[Joshua Then and Now] is a very funny and often wrenching book,… [a] clamorous, bumpily comic chronicle….

Richler crowds his hero's long voyage with as many colorful folk as on any ship of fools…. [He depicts] a world's worth of people who spend their passions raking at each other with the sharpened claws of class and religion and race even as they grapple to get into each other's pants.

Joshua would seem to have made good in all this welter. Look at his faithful but still full-blooded marriage, his solidly successful career. Look at how every five pages he's telling someone off to his or her face. Look how well scornful Joshua knows the score…. (p. 36)

So why, then, does the book open in the present with this 47-year-old Joshua a rumple of fractures in a hospital bed, his name unfairly linked to a scandalous faggotry, his wife...