A Father’s Son

I may be wrong, but I don’t think most readers will happily pick up a book with a subtitle that promises an account of schizophrenia. Those who have experience with the serious mental disorder might be interested, but, then again, they might not. Those who knew Fraser Sutherland as a poet or an essayist might want to take a look, but they might not either.

I had better offer a rather painful personal story up front and acknowledge two conflicts that nevertheless don’t, in my mind, disqualify me from commenting on Sutherland’s The Book of Malcolm: My Son’s Life with Schizophrenia. The story has to do with my beloved mother, who was carried out of our Toronto house in 1960 screaming and in a straitjacket. I was ­fifteen. She spent over a year and a half in the Homewood Sanitarium in Guelph, Ontario, where she was subjected to involuntary electric shock treatments that...