landmark sandwich shop with no glimmer of recognition. Bookbinder expends little effort contemplating his Jewish roots; he knows his grandmother is from the Old Country, but never bothers to ask which old country. "In some respects," acknowledges Richler, "my father mowed the grass and I was able to walk across the lawn. He marked out a certain map, and I was addressing certain of his landmarks antagonistically or satirically, intending to poke fun. I wanted to take the mickey out of his portrayal of the city."