Books: Listen to the Mockingbird

HOME SWEET HOME by Mordecai Richler; Knopf; 291 pages; $16.95

That eminent sport psychologist and voyager Casey Stengel once analyzed the Canadian scene: "Well, you see they have those polar bears up there and lots of fellows trip over them trying to run the bases and they're never much good anymore except for hockey or hunting deer."

Stengel's critique neatly encapsulates a view that has remained unchanged since Voltaire dismissed North America as "a few arpents of snow." Edmund Wilson gamely attempted to make his neighbors fascinating in a historical survey named for the country's national anthem, O Canada (1965). Pauline Johnson, Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan: above the St. Lawrence Seaway these are names from a literary pantheon. Below it, they are authors out of print.

All this has done nothing to discourage Novelist Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now). His 14th book, aptly subtitled My Canadian Album, is a mordant, witty brief for the defense of his homeland. As evidence, the Montreal native offers a series of diverse impressions of Canada's past imperfect and present tense. He lunches with Pierre Trudeau, and remembers an earlier Prime Minister, the gnomic William Lyon Mackenzie King, who "nightly for 22 years sat by his crystal ball, beneath an illuminated portrait of his mum, and rapped with her spirit, seeking guidance on how much to tax, when to call an election and where to send the troops." He ventures toward the Arctic Circle, to Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, where the big golf tournament starts at midnight and the rule book states, "No penalty assessed when ball carried off by raven." Richler finds ecumenism where others see only ice: on Great Slave Lake, he is told, Indians net vast numbers of pike that end as gefilte fish in Chicago.

Sometimes the author suspects that the whole nation is a theater of the absurd. In the battle between Quebec's French separatists and its anglophone minority, violent verbal gestures are made. The provincial government forbids the use of the English word hamburger; "hambourgeois" is the meat substitute. In Montreal, police become provincial celebrities not by seizing heroin but by impounding 15,000 Dunkin' Donut bags because the printing is not bilingual.

Throughout his travelogue, Richler illuminates general truths with local anecdotes. A grieving memoir reveals the dark side of the immigrant experience and the author's love for his father: the lifelong failure who "came to Montreal as an in fant, his father fleeing Galicia. Pogroms. Rampaging Cossacks. But, striptease shows aside, the only theater my father relished, an annual outing for the two of us, was the appearance of the Don Cossack Choir at the St. Denis Theater. My father would stamp his feet to their lusty marching and drinking songs; his eyes would light up to see those behemoths, his own father's tormentors, prance and tumble onstage. Moses Isaac Richler, who never marched, nor drank, nor pranced."