In 1973, forty-two-year-old Mordecai Richler spoke at a Jewish student conference in Niagara Falls, Ontario. After meeting the students the night before and hearing their concerns about a university dance that conflicted with the Sabbath, he abandoned his prepared notes. He had written, he told them, a speech about literature and nationalism. “I left that in my hotel room. Because it would be a waste to deliver it here.” The assault lasted half an hour. He called them ignorant bigots. He said he had considered painting swastikas on the hotel to help them certify their “ghetto paranoia.” He said while they worried about Friday night dances, babies burned in Vietnam. He said they needed not only a Jewish education, but an education.

So begins Charles Foran’s Mordecai, the fourth version so far of the life of a Jewish punk from Montreal, son of a junk dealer and a rabbi’s daughter, the hard-working, hard-living, perpetually rumpled, abrasively honest Mordecai Richler. It was a full, rich life, and it’s a full, rich book — over 700 pages spanning just over seventy years. It’s thick with names famous and forgotten, from the complicated families of St. Urbain Street, to chance meetings and long friendships with writers, actors, producers, publishers, and power brokers in Paris, London, New York, Montreal, and Toronto. (And, of course, the enemies — not all of whom were Jewish. Or French.)

The promotional material for Mordecai promises a full revelation, “warts and all.” Seems to me Richler wore the warts that mattered proudly enough himself, but for the curious they’re certainly here: Richler insulting his paying hosts, whether students or university administrators. Hitting on his second wife on the evening of his wedding to his first. Slipping out of his own book launch to court, successfully, a rival publisher. Abandoning the agent who stood by him through three immature novels soon after the success of his fourth, the breakthrough Duddy Kravitz. Cutting off his mother, wacko or not. And, naturally, what Richler did best, firing broadsides in print or in person at his targets of the times, whether Jewish bootleggers, Canadian nationalists, French separatists, or the gay waiter who asked him to put out his cigar: “I don’t tell you what to put in your mouth,” he said. Mordecai Richler earned his hate mail.

Foran balances these scenes with others of stubborn loyalty to friends and family, and assures us of “equal numbers of stories of the courteous, kindly Richler.” He doesn’t tell these stories so often as the other kind, but there’s likely not a lineup of people looking to read about the “courteous, kindly Richler.” In the end, Richler was loved by his wife, his children, and his closest friends. For a man, that’s enough. At his funeral, son Jacob called him “a better father and husband than a novelist,” while daughter Martha squared her shoulders into grief and said, “Fuck you to all cancer.” With kids like that, who cares what anyone else thinks?

For a writer, none of it matters — the good, the bad, or the ugly. As Richler told an interviewer in the early ’70s, “Whether a writer is a marvellously charming, agreeable, generous man or whether he beats his wife and tortures his children is beside the point. The books are what matter one way or the other, and the two should not be confused.” His last publication, his column in the National Post for May 5, 2001, was called “Don’t Look to Writers for Morality Lessons.” We judge a man by his life, a writer by his books. Charles Foran has done a thorough and thoughtful job of the first. Time will do the second.