Of course, Joshua's [racist] outbursts can be explained away as the spasms of a mind twisted with jealous rage, but they're still coarse, particularly in a novel which prides itself on its heart-bruised Jewish sensitivity. Besides: even in calmer moments, Joshua acts as if all blacks make their homes in the trees….

A slapstick farce, Joshua Then and Now shuttles back and forth in time, tracing Joshua's bunged-up life from his boy-hood in a St. Urbain cold-water flat to his misadventures in London bedsitting rooms and Hollywood bungalows. It's a book full of pranks, excursions, roguish couplings, and smutty wisecracks, but the look!-we've-come-through exuberance of Richler's earlier work is sadly missing. As Joshua rattles from decade to decade the novel turns into a male-menopausal moan, a lament for lost energy and idealism in a tone of intellectual condescension and racist rancor. Richler scores easily (too easily) off...