Bookish assertions can take many forms. Consider the freight and even the weight of Mordecai Richler was Here. The volume is thick as a dictionary and nearly as hefty. The paper is closer to parchment and the binding is sturdy. Beneath a dust jacket featuring original art by Aislin and a floor-to-ceiling photo of the author can be found the black cover boards and spine of silver lettering familiar to collections by French philosophes. The tassel bookmark, colour co-ordinated with the jacket, flirts with overkill.

But the packaging is only the start. Along with hundred or so samples from the novels, books of non-fiction and journalism, are fifty black and white photos. Some are of Mordecai Richler himself but others are culled from his life and times, including snaps of contestants in a 1950 Mr. Universe contest and a shrugging Rene Levesque.

There are six additional colour illustrations by Aislin, and at the back is a kind of visual bibliography providing plot summaries of the novels, along with reproductions of their covers. Finally, Mordecai Richler was Here features an introduction by the author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

Even the price – normally not the business of reviews – strikes one as purposeful. Few expenses have been spared to produce this lavish and elegant book. At just $34.95, it is good value.

Each of the principal components of Mordecai Richler was Here – the introduction and illustrations, the photos and selections – seem likewise on-point. That point concerns, in the broadest sense, where Mordecai Richler belongs, and why asserting the primacy of that belonging remains essential five years after his death in July 2001, at age 70. The book wants to argue using essay, artwork, photographs, and the author's own published words his eternal allegiance and attachment to the city of Montreal. The centrality of the city to his writings, along with his reciprocal centrality to Montreal's literary landscape, are meant to emerge as equally irrefutable.

In this ambition, the collection is echoing Richler's own sense of his artistic mission: "I do feel forever rooted in Montreal's St. Urbain Street," he once said. "That was my time, my place, and I have elected myself to get it right." In an essay he went further in particularizing the locale: "Our world," he wrote, "was largely comprised of five streets that ran between Park Avenue and The Main: Jeanne Mance, Esplanade, Waverly, St. Urbain, and Clark."

Adam Gopnik's introduction, worth $34.95 by itself, begins with his own memories of growing up in Montreal as an "emancipated but still ethnically unmistakable Jew" who also hoped to write books. His own nascent ambitions positioned Mordecai Richler as "the single powerful local presence, the one with whom one had to deal." Meanwhile, Gopnik's discovery of novels like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Cocksure – "It was that you had never known before that you were living in a book" he writes of those reading experiences – was galvanizing.

Richler was a "specific" novelist, at his very best dealing with the chief place "where his experience spoke most eagerly to his imagination." That place was around St. Lawrence Boulevard (aka The Main), as well as the "conquered territories" of Westmount and the richer Jewish areas across the mountain. "Just to write these names down," Gopnik says, "is to recall how wonderfully he imprinted their peculiar presences in his fiction."

At the same time, noting Richler's impulse to both inventory a vanishing tribe and a changing city and satirize that tribe's narrowness and pretensions, Adam Gopnik makes a claim for him as a literary pioneer. Richler's Big Theme, he writes, was the "the comedy of emergence from a cultural cringe at the price of vulgarity in cultural assertion."

The notion that Mordecai Richler, lately dropped from Diversity-Lit A-lists and booted from school syllabuses for supposedly being scant more than a middle-brow satirist and dinosaur male curmudgeon, might have been preoccupied with "the transformation of a post-colonial culture in a post-modern age" should send a few scholars back to their copies of Solomon Gursky was Here, where they will find, among other New World conundrums, a Montreal Jewish character transformed into a Native American trickster.

If Adam Gopnik wants to argue for the elasticity of Richler's fictional project – small-scale locales, large-scale themes – the drawings of Aislin are content to celebrate the intimacy of that specific Montreal. The esteemed cartoonist contributes a total of seven illustrations to the volume, including the cover image of a street that, while unidentified, clearly belongs among the five mentioned by Richler as comprising the universe of his childhood.

