The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Duddy Kravitz grows up on St. Urbain Street hearing his grandfather Simcha's proverb that a man without land is nobody, and Richler builds the whole novel as a literal-minded, teenage misreading of that inheritance: land, to Duddy, means acreage around a lake in the Laurentians, and he sets out to buy it parcel by parcel through a summer-camp cigarette racket, black-market scheming, and a bar-mitzvah film he hires a blacklisted, drunk English director named Peter John Friar to shoot, a home movie that ends up an avant-garde catastrophe involving flamingos and a bar mitzvah boy dressed as a Roman senator. Richler keeps the comedy moving fast enough that a reader is laughing at Duddy's hustles well before noticing how much damage each one leaves behind it.

That damage lands hardest on Virgil, an epileptic friend Duddy hires to drive his cigarette route and keeps sending out even after a seizure puts the truck in a ditch and Virgil in a wheelchair. Duddy visits, apologizes, means it, and then forges Virgil's signature on a loan against Virgil's own savings to close on the last parcel of land he needs, an act the novel refuses to let a reader forgive on Duddy's behalf even as it keeps supplying reasons to understand him: a father who prizes his brother the doctor over him, and a grandfather's love that reads, to a child, as a debt to be settled rather than a gift.

Duddy's dying uncle Benjy, the family's wealthiest and most disappointed member, leaves behind a letter that judges Duddy directly, warning that a small ugliness allowed to grow in a child becomes a large one in a man, and Richler positions it as the closest thing the novel offers to an outside moral reckoning, since Duddy never reads it changed. The letter doesn't quite redeem Benjy either: his own coldness toward Duddy as a boy is part of what the novel holds responsible for the hunger it now condemns.