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Thursday 18 August 2011

Elizabeth and After

Carl McKelvey returns to small-town Ontario, to a landscape marred by 'progress' and dotted by monster homes, to see more of his young daughter Lizzie, and to put behind him the legacy of violence and alcohol that brought about his divorce and subsequent departure.

In the novel by Matt Cohen, Carl soon discovers he is being watched with great interest by two men: the town's most prominent businessman, and his ex-wife's new husband--both engaged in a power struggle that is played out by others in parking lots and rural terrain under hot night skies. But what he doesn't see at first--as he tries to bury his feelings for his former wife--is that a third man is watching: a man who once loved Carl's intelligent and engimatic mother.
 
A longer account of the novel written in 2000 states:
 
Winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, Cohen's (Last Seen) muted smalltown drama is set in West Gull, Ontario, a farming center and tourist destination on the shores of Long Gull Lake.

The eponymous Elizabeth McKelvey, "the woman considered to be the most beautiful, the most mysterious, the most out-of-place in the whole township," is already dead at 51 as the novel opens, but her presence is still felt. She is mourned by her retired, semi-alcoholic husband, William, and her ne'er-do-well son, Carl, who has just returned to town. Adam Goldsmith, accountant to West Gull's unscrupulous leading citizen, Luke Richardson, and "possibly the most colourless man ever to live in West Gull," silently suffers her loss, too; he was Elizabeth's secret lover.

As Richardson's political campaign kicks into high gear, Carl tries to find a job in his hometown's depressed economy and reconcile with his ex-wife, Chrissy, and seven-year-old daughter. Carl is tormented with guilt over his mother's death; he was driving his parents home after a party and crashed into a tree. He is also fearful of inheriting the McKelvey family shiftlessness--needlessly, it turns out, since Carl is actually Goldsmith's son, although the younger man is unaware of that.

It is Chrissy's new boyfriend, Fred Verghoers, Carl's old enemy and Richardson's opponent on the campaign trail, who finally forces Carl to confront his past. The narrative pauses to flash back to Elizabeth's life; perhaps she scrutinized it obsessively ("Was it that she had been too frightened to ruin her life and wished she had?"), but she never suspected the strength of her legacy to the people who would survive her. Though Cohen wraps up his plot lines a little too neatly in another car crash, his empathy and compassion, and his delicate depiction of loss and longing in a closely knit community, haunt his narrative. (Aug.) FYI: After Cohen's untimely death in 1999, Margaret Atwood wrote "An Appreciation" for the Toronto Globe and Mail: "Matt was a consummate writer.... He was very smart, very funny and very intellectually tough."
 
Another review stated, “This three-generational story of passion and subterfuge is limned with Matt Cohen's gift for language and a narrative tension that embraces descriptions of astonishing beauty and power.”
 
Elizabeth and After was published by A.A. Knopf Canada, 1999 - 370 pages

About the author (1999)
 
Matt Cohen was born in Kingston, Ontario. He received his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Toronto. He taught political philosophy at McMaster University in the late 60's.

Between 1969 and 1999, he published more than 20 books, including novels, short stories, poetry and two books for children, which won him the Toronto Arts Award. He was a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for short fiction and a recipient of the John Glassco Translation Prize.

Matt Cohen was writer-in-residence at several Canadian universities and was a visiting professor at the University of Bologna in Italy in 1985. He taught a number of writers workshops and was a founding member of the Writers Union of Canada. Matt Cohen passed away on December 2, 1999, from lung cancer.

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