In their themes and motifs, Mordecai Richler's novels return regularly to a constant set of preoccupations. Despite this consistency, however, his career as a novelist has undergone some interesting alterations in terms of his moral attitudes towards his favourite preoccupations. This change of outlook has naturally been accompanied by a change in style and genre. It would have been difficult, on the basis of his early naturalistic novels, to anticipate the satirist and caricaturist who emerged with The Incomparable Atuk and Cocksure…. Occasional satirical elements are utilized by most novelists. It is another matter altogether to step from a dominant narrative mode of realistic characterization, verisimilitude of action and psychological plausibility to a dominant mode of conscious caricature in characterization, purposeful implausibility of action and fantasy in events. For a novelist to alter his style and narrative mode so decisively, a deliberate change in moral outlook must have occurred…. One of the theses of this interpretation is that, philosophically, Richler has moved from a tentative Romanticism to a kind of Classicism. (pp. ix-x)
In Richler's first novel, The Acrobats, we can already see most of the materials that recur in his later work: power, egoism, self-realization, struggle for survival, the conflict of generations and youthful rebelliousness, the need to escape from a confining environment, the sense of moral disillusionment and the fear of failure. The form of his first novel (and of all his naturalistic novels) is that most traditional of fictional structures: the attempted progress of the sensitive young man … in escaping the fetters of an inhibiting situation and in advancing towards a form of independence, realization of what he takes to be his inherent potentialities or worldly success and recognition. In other words Richler's theme is that of the attempted rise from rags to riches, on several moral and aesthetic levels. (p. x)
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