All but one of the drawings depict the city, in fact, and are the more affecting for their own loving specifics: horse-drawn carts marked 'Brunelle Ice' and men playing billiards in three-piece suits and Fedora hats; posters of the Maxie Berger vs Sugar Ray Robinson fight of February, 1942, and the old Montreal Forum during the days of no glass along the boards and flimsy wire-mesh behind the nets.

The photo selection, too, while not forsaking images of England, where Richler lived for two decades, or of Spain, setting for the twenty-three-year-old's precocious debut, The Acrobats, is just as demonstrative about Montreal. Among the more evocative photos are a snowy St. Urbain during the Depression and a grinning young novelist on a visit home in 1953, his arm around his father, Moses Richler. A snap-shot of Raquel Welsh in swinging London ranks as one of the quirkier choices.

Lastly, there is the writing itself. As edited by Jonathan Webb, the selections equally respect Richler's non-fiction and novels. Some might even object to the positioning of fiction alongside non-fiction, especially with the casual inferences of shared autobiographical strands, and for the most part the samplings tend to err on the side of brevity. That brevity leaves Mordecai Richler was Here of limited use as a reader.

Still, Webb displays solid editorial instincts. Besides the obvious 'bits' from the novels, such as the expatriate baseball game in St Urbain's Horseman and Duddy Kravitz's summer adventures in the Laurentians, the selections serve to remind as well of the genial mischief of The Incomparable Atuk and the malicious outrage of Cocksure.

Is there a more unbuttoned creature in Canadian literature than the satanic media mogul Star Maker? "There we were, you see," Richler has Star Maker declaiming, "a handful of kikes, dagos, and greaseballs, controlling the images Protestant America worshipped. We taught you that to be inarticulate, rather stupid in fact, like Gary Cooper, was manly."

The non-fiction choices accurately prioritize Richler's broad interests, ranging from sports to film to politics. A lifelong traveller, his sweet nostalgia for his formative days in Spain, excerpted from an introduction he wrote to a 1970s book of photos, contrasts well with his more detached and seasoned observations of the Israel he visited in 1992.

Again, though, it is those Five-Streets-of-Montreal that seem to be where experience communicated most avidly with talent. Webb is right to include multiple passages from the luminous The Street, a singular blend of memoir and short-story, and suspends his embargo on lengthy excerpts to reproduce, almost in their entirety, two seminal essays. "Bad news," opens 'St. Urbain Street Then and Now,' paean to a vanishing tribe. "They're closing Baron Byng High School. Our Baron Byng."

Then there is 'My Father's Life,' love-song of a different order, and a model of memoir-writing at its most honest and unsentimental. "My father never saw Paris," the son says of the parent. "Never read Yeats. Never stayed out with the boys drinking too much. Never flew to New York on a whim... Never knew a reckless love. What did he hope for? What did he want? Beyond peace and quiet, which he seldom achieved, I have no idea."

The various assertions of Mordecai Richler was Here does make for a somewhat awkward, if still worthy, tribute. There is, moreover, a purpose to the ardency. While Mordecai Richler's novels require no special pleading, his stature as a Montreal literary icon is far from evident.

A photo in the book, of the then middle-aged author standing on the second-floor landing of a St. Urbain walk-up, is illustrative. Visible above Richler's trademark mop of hair is the number 5257. Studying the photo, or inquiring of elders who still recall the old neighbourhood, is about the only way for a curious visitor to discover where one of the city's most illustrious citizens was born and raised.

No plaque adorns the building, or any of the other buildings associated with those streets. Is it so unfair to likewise lament that a major adjacent boulevard, Rue Park, of near equal importance in the books, is about to be renamed after the late premier Robert Bourassa? Montreal is a palimpsest of often competing histories and narratives. Asserting that, in effect, Mordecai Richler is here, and isn't going away, seems fair enough.