Mordecai Richler could not resist provocation; it was an urge that seemed to be written into his genes. He provoked the francophones of his home province of Quebec. He provoked Canadian nationalists and feminists and Jews. He provoked the establishment, even when it was in the process of giving him money: when Absolut Vodka wanted him to insert a reference to their product into a sponsored excerpt from Barney’s Version that appeared in Saturday Night magazine, he first suggested a line that said vodka “leads to blindness, impotence, and cancer. Only Communists drink it.”

That anecdote is one of many contained in Reinhold Kramer’s comprehensive biography of the great writer. Unlike Michael Posner’s The Last Honest Man, an oral history, or Joel Yanofsky’s Mordecai and Me, which, as the title suggests, is as much a memoir of its own author as it is a biography of Richler, Leaving St Urbain attempts a much broader scope. Kramer’s book is alternately a critical analysis of Richler’s published and unpublished fiction, an examination of his ideological journey from young socialist to older conservative, and a reckoning between strict Jewish Orthodoxy – both religious and political – and Richler’s more secular, humanistic attitudes.

Kramer fares best when he focuses on Richler’s life and his complex reactions to the people around him. No mere hagiographer, Kramer presents Richler as a difficult figure, possessed of a fairly pronounced cruel streak. As a (very occasional) teacher, Richler could be particularly harsh. He referred to one student’s work as “pretentious horseshit”; when the student suggested that the criticism was unfair, Richler’s only response was, “We disagree.”

Paradoxically for a professor of English, Kramer is weakest in his exegesis of Richler’s fiction. Relying on reams of papers from Richler’s archives, as well as interviews with the author’s surviving family members and colleagues, Kramer attempts to find correlations between Richler’s life and incidents in the fiction, but much of this is necessarily contingent and speculative. Kramer overuses temporizing phrases in an attempt to draw parallels that may not be there. For example, in his comparative analysis of the novel Joshua Then and Now and an unpublished memoir, Back to Ibiza, Kramer is reduced to suggesting that incidents from the two works are either “likely fictional” or “likely factual,” but seems unclear on what difference this makes to a critical reading of the novel.

The result is a biography that is only intermittently satisfying. By insisting on reading the novels as simple romans à clef, Kramer engages in the very reductionist thinking that Richler himself always warned against.