I probably wouldn't even be safe in Senegal. And, in one of the most puerile episodes of his adult career, he punishes his old schoolmates for being rich and vulgar by breaking into their houses to soak the labels off their boasted wine collections or plant hot money in their desks. Joshua is represented as a kind of nihilist who nevertheless stands for the only kind of integrity possible in a corrupt world. This novel seems most alive, however, not when Joshua is experiencing purported moral understanding but when his gift for animosity exercises itself more or less freestyle. I was delighted when Joshua is suggests to a visiting German industrialist looking for investment opportunities that, since people are always losing their credit cards, he might look into the idea of tattooing the numbers on their arms.
Comedy is a rough and self-assertive art.
But predictable excess is less exciting, and Mr. Richler's ways of going too far aren't always very surprising. We Were' before the open doors of a reconstructed crematorium. Mindless good feeling is an enemy to the intelligent life, but so is habitual ill-feeling, since it spoils the hope of making any useful distinctions. Retirement is after all the satirist's fate, as the Sabine Farm and Pope's villa at Twickenham testify. But this ending would be stronger if it were clearer that Joshua's public disasters weren't mostly his own fault, that had at least tried to meet an unsatisfactory world half way, that his defeat is in some part a disenchantment and not just a confirmation of his author's worst expectations.