Lament for Rosedale

One of the supreme advantages of being born a child of privilege is the freedom to reject the values of one’s own class—having one’s cake, eating it and spitting it out. Far harder to expel is a clinging feeling of entitlement that can consume a lifetime.

Mount Pleasant, the title of Don Gillmor’s mordantly powerful new novel, refers at a surface level to the fabled Toronto cemetery while even more richly and deeply symbolizing the feral, underground forces that entomb three generations of an epically unpleasant WASP family—the living as well as the dead.

Engulfed in mid-life angst in the wake of the 2008 market crash, Harry Salter is a former broadcast journalist turned left-leaning political science teacher—“a white male at the one moment in history when this wasn’t an advantage.” Harry grew up in the exclusive enclave of Rosedale, “a fountain of money that shot out of the ground, and in the gush of afterbirth came the nannies and cooks and...