Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing

Douglas Ivison is an assistant professor of English at Lakehead
University in Thunder Bay.

Ray Robertson is a novelist and prolific book reviewer whose reviews
have appeared in a variety of Canadian newspapers and magazines. Mental
Hygiene collects the best of those reviews—primarily of fiction
(mostly Canadian), but also of biographies and books on popular culture
and other topics—and throws in a few other short essays for good
measure.

In the introduction, Robertson cites novelists Sir Kingsley and Martin
Amis, Mordecai Richler, Anthony Burgess, and especially Gore Vidal as
model critics whose reviews give “enormous pleasure.” In
Robertson’s view, a good review should reveal the “essential
style” of its author; be entertaining and readable; and attempt to
“teach people how to be better readers” or, as he puts it in the
title essay, “help maintain the mental hygiene of their time.” In
the reviews collected here, Robertson frequently rails against what

he sees as the stultifying strictures of what he describes as
“McCanLit,” which result in a plethora of fiction that is “thinly
disguised journal writing chiefly concerned with the domestic dilemmas
faced by boring, middle-class, self-absorbed writer-types but ostensibly
about life’s BIG questions. And all of it entirely humourless, of
course. Because it’s serious.” Robertson repeatedly emphasizes the
value of solid storytelling, fully realized characters, and the
inventive use of language; these are the values that he sees as being
all too often absent in Canadian fiction.

Individually, the reviews are frequently witty, entertaining, and
insightful, though of more interest when the reader is familiar with the
author or book being discussed. Unfortunately, the collection as a whole
is unsuccessful. Many of the reviews would undoubtedly have had much
more impact in their original context; here they are just too short and
repetitive to maintain the reader’s interest over an entire book.
Mental Hygiene does, however, make the reader eager to read
Robertson’s own fiction.