Mordecai Richler would have hated the idea of being the subject of a hagiography. Everything his writing represented is antithetical to a family-sanctioned, cultural industry-approved biography. Besides, Richler believed that there was something oddly emboldening about the deflation of a lofty reputation, that learning of the occasional lapses and failures of the great gave hope to the not-so-great.

Nearly three years after Richler’s death we now have The Last Honest Man by journalist Michael Posner, the first in what will likely be a long lineup of Richler remembrances. Except for an overly sentimental closing chapter, “How Will You Remember Him?,” which reads like the transcript of a four-hour eulogy, Posner succeeds in helping to create a vivid, consistently engaging character study that is as well balanced as it is ennobling. Yes, Richler wrote and lived well (and hard), but he also, we learn, was an occasionally distant father and a potential terror at boring social occasions when the scotch was in far more abundance than collective wit.

Posner provides brief, always apposite biographical links between testimonies collected from Richler’s family members, close friends, acquaintances, detractors, and, occasionally, even Richler himself. He begins with Richler’s birth in 1931 in Montreal to, by all accounts, a shy, gentle, regrettably passive junk-dealing father and a mother who, aside from openly disliking her husband (the marriage was arranged), succeeded in alienating most of the people she came into contact with, including those of her own family. Richler’s brother Avrum admits, “I didn’t like my mother. She thought she was better than my father.” Richler didn’t speak to his mother for the last 20 years of her life and refused to attend her funeral.

Skipping university for Paris, writing short stories that no one wanted to publish, marrying too young a woman he probably didn’t love, writing a novel, The Acrobats, he later thought so little of he attempted to keep it out of print during his lifetime, it’s refreshing to read about a Richler so unlike the baronically assured, world-weary popular image he’s become in the public mind; to wit, a young writer as egoistic, insecure, and ambitious as any other. Recalls Mavis Gallant: “One time, I was sitting in a café and reading Elizabeth Bowen, The House of Paris, a lovely novel, and he came along … and he grabbed the book out of my hand. This is a very good novel, a classic of the 1930s. And he said, ‘Look, Mavis, you are never going to get anywhere if you go on reading this crap.’ You can’t answer that. But when he was in Paris, he was a bit of a brat.” Writing to a friend around the same time, “Drinking too much here,” Richler admits. “Exhausted … Why in the hell doesn’t the goddam Statesman review my book? Haven’t I been a good socialist?”

The fully mature, more familiar Richler figure is here as well: tipping over sacred cows, drinking and smoking too much, and, of course, dedicatedly writing the novels and essays that made him the best writer Canada has yet produced. (Ted Kotcheff: “He had the most incredible regime. I said to him once, ‘You do it like a job. Where’s the muse?’ He said, ‘Ted, if I sat around waiting for inspiration, I’d never write a bloody word.’”)

Looming nearly as large as Richler’s developing talents and increasingly successful career is the story of his marriage to his second and last wife, Florence, with whom he had four children (and helped raise from infancy a fifth, Daniel, from Florence’s first marriage). As Posner writes, “In part through the treatment of marriage in his novels and in part through the countless stories told by friends, it has acquired an almost mythic dimension – two lovers endlessly besotted. Like many myths, it contains an element of reality.” Posner does a good job at attempting to get at the reality behind this myth.

In the end, the truth of John Fraser’s assertion that Florence “allowed him to do the writing but at the expense of her larger flowering” is something only Florence Richler can judge. But by resisting the temptation to tell a marital fairy tale, Posner allows John Aylen’s claim that “he loved her as much on the last day of his life as he did the day they were married” to ring as touching – not maudlin – and entirely believable. The same can be said of the portrait Posner constructs in The Last Honest Man of Mordecai Richler himself.