- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Canada; 2nd Printing edition (April 11 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676972578
- ISBN-13: 978-0676972573
- Product Dimensions: 20.1 x 12.7 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #272,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Winner of the 1999 Governor General's Award for fiction, Elizabeth and After is in every way a first-rate novel, set in a Matt Cohen version of small-town Ontario somewhere near Kingston, a mythic setting similar to that of Cohen's acclaimed Salem Quartet novels. Elizabeth is dead when the novel begins, killed more than a decade earlier in a terrible car accident. Her son, Carl, who was driving drunk, was uninjured and bears a survivor's guilt. After a decade-long exile in British Columbia, Carl has returned to West Gull, in part to make amends for his violent temper and his drunkenness, which have cost him not only his wife and daughter but also any vestige of respect that might once have been his. But this isn't just Carl's story--it's also that of his shiftless father, William; of Adam Goldsmith, a small-town accountant and Elizabeth's confidant and lover; of Luke Richardson, whose family has always controlled West Gull and who "rescued" Carl's ex-wife, Chrissy; and, of course, of Elizabeth herself.
Elizabeth and After is a rich and wonderful novel, by turns quirky and humorous, heart-breakingly erotic, and wrenchingly painful, with an overwhelming sense of decades-old humiliations, losses, and mistakes. In handling these complex layers of emotional history, Cohen's touch is always deft. He is able to reach into the most painful depths of Carl McKelvey's soul and, at the same time, to fill the novel with the late Elizabeth's evanescent energy. She changed the lives of everyone in West Gull, whether they knew it or not, and she changes our lives as well. --Jeffrey Canton
From Publishers Weekly
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 shiftlessnessAneedlessly, 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."
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent vivid writing...,
By libellule "libellule23" (St Bruno Québec, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Elizabeth and After (Paperback)
I wish I had discovered this book before. I could not put it down. It is a page turner especially from part II when we get to really know Elizabeth.The writing is quite vivid and descriptive, easy to read, it flows. The characters come alive and the author transports you into their world and uncovers their beauty, their passions, their faults and obsessions in such a unique way. I highly recommend this book and am sorry that it is the last one written by Matt Cohen.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
an interesting story,
By Christina (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Elizabeth and After (Hardcover)
a beautifully written story with lots on twists along the way. although it has a slow pace, it's worth the read.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
over-rated!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Elizabeth and After (Hardcover)
I was very disappointed with this book. I can understand people liking it but I cannot see why anyone would think it a great novel. The best thing about it is the writing. It is a well-written book. The plot is somewhat mechanistic. The characterization is also frustrating; the good people tend to be passive and the bad ones tend to be totally bad with no redeeming features to create a sense of well-roundedness. Finally the moral vision is somewhat bleak with so much sinister corruption in the town. If this is what small town Ontario is like, no wonder we have situations like the tragedy in Walkerton.This novel bears no comparison with a novel like No Great Mischief by Alstair Maclean, which is just in another league altogether.
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