SOURCE: Gorjup, Branko. Review of Barney's Version, by Mordecai Richler. World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 149.

In the following review, Gorjup contends that Barney's Version is “Richler's most remarkable accomplishment to date, the work of a great master who has come to understand the pitfalls of writing, the incompleteness of the text.”

With the publication of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz almost four decades ago, Mordecai Richler created a new hero in Canadian literature. American critic Warren Tallman saw Richler's creation as a latter-day Huck Finn, possessing a consciousness begotten in the seedy jungles of North American cities on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel. These cities—Montréal in Richler's case—were characterized by Tallman as demonic parodies of a peaceable kingdom, presided over by urban Calibans. It was perhaps for this reason that Duddy Kravitz, embodying the vulgarity, crudeness, and aggressiveness associated with the lonely, sharklike individualism...