Books like Jean Simard

Sammy Glick is Duddy’s closest literary cousin: a ferociously alert copyboy who treats every human relationship as either a rung or an obstacle. Schulberg makes his ascent through 1930s Hollywood exhilarating to watch and increasingly hard to excuse. The kinship lies not just in ambition, but in the unsettling question both novels press: if a society worships success, how much can it blame the young man who pursues it without scruple?

Published in 1941, this enduring Hollywood novel still feels fast, sharp, and dangerously alive. Anyone captivated by Richler’s mixture of disgust, fascination, and reluctant admiration will recognize the charge immediately.

Balram Halwai tells his story in letters written over seven nights, explaining how a poor village boy became an entrepreneur. His voice is the irresistible engine: funny, observant, boastful, intimate, and morally unnerving. Like Duddy, Balram has learned to read the hypocrisy of his world with unusual clarity—and to use that knowledge ruthlessly.

Adiga’s Booker Prize winner turns upward mobility into both a liberation story and a savage indictment. Its jokes do not soften its anger; they sharpen it. If Duddy made you feel the thrill and ugliness of self-invention at once, Balram’s account is essential reading.

John Self, a film director ricocheting between London and New York, is appetite made flesh: money, alcohol, pornography, junk food, status. Where Duddy’s energy is lean and hungry, Self’s is swollen and consuming—but Martin Amis gives him the same dangerous readability. You know he is vulgar, vain, and self-deceiving, yet his voice keeps hauling you onward.

Widely regarded as one of Amis’s defining novels, Money is a virtuoso performance of comic excess, verbal invention, and cultural disgust. Richler readers will relish its refusal to separate hilarity from moral judgment: every dazzling joke reveals another form of emptiness underneath.