SOURCE: Brzezinski, Steve. Review of Barney's Version, by Mordecai Richler. Antioch Review 57, no. 1 (winter 1999): 104-05.

In the following review, Brzezinski offers a laudatory assessment of Barney's Version, noting Richler's “savage wit and precisely delivered irony.”

Known in this country principally for the coming-of-age novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Richler is one of Canada's most prolific and best-known writers. This new novel [Barney's Version], brimming with savage wit and precisely delivered irony, can only add to his already established reputation as a master of serio-comic fiction. Barney Panofsky, now 67, his memory failing, sets out to correct what he regards as the mistakes, idiocies, and failings of friends, ex-wives, children, lovers, and everyone else he has ever encountered, by writing his own “version” of his life and its principal events. This “purging” would be merely tedious or bilious in the hands of a lesser writer, but Richler's wit, his...