Emma’s Version
A Richler scion can’t escape writing about her family
A Richler scion can’t escape writing about her family
Emma richler walks toward me on a cool and foggy London morning. Trim and tidy in a dark blue coat, she wears crooked spectacles and a pair of sensible brown oxfords. At fifty-five, the novelist is a perfect mix of both her parents —tousled and professorial like her late father, Mordecai, with the gamine, sylph-like grace of Florence, her mother, a former model. At Richler’s side is a large, silent greyhound, whom she introduces as Nico, “after Niccolò Machiavelli.” He’s a retired track racer, she explains, a former champion. He came with the name.
We are standing outside Richler’s favourite Camden café, a tiny hole in the wall rammed to the barn beams with caffeine addicts. Inconveniently, I have brought my newborn baby along for the interview, so we have a stroller and a large canine between us. I suggest we go somewhere else to find more space, but Richler, who is serious about her coffee, won’t have it. She slips inside, and in a moment, the owner is clearing a spot for us in the back where we can have a bit of privacy. Silky espressos appear in thick ceramic cups as Richler kibitzes with the staff, all of whom seem to know her well. This is, after all, the neighbourhood where she has lived for nearly twenty-five years. Camden Town. A bustling, slightly ragged patch of north London famed for its tourist market full of bong pipes, as well as pubs that the late great Amy Winehouse once tumbled out of.
It’s impossible not to feel the romance of the place while reading Richler’s ambitious new novel, Be My Wolff, which is set mostly in and around these parts — depicting them not only as they are now, but the way they once were 200-odd years ago. “Dickens had his first address right around the corner from here,” she says once we have settled into our chat. “Somewhere buried under some mesh wire is a brown plaque. This would have been all fields, mostly. I’ve always felt that I walk in his steps.”
Richler often says stuff like this — dreamy pronouncements that would sound precious or downright weird coming from anyone else. But there is something about her, a winsome, out-of-time quality, that makes it plausible, even charming, when she describes her craft with terms borrowed from a Romantic poet. Characters’ voices are “insistent,” and her writing, she says, “is not a choice, but a need.”
Be My Wolff follows the lives of Rachel and Zachariah Wolff, a pair of star-crossed lovers living in contemporary Camden. They also happen to be adopted siblings. As the young couple attempt to make a life together despite the disapproval of their family, Rachel becomes increasingly obsessed with constructing a history for Zach, who is a former boxer, her “dream bareknuckle boy.” What ensues within the novel are several intertwined stories — most of which take place in Rachel’s rich imagination. She ruminates on everything from Zach’s imagined Victorian forefather — a pugilist and drinking mate of Dickens— to Russian Hussars duking it out during the Napoleonic wars.
“This boxer character kept appearing to me, sometimes in dreams, the way he does for Rachel,” Richler says. “Then one day, I stumbled into this exhibition at the British Museum. London 1753. And I kept going back and back. I went four times. I didn’t know why, but I thought, there’s something here. Then suddenly these two characters emerged — Rachel and Zach.”
The novel, Richler’s third, took twelve years to write, and the effort left her flattened. “It’s been a long, obsessive ride,” she says. “There were definitely days when I thought, ‘I’m going to die writing this novel.’ My agent actually did die.”
Her first two books — Sister Crazy (2001) and Feed My Dear Dogs (2005) — chronicled the interior life of Jem Weiss, a juvenile narrator and observant middle child in an