SOURCE: Bemrose, John. “‘Do Not Go Gently. …’” Maclean's 110, no. 41 (13 October 1997): 76.

In the following positive review, Bemrose regards Richler's “bitter, ironic sense of mortality” as the central theme of Barney's Version.

Across the land, Mordecai Richler's face is almost as famous as his books. The longish hair, usually collapsing around his ears. The sad-sack eyes. The big schnoz. The older he gets, the more he resembles Golda Meir. His readers love him, hate him, and often do both—not a bad measure of success for a satirist. He has poked fun at everything from vegetarians to Quebec's language police, and in one notorious magazine article he undertook to explain Canadians to Americans in terms that were less than flattering. He is also, of course, one of the country's leading novelists, the author of such books as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and St. Urbain's Horseman (1971). It is now eight...