ELIZABETH AND AFTER

Name: ELIZABETH AND AFTER
Author: Matt Cohen
ISBN: 0-312-26151-9

by Matt Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2000

An extremely satisfying work, finding new depth in old themes, and offering a fitting memorial to a talented, deeply humane...

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A strong, spare, autumnal tale of loss and redemption, winner of the Governor General's Award, and the final work from Cohen (The Bookseller, 1996, etc.), a talented, hard-working Canadian novelist who died, at age 52, in 1999.

Set in the increasingly gentrified precincts of rural Canada, in a town where the long-established family farms are giving way to expensive housing developments, the story follows the struggles of a family displaced from the land and further damaged by tragedy. Carl McKelvey reluctantly returns to the town of West Gull after an absence of three years, torn between his desire to escape from the past and the need to deal with its considerable hold on him. He blames himself for the untimely death of his mother, Elizabeth, in an accident fueled by anger and alcohol. He also carries the weight of a failed marriage. He has come home in an attempt to make peace with his troublesome father, a lifelong farmer now confined against his will to a nursing home, and to reestablish a connection with his disaffected daughter, seven-year-old Lizzie. Because his mother, a schoolteacher, was a beloved figure in West Gull, whose benign presence affected many lives, Carl's return stirs up dormant memories and resentments, and precipitates a series of confrontations. Carl and his father blame each other for Elizabeth's death: Carl had been at the wheel, bringing his mother and his drunken father home from a party, when he had lost control of the car. Carl has had his own long struggle with alcoholism, and with a fierce temper also inherited from his father. His slow, painful battle to reconnect with life, to be a father for Lizzie, and to strike some truce with his own father are all delineated here in precise, resonant prose, imbued with a muted but powerful sense of longing. Cohen quietly presses the action toward a moving conclusion, all the more persuasive for its refusal to rely on easy victories.

An extremely satisfying work, finding new depth in old themes, and offering a fitting memorial to a talented, deeply humane writer.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-312-26151-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOOKSELLER
by Matt Cohen

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EMOTIONAL ARITHMETIC
by Matt Cohen

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.