MORDECAI RICHLER: LEAVING ST URBAIN,

by Reinhold Kramer (McGill-Queens University Press, 498 pages, $39.95 hardcover with 15 photographs)

Not surprisingly, Mordecai's Richler's death in 2001 has created a cottage industry of memoirs and biographies.

Joel Yanofsky got the ball rolling in 2003 with a quirkily self-serving memoir, Mordecai and Me: An Appreciation of a Kind. Then there was Michael Posner's celebratory oral biography, The Last Honest Man.

And this book by Brandon University English professor Reinhold Kramer is the first of three biographies. Canadian author Charles Foran is also writing a biography for Richler's last publisher, Knopf, expected to be released in 2009, and novelist M. G. Vassanji is penning a pocket biography for the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians series. No doubt Richler would be cautiously amused by all the posthumous attention.

Kramer has the advantage of being first biographer out of the gate. But his scholarly study leaves lots of room for subsequent scribes.

The volume's subtitle is ironic. As every reader of Richler knows, he never left "St. Urbain in heart, soul or imagination. His best works -- The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain's Horseman, Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky Was Here and Barney's Version -- draw directly and immediately on the Montreal working-class street he grew up on.

Kramer views Richler with objectivity and judiciousness -- substantial warts and all. As a man, Richler comes across as thorny at best. His disdain for others knows no bounds. He is easy to admire, but hard to look on with anything approaching affection.

While he undoubtedly loved his Florence, his wife, and their children and some of his closest friends, Richler's aggressive rudeness cannot be justified simply as the awkwardness of an intensely shy man. If there is one word to describe the writer, after reading Leaving St Urbain, it is conflicted.

Kramer carefully delineates the many emotional and intellectual conflicts in Richler's life that inform and colour his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, literature and journalism.

An incomplete list of conflicts includes: relations with his parents and extended family; his connection to Jewish orthodoxy; early socialism and mature conservatism, avant-garde and naturalistic fiction; literature and journalism; Canada and abroad; nationalism and internationalism; art and commerce; poverty and wealth; failure and success; obscurity and celebrity.

The conflict Kramer concentrates on is Richler's lifelong struggle with Jewish Orthodoxy, which he appears never to have resolved.

Kramer interprets Richler's writing primarily through this set of critical lens. While this perspective is fundamental to an understanding of Richler as a man and as a writer, it reduces and distorts the nature and effect of his greatest novels. You don't turn the last page of Leaving St. Urbain and rush to reread your favourite Richler novels.

Kramer isn't a bad writer, but he writes in an academic style that doesn't encourage you to flip pages with wild abandon, eager to get on with the story of one of Canada's greatest writers.

Leaving St. Urbain is neither comprehensive, nor definitive. However, it's a good start. It will prove invaluable for a long time to come with respect to understanding and appreciating Richler's herculean struggle to come to terms with his religion, race and culture.

Robert Reid is a Record staff writer.