SOURCE: King, Francis. “A Highly Amusing Shambles.” Spectator 279, no. 8827 (4 October 1997): 47-8.

In the following review, King offers a mixed assessment of Barney's Version, arguing that “for all its defects, this unruly book about a thoroughly unruly life contains not a page without its laugh and not a paragraph without its smile.”

The Canadian, Jewish narrator of this fictional memoir [Barney's Version], Barney Carnofsky, writing when he is beginning to show the first insidious symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, is, as he himself puts it, ‘a shrinking man with a cock that trickles’. A cynic, philanderer, boozer, adulterer, and possibly a murderer, he would be a totally odious character were it not for the sharpness of his intelligence, the breadth of his culture, and the cathartic ferocity of his hatred of pretension and humbug.

As a young man, in 1950, Barney withdrew from his Montreal bank the modest stash of money...