Cock-sure : a novel

M. Richler

Minorities are funny. A satire on big business, the communications industry, pop culture, organized morality, modern education, sex. Richler's basic weapon is the mace of reductio ad absurdum, which he wields with skill and ferocity. A publisher compiles a book that documents little acts of kindness shown by the Nazis toward Jews, and holds a benefit dinner for wives and children of deceased concentration-camp guards; a school play casts ten-year-olds in a staging of Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom; a teacher encourages the academic achievement of her boy students by rewarding them in an entirely extracurricular manner; a nun appearing on a Joe Pyne-style TV insult program is publicly reduced to a fluttering wreck when the M.C. savagely probes into her sex life; an aged international entertainment biggie, known only as Star Maker, stays alive on the transplanted organs of his employees.