Barney Panofsky smokes too many cigars, drinks too much whiskey, and is obsessed with two things: the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and his ex-wife Miriam. An acquaintance from his youthful years in Paris, Terry McIver, is about to publish his autobiography. In its pages he accuses Barney of an assortment of sins, including murder. It's time, Barney decides, to present the world with his own version of events. Barney's Version is his memoir, a rambling, digressive rant, full of revisions and factual errors (corrected in footnotes written by his son) and enough insults for everyone, particularly vegetarians and Quebec separatists.

But Barney does get around to telling his life story, a desperately funny but sad series of bungled relationships. His first wife, an artist and poet, commits suicide and becomes--à la Sylvia Plath--a feminist icon, and Barney is widely reviled for goading her toward death, if not actually murdering her. He marries the second Mrs. Panofsky, whom he calls a "Jewish-Canadian Princess," as an antidote to the first; it turns out to be a horrible mistake. The third, "Miriam, my heart's desire," is quite possibly his soul mate, but Barney botches this one, too. It's painful to watch him ruin everything, and even more painful to bear witness to his deteriorating memory. The mystery at the heart of Barney's story--did he or did he not kill his friend Boogie?--provides enough forward momentum to propel the reader through endless digressions, all three wives, and every one of Barney's nearly heartbreaking episodes of forgetfulness. Barney's Version, winner of Canada's 1997 Giller Prize, is Richler's 10th novel, and a dense, energetic, and ultimately poignant read. --R. Ellis

From Library Journal
You have to like a narrator who can ask about libel after being accused "in print, of being a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence, and probably a murderer as well" only to have his lawyer answer "Sounds like [the writer] got things just about right." Richler is in top form with this first-person voice of Barney Panovsky, 67-year-old TV producer at Totally Useless Productions, thrice-married (the third being the one that matters, and she's gone; the second, after being found in bed with Barney's best friend, Boogie, is the catalyst for the putative murder), fretting over liver spots and mental slippage. The book is always hilarious, but the humor is sharpened by the psychological accuracy/honesty and the richness of detail; in short, this is one well-written book. There are even footnotes to help out when Barney gets something wrong. Absolutely for all collections, this is what Barney calls his third wife: "a keeper."?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New Yorker, John Updike
...a rollicking novel laden with rue, a self-portrait of a creative personality who never found a creative outlet that he could respect, a paean to the pleasures and perils of drink, a celebration of ice hockey and tap dancing, a lament for a multicultural Montreal now torn and depressed by Quebecois separatism, a broad window into the bustle of Canadian Jewry, an intermittent disquisition on authorship, an extended meditation on the relations between the sexes, even a murder mystery, with uproarious conclusion.

Entertainment Weekly, Suzanne Ruta
Richler's "coven of jumped-up Jews" ... runs amok once again in this brilliantly slapdash fictional memoir.... His rants are hilarious. But the real joke is a sad one...

The New York Times Book Review, James Shapiro
While his aim is still deadly, the familiar objects of Richler's scorn--Quebec separatists, rabid feminists, self-deceiving Jews and self-crowned laureates--now verge on parody and have, in this latest novel, become standing targets, unworthy of satiric overkill.

From Kirkus Reviews
A fair-enough stab at Rothian (or, perhaps more accurately, Bellovian) comic portraiture intermittently enlivens this overlong story of an aging TV producer, lover of women, and possible murderer: the eponymous Barney Panofsky, a kind of lower-case Mickey Sabbath or Augie March. A lifelong Montrealer (and devoted fan of hockey's Les Canadiens), Barney is penning his own story as he's about to be ``outed'' for his various disgusting personal traits and disgraceful (when not outright criminal) behavior--the outing to be done by his former friend, successful popular novelist Terry McIver. ``I have my principles,'' Barney protests. ``I have never handled arms, drugs, or health foods.'' What he has handled are three long-suffering (and, to differing degrees, insufferable) wives: the high-strung Clara, a poet and suicide, who becomes a feminist saint; the unforgiving shrew whom Barney refers to only as ``the Second Mrs. Panofsky''; and, best of all, the gentle and charming Miriam (whom--let's be fair about this--Barney met and fell for during his second wedding ceremony). Aside from marriage, his life is pretty much taken up by the demands of his company, Totally Useless Productions, which churns out highly popular and instantly forgettable mass entertainment (``Had I suspected I would survive to . . . sixty-seven,'' Barney muses, ``I would prefer to have earned a reputation as a gentleman, rather than a ruffian who made his fortune producing crap for tv''). We hardly believe him, but that also hardly matters, in a fast-paced, foulmouthed, generally entertaining romp that unfortunately grows tiresome whenever Richler lets Barney drone on about his literary loves or pet hates (feminists, antismoking activists, the annoyingly middlebrow Terry McIver, and Qu‚be‡ois separatists, among many other targets) or alludes coyly to characters from his own earlier novels. The result pales beside such Richler triumphs as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1960) and St. Urbain's Horseman (1971), but it's a pretty decent comic novel nevertheless. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
The Dallas Morning News A memoir at once falling-down funny, angry and heartbreakingly poignant.

Book Description
When a sixty-seven-year-old Canadian rascal named Bernard Panofsky decides to write "the true story of my wasted life." the result is Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler's wickedly funny blend of satire, social commentary, and brilliant introspection on the state of contemporary life. Hoping to rebut the charges about him made in a rival's autobiography Barney feels compelled to pen his account of events. From his bohemian misadventures during the 1950s in Paris to the fortune he amassed through his trashy TV company Totally Unnecessary Productions and the three women he married, he quickly proves that his memory may be slipping, but his bile isn't. He skewers feminists, politicians, the bourgeoisie, fads, social movements, and most of all himself. And when it comes to being charged with the murder of his own best friend -- caught in bed with the second Mrs. Panofsky -- Barney's version is as contradictory and slippery as real life right up to its astonishing end. Wildly vulgar, superbly ironic, and brilliantly manic, Barney's Version is Mordecai Richler's comic masterpiece, the great work of a satirist at the top of his game.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Told in the first person, Barney's Version gives us the life (and what a life!) of Barney Panofsky - whose trashy TV company, Totally Useless Productions, has made him a small fortune; whose three wives include a martyred feminist icon, a quintessential JCP (Jewish-Canadian Princess), and the incomparable Miriam, the perfect wife, lover, and mother - alas, now married to another man; who recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early fifties, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens; who either did or didn't murder his best friend, Boogie, after discovering him in bed with The Second Mrs. Panofsky; whose satirical eye for the idiocies of today's Quebec separatists (as well as for every other kind of political correctness) manages to offend his entire acquaintanceship (and will soon be offending readers everywhere); and whose memory - though not his bile - is, in his sixty-seventh year, definitely slipping...

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal