The bookseller

Vaudeville isn't dead. But the song-and-dance men, jugglers, animal acts and stand-up comics have been displaced by jet-lagged authors, who will read from their works in bookshops wherever at least eight potential customers can be found. On a recent week in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times Book Review listed no fewer than 80 peddlers reading in various locations.

On the day before I start out on my own cross-Canada book promotion tour, the omens are bad. Striding down Crescent Street, late in the afternoon, bound for my favoured watering hole, I am stopped by a gentleman from Vancouver.

"Aren't you Mordecai Richler?"

"Yes."

"Let me shake your hand. I've read everything you've written. I think you're wonderful."

"Well, thank you."

"Now let me ask you a question. What do you do for a living?"

Then there is a letter from a college in Ontario inviting me to speak. "Your book, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has long been a fixture in our English classes. Students are amazed to discover that you are still alive."

Toronto. In town to deliver the Donner Foundation lecture, I first submit to lunch with Ms Jan Wong, a Globe and Mail columnist. "How tall are you?" she asks. "And how tall is your wife?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"I need to describe you."

Pursuing her literary inquiries, she asks if our children are getting a Jewish education. Married to a Jew herself, she allows, with a self-satisfied smile: "We have a seder every Friday night."

"That must be a Jewish-Chinese custom. We manage it only once a year. On Passover."

A six-page fax is waiting for me back at my hotel. It's from Knopf Canada. A list of interviews, readings and book signings I am to do, cross-Canada. I have been wary of morning television interviewers ever since one of those relentlessly cheerful young women squeezed me in for two minutes between a cooking demonstration and a chat with a spiritual healer. Brandishing my novel, she demanded: "Is this a true story or did you just make it up out of your head?"

Publication wasn't always such an ordeal. When I was a young writer, rooted in London, I would deliver my manuscript to my publisher, who would immediately remind me of the unearned advance on my previous effort. When my novel came out nine months later, I would sit at home waiting for cherished friends to telephone and read aloud my worst review, just in case I had missed it. Those, those were the days when novelists could be condescending about travelling salesmen-men who lugged their sample cases from town to town-but we have long since joined the club. The last time I was in New York, I was driven in a limo from bookshop to bookshop, popping in to sign copies of my novel, preceded and followed by other writers in other limos, signing theirs. Bookshops can return unsold copies of a book to the publishers, but they can't return those which are autographed. So the publisher's flack who accompanies authors on these excursions usually says something like: "I'll chat up the sales staff, and while they aren't looking, you sign as many goddamn copies as possible."

Maybe ten years ago I was invited to Montreal's annual Salon des Livres to sit with the translator of a new French-language edition of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Our table was stacked high with books. Our moment arrived when a voice booming out of a loudspeaker announced to the milling crowd that we were now available for signings at booth number 12. Ten minutes passed and nobody came. Finally a man stopped at our table. He pulled out a cigarette and asked, "Got a light?"

Now that I am an ageing pro-somebody who has been around the block possibly once too often-I don't make rookie mistakes. For example, I will no longer do radio or television call-in shows. Once, at a late-night call-in show in Chicago, I sat around a table with two other writers. We watched, astonished, as the technician in the control booth rapped on his glass window and held up a message for our host. "Remember Dave," it read, "this is a night of the full moon." When my turn to sell came, I went on, as required, about the torments of my difficult craft-how hell is a blank sheet of paper, and so forth. Then a listener addressed a question to me: "All that's well and good, Mort, but I live on the North Side, and I want to know how come there was no garbage collection this week?"

Now I've been out there peddling for only a few days, and I am already weary of the most frequently asked questions:

"Why did you write in the first person?"

"Why not?"

"Do you use a computer, Mr Richler?"

"No, every morning I slip into my Armani silk dressing gown and monogrammed velvet slippers by Dior, and begin to write with my goose quill pen."

I fly to London with my wife for the British publication of Barney's Version. Good news and bad news. Splendid reviews in the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times, but Melvyn Bragg has cancelled my appearance on BBC radio's Start the Week and John Walsh, of the Independent, no longer wants to take me to lunch at the Ivy, because I have already been interviewed by Mark Steyn, in Montreal, for the Daily Telegraph.

Manchester. My publisher, Chatto & Windus, has arranged for me to do a reading at Waterstone's, but the day happens to be Rosh Hashonna, so many of my people have cancelled. Militant feminist Andrea Dworkin is reading in another room at the bookshop. An incurable romantic, Ms Dworkin has written: "Intercourse remains a means, or the means, of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status... pushing and thrusting until she gives in." On the other hand, she doesn't believe that all men are rapists, which is awfully decent of her.

