SOURCE: McSweeney, Kerry. “Endgame Tap-Dancing.” Canadian Literature 159 (winter 1998): 188-90.

In the following review, McSweeney offers a stylistic and thematic examination of Barney's Version.

If old age is a shipwreck, as Charles de Gaulle claimed, then Barney Panofsky, the sixty-seven year old narrator of Mordecai Richler's latest novel, is already on the rocks. A successful producer of schlock (Canadian-financed films and Canadian television series), Barney's mid-1990s life consists of too much single-malt scotch and too many cigars, bar talk, channel surfing, health worries, and sour reflections on his wife of thirty years having left him, on the decline of Montreal and its hockey team, on friends and enemies, and on himself. Although not a writer, he is prompted by the mendacious memoir of a contemporary to set down his “version” of his adult life. The result is a rambling and digressive narrative—at one point he even calls...