"I ... feel forever rooted in Montreal's St. Urbain Street," Mordecai Richler stated in an essay, "Why I Write," collected in Notes on An Endangered Species and Others (1974): "That was my time, my place, and I have elected myself to get it right." In spite of the roughly twenty years that Richler spent outside Canada, the locale of his youth, of the first two decades of life, which he believes to be the crucial, formative years of a writer's consciousness, appears repeatedly in his fiction, and his voice, even during his absence, maintained a controversial, entertaining, and caustic critique of Canadian culture. With his output, which, since the early 1950s, has included stories, articles, and reviews for Canadian, British, and American magazines; film, television, and radio scripts; and, to date, eight novels, Richler has established himself not only as one of Canada's most important authors but also as a...