McIver and Barney had been crossing paths since their days as aspiring Canadian writers slumming in Paris in the early 1950's. But Richler is not interested in exploring the interiority of these characters, nor, for that matter, is he much interested in plot. Those expecting Richler's usual verbal pyrotechnics won't be disappointed here. He is a gifted stylist, with a great ear for parody and comic dialogue. Many of the comic scenes, including the Second Mrs. Panovsky's phone conversations with her mother, are hilarious.
False notes are few and very far between.
The issue of the unreliable narrator becomes even more pressing when we discover, along with Barney, that he is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, which makes his struggle to remember the past truthfully all the more poignant. Michael is obsessed with getting things right and correcting his father's errors. I do not doubt my father's veracity or my mother's testimony, but I do believe Barney muddled things. . . . Michael later observes, ''I fear that by this juncture my father's memory was unreliable,'' further eroding our hope that we will ever get at the truth. This questioning of memory's reliability is an unexpected move on Richler's part, in large measure because the satiric drift of his fiction ultimately rests upon the conviction that it's possible to know what really happened, who was right and who was wrong.