Mordecai Richler - Joshua Then and Now

A rich, labyrinthian and always entertaining novel, bursting with life and moral energy.

Toronto Star

A rich, profound novel which stands as a rare reminder that one of the prime purposes of literature is pleasure.

Canadian Forum

Richler is a real writer, which is rare. Richlers satire can be as lethal as Swifts and his humor as subtle as Leacocks.

Macleans

An impressive literary achievement.

Regina Leader Post

Immensely readable and richly comic, Joshua Then and Now is a well-crafted, prismatic novel. Richlers language is coarse, irreverent, direct, his insights true, his judgements precise.

London Free Press

A comic, rambling romp through four decades of Canadian society with the always audacious Richler as guide.

Kingston Whig-Standard

Brilliant. Richler is mordantly ironic, wearily worldywise and truly cynical. A mature, beautifully crafted, skillfully written novel.

Financial Post

Crackling with wit, guile, black humor and contempt.

Calgary Sun

FICTION
The Acrobats (1954)
Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)
A Choice of Enemies (1957)
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)
The Incomparable Atuk (1963)
Cocksure (1968)
The Street (1969)
St. Urbains Horseman (1971)
Joshua Then and Now (1980)
Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)
Barneys Version (1997)

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)
Jacob Two-Twos First Spy Case (1995)

HISTORY
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!:
Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)
This Year in Jerusalem (1994)

TRAVEL
Images of Spain (1977)

ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)
Shovelling Trouble (1972)
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)
Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990)
Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions (1998)
On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001)

ANTHOLOGIES
The Best of Modern Humour (1983)
Writers on World War II (1991)

Copyright 1980 by Mordecai Richler

This book was originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1980.
First Emblem Editions publication 2001

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Richler, Mordecai, 1931
Joshua then and now

eISBN: 978-1-55199-560-1

I. Title.

PS 8535.138 J 67 2001 C 813.54 C 2001-930018-2
PR 9199.3. R 52 J 67 2001

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

Series logo design: Brian Bean

EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M 5 A 2 P 9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem

v3.1

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

W. H. AUDEN

L OOK AT ME NOW, JOSHUA THOUGHT .

His right leg was no longer suspended by pulleys from a hospital ceiling, but it was still held in a cast, multiple fractures healing slowly at his age. There were no more tubes unwinding out of his nostrils or feeding him intravenously or draining his lungs. Lungs bubbling with blood whenever he took a breath. Yet he continued to brood about all the blood they had pumped into him. Twelve alien pints. It flooded his dreams, it polluted his waking hours. The odds were that some of the blood had been peddled to the hospital by winos or junkies. Im bound to come down with hepatitis, he thought. Worse, maybe.

Although his cracked ribs were on the mend, or so they assured him, it was still excruciating for him to cough. The cast wouldnt come off his right arm until Thursday, but he could already wiggle the fingers of his right hand. There were places where he was free to scratch. If a magazine was mounted on his reading stand, he could turn the pages himself. But Time, no longer an abomination (excoriating Adlai, clapping hands for Senator Joseph McCarthy of blessed memory), wasnt much fun any more either, now that it was informed by decency. More liberal pieties. Neither were there any more gratifyingly unjust wars to read about, where you could at least root for the downtrodden. Screw the downtrodden muggers, the lot. The Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, were interchangeable enigmas to him, and he didnt much care who won that one. Or, come to think of it, which National Liberation Front came out on top in Botswana, or whatever they were calling that chunk of uppity Africa this week. Good news: Bob Hope, he read, has announced that he wants to do a TV special in China. After the Long March, following the years deprivation, the ultimate Great Leap Forward. The William Morris Agency, Swifty Lazar, Sue Mengers, or whoever represented hope with a capital H, would soon be out there in the Middle Kingdom, negotiating points with Teng Hsiao-ping, proffering serendipity in living color for once-recalcitrant chinks. Imagine, in the absence of Virginia Mayo, this years Miss America disco-dancing out of the mouth of a cave in Yenan clad in a Halston original.

Next year maybe Sonny and Cher would come to us direct from Auschwitz, singing The Way We Were before the open doors of a reconstructed crematorium.

The bandages had been peeled from his shaven skull, cracks having knitted together again. Doctors no longer surrounded his bed with solicitude, their expressions grave, whispering to each other, frowning over charts, even as they asked him his name, what day of the week it was, or the ages of his children. Alex, eighteen; Susy, fourteen; Teddy, ten. I will be no more of a dolt, he thought, than I was before. Small satisfaction. But at least he was through with the bedpan. If he was helped out of bed, taking it poco a poco, he was now able to go to the toilet himself.

Only last Tuesday, Joshuas bed had been wheeled surreptitiously into an elevator; he was loaded into an ambulance idling at a rear door of the Montreal General and sped across the Champlain Bridge, down the familiar Route 10,