American Literature, Writ Large

Thanks to Harry Stein, Jake has gotten into a real pickle: a trial on charges of "rape, aiding and abetting sodomy, and possession of cannabis." Precisely how this has come about is revealed only in bits and pieces as Richler teases the reader along, being far more interested in the many things on his mind rather than merely chasing down a courtroom mystery. He was incredibly observant and loved to indulge himself in the sheer pleasure of words, as in this account of a meal with a proper British couple:

"Dinner commenced with hard-boiled eggs, sliced in half. Paprika had been sprinkled over the eggs and then they had been heated under the grill to suck out whatever moisture they still retained. Pamela flitted from place to place, proffering damp, curling white bread toast to go with the eggs. Jake washed down his egg with a glass of warm, sickeningly sweet, white Yugoslav wine, watching gloomily as Pamela brought in three platters. One contained a gluey substance in which toenail-size chunks of meat and walnuts and bloated onions floated; the next, a heap of dry lukewarm potatoes; and the third, frozen peas, the color running. Pamela doled out the meat with two ice cream scoops of potatoes and an enormous spoonful of peas and then passed around the toast again.

" 'You are a clever thing,' Desmond said, tucking in."

The novel is full of delights such as that, some of them escalating from funny to hilarious, and it is both easy and excusable to read "St. Urbain's Horseman" for the sheer pleasure of it all. There is more to the novel than that, though. For one thing, it is "the plaintive story of his American generation," born too late for World War II, too soon for Flower Power, a generation "squeezed between two raging and carnivorous ones. The old establishment and the young hipsters." Caught right in the middle: "What Jake stood for would not fire the countryside: decency, tolerance, honor. With E.M. Forster, he wearily offered two cheers for democracy. After George Orwell, he was for a closer look at anybody's panacea. . . . Increasingly, wherever he turned, Jake felt his generation was being crushed by two hysterical forces, the outraged work-oriented old and the spitefully playful young, each heaving half truths at one another."

Those words were written in the late 1960s and obviously were inspired by the quite specific outrages of that day, but they retain their pertinence because they stand for notions of civility that were endangered then and are even more so now. By the same token, there is a timelessness to Jake's "Jewish nightmare, the terror that took him by surprise in his living room, striking only on those rare evenings when he brimmed over with well-being, a sense of everything having knit mysteriously together for once, his wife, the children they had made, so that he could even contemplate his shortcomings, his failures, his own rot and dying."

"St. Urbain's Horseman" is about these matters and many others: mixed marriages that produce kids who "have a stake in Jehovah and a claim on Christ," the complexities and ambiguities of being Canadian, the indignity of aging, the thirst for experience. It's a flawed novel -- a bit too long, a bit repetitious, a bit self-absorbed -- but it's also a real grown-up's novel, by a genuinely grown-up writer. Such novels are all too rare these days, so when you find one, hold tight to it. Hold tight to "St. Urbain's Horseman."

"St. Urbain's Horseman" is available in a McClelland & Stewart paperback ($6.95).

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address isyardleyj@washpost.com.