The Posthumous Richler

Mordecai Richler was a complicated guy. The celebrated author of ten novels, the creator of such memorable characters as Duddy Kravitz, Jake Hersch, Joshua Shapiro, Solomon Gursky and Barney Panofsky, he was also an astute and often hilarious political and cultural essayist. Publicly acerbic, yet quick to feel slighted and even quicker to retaliate, he was a passionate protector of his family and his friends, the satirical voice of gritty, striving post-war Jewish urban life, an inveterate prankster and the sharpest, stealthiest debunker of pretension and gobbledygook in this or any other country.

A few weeks before he died in a Montreal hospital on July 3, 2001, of complications from metastasized bladder cancer, he changed his will. In addition to his wife, Florence, he added his son Noah and his Canadian agent, the entertainment lawyer Michael Levine, as literary executors of his estate. Richler was canny enough to know that the wily Levine—about...