SOURCE: Wilson-Smith, Anthony. “Richler Remembered.” Maclean's 114, no. 29 (16 July 2001): 18-19.

In the following essay, Wilson-Smith offers a brief memorial overview of Richler's life and career.

Say this, among many nice things, about Mordecai Richler: he knew how to have things both ways. Imagine how he might have portrayed, in one of his books, a wealthy, well-connected novelist with residences in the best part of Montreal's old Square Mile, a winter getaway around London's trendy Sloane Square and a summer refuge in that great wealthy Anglo-Quebec enclave, the Eastern Townships. Such a protagonist might have been a self-centred, utterly humourless WASP who made his living preying on others, or perhaps a tortured, self-mocking Jew, a parvenu amazed and uneasy at the success that had arrived at his door.

Instead, Richler lived just such a materially blessed life—and did so without any such apparent shortcomings or traumas. By the time...