London, in early October, is still balmy, sidewalk caf?s flourishing, but I do notice one change. I see an increased number of bald-headed women. I am not sure whether this is the new fashion, or if the women have been treated for head-lice. Either way, I am not impressed.

Montreal. Time to check out a week's mail. A professor at an Ontario university is writing a paper on minor novelists and wants me to answer 26 questions. An eyeglass museum in Tennessee would like a pair of my old spectacles. An invitation to lecture, beginning: "We are a non-profit society..." I read no further. A query from Knopf's publicist in Calgary inviting me to appear on a CBC radio show called Mountain Top Music: "This interview is a personal profile of Mr Richler. They have requested the following information: 1. His first five favourite pieces of music. 2. The title and author of his favourite book. 3. Where he would like to spend his last days on earth (This can be anywhere, a mountain top, an island, at home and so on.)"

Toronto again. More television, radio and press interviews, followed by an evening reading at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall. Afterwards, at the book-signing, I am confronted by a hostile young woman: "I read your last novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here. It took me two years. What a struggle!"

Still Toronto. I pick up a copy of the Montreal Gazette. Bad news from home, as Quebec's loopy language wars continue. I should explain that Florence and I spend the winter in London and for the rest of the year we are rooted in our cottage on the shores of Lake Memphremagog in Quebec's Eastern Townships. The nearest hospital, La Providence, is in the neighbouring town of Magog, and our family has always been treated with courtesy there. But now there is a scandal-no, perfidy. The alert Rodrigue Larose, of the Mouvement Estrien Pour le Fran?ais, has discovered handwritten signs in English on the premises, loose-leaf sheets bearing the words "emergency admissions." This is illegal, of course, because the Townships' 44,563 anglophones make up only 9 per cent of the population. "Make no mistake," says a horrified Larose, "loose-leaf scribbling is one sure step on the road to full-fledged signs made by professional sign-makers." Larose is also concerned because the Quebec government intends to introduce English lessons in francophone schools in Grade 3, instead of in Grade 4. Impressionable young eight-year olds, he fears, will be exposed to "contamination."

Ottawa. Reading and signing at the National Public Library. A man asks me to inscribe a copy of my novel "to Judith," and that I add a personal message. "Something witty," he says.

I protest that I don't know Judith, so I can't add a personal message. "I doubt that she'll have time to finish it anyway," he says, grabbing the book. "She's suffering from terminal cancer."

Victoria, Vancouver Island. Midway through my reading, at the Open Space Gallery, the microphone begins to leak music from a local rock station. It's the first time I perform with a backup group. Among those waiting to have a book signed, there is a pretty young girl. "My mother enjoys your work," she says. Somebody else tells me: "My husband was in your class at Baron Byng High. He couldn't come tonight. Heart attack. One minute he was reading the Globe and Mail at the breakfast table, and the next he keeled over." I don't recognise the name, but I say I remember him well.

Vancouver. Last time I was here, locals were complaining about the influx of Chinese from Hong Kong, and how they had inflated real estate prices. Now the same people are fulminating because so many of the Chinese are leaving. My minder says: "The parents return to Hong Kong and leave their teenage kids behind in those big houses, just in case. They're usually left with a clothes allowance of $40,000. White kids hit them for protection money during school lunch hours."

Interview with a woman from the Western Jewish Bulletin. She wants to know, speaking frankly, if it is true that I'm an anti-Semite? Item: a story, possibly apocryphal, told to me by a Hollywood film director: years ago, Daniel Fuchs, a gifted novelist and short story writer, was hired to work on a screenplay in Hollywood with his idol, William Faulkner. Faulkner, a sensible man, did not suffer Hollywood easily. He was drunk most of the time. Following a difficult couple of weeks, the sensitive Fuchs said: "Mr Faulkner, this collaboration is not working."

Faulkner agreed. "It's not working," said Fuchs, "because you're an anti-Semite."

"Yes," said Faulkner, "but I don't like gentiles either."

Florence has to fly home and my flight takes me to Calgary on a cloudless day. Last time I was in Calgary, I stopped somebody and asked him if he could direct me to the main street. "We haven't got one," he said.

At Calgary airport, bound for Winnipeg, I cannot find a copy of my recent novel in the bookshop. I ask the teenager behind the counter, "Have you got a copy of Barney's Version?"

"Jeez. They went so fast, we haven't got any left. I could order you one from our other shop."

"I don't need one. I wrote it. Now why don't you re-order?"

"Not a bad idea."