Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports & Opinions

Mordecai Richler was, especially in Canada, an increasingly rare breed: a professional writer. Except for the few brief stints as a writer-in-residence chronicled as part of this collection, Richler avoided what Paul Theroux calls the "straight jacket of the college professor's tie and sports coat." He didn't teach. He rarely edited. He really did live by his pen, and he did so from the tender age of 23. Like his four previous volumes of non-fiction, Belling the Cat collects reviews, essays, and articles, most of them written for GQ or The New York Times Book Review. In these scattered essays divided into "Books and Things," "Going Places," "Sports," and "Politics," we see the patient Richler sharpening the observations, research, and interests that will pepper his hilarious, biting novels. "Writing for the Mags," for example, includes autobiographical and anecdotal confessions about the writing life in London that resurface in Joshua Then and Now, while the biographical sketch of Sam Seagram ("Mr. Sam") resembles a hand-drawn map to Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here. A miscellany of this sort does, however, invite a skim-and-delve kind of reading. Some may find the term "sports writing" oxymoronic, and, sadly, political essays, even Richler's, never outlive the weekly magazines in which they appear. What we're left with is a good collection that begs the great one that could be made by selecting the irreplaceable and the lasting from the five books of essays that Richler completed before his death. --Darryl Whetter

Author: Mordecai Richler

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Year: 1999