Critical Loss

When Joel Yanofsky died from cancer in December 2020, Canada and, in particular, Montreal suffered an irreparable loss. A novelist, essayist, autobiographer, and university teacher, he was also a devoted literary columnist and reviewer. In four decades of writing, he penned much more than “a half-million words about writers and their work — book reviews, profiles, essays,” as he once put it. “All those words would fill a fairly long shelf dedicated to the literary life — to the variety of ways writers write and readers read.” His astute commentaries appeared in, among many places, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Village Voice, the Literary Review of Canada, and, above all, the Montreal Gazette.

In his long-form literary profiles, including the award-winning Mordecai & Me, from 2003, he attempted to enter his subjects’ frames of reference, aiming to both celebrate and criticize. His was a unique...