SOURCE: Alexander, Edward. “Bad Trip.” Commentary 99, no. 1 (January 1995): 82-5.

In the following review, Alexander offers a negative assessment of Richler's “lazy” intellectual tone in This Year in Jerusalem.

Mordecai Richler first came to prominence by virtue of two novels set among the Jews of Montreal. The first, Son of a Smaller Hero (1959), recounts the struggle of its hero, Noah Adler, to free himself from the prejudices and limitations of the Jewish community; the second, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), later made into a movie, is a rags-to-riches story, formulaic but also satiric (it was reviled in some parts of the Jewish community). Since then Richler has written seven more novels, numerous screenplays, and, in 1992, a book (Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country) severely critical of the Quebec separatist movement.

As we learn from his latest book [This Year in Jerusalem], which is in part a...