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Single white trash male >> Elizabeth and After weaves a twisted tale by JULIET WATERS
But Carl, the central character of Elizabeth and After, doesn't really have a problem attracting women. The one thing he's inherited from his mother, Elizabeth, before she died tragically in a New Year's Eve car accident, is her magnetic personality. After a three-year absence, Carl comes home to West Gull, pop. 684, just outside of Kingston, located on scenic Dead Swede Lake. He's returning to an alcoholic father, William, who recently broke out of his old folks home to take a near-suicidal joy ride in a stolen Pontiac. But mainly he's back for his seven-year old daughter, Lizzie, and ex-wife, Chrissie, who he's still in love with, but who's now living with an aspiring right-wing politician with the kind of TV charisma that's making him an Ontario phenomenon. However, what Carl doesn't know yet is that he's also returning to a tense, tangled web of history woven out of the guilt of three men over Elizabeth's death--his father's, his own and that of his mother's ex-lover, Adam Goldsmith, a deceptively gentle-natured accountant. Gradually, this simple story about a small-town loser becomes a twisted epic set in the complex cultural terrain surrounding Kingston. West Gull is a fucked-up and, sadly, typically Canadian rural setting. Kingston is a weird enough morph of people, where one road leads to academia and the other to prison. But West Gull adds another dimension, where farms are being turned into strip malls and agrarian communities are being replaced by a desperate tourist trade. Over the last couple of novels (this is his 14th), Matt Cohen has been developing a reputation as one the most under-appreciated Canadian writers. The impression he creates when we meet is of a mellow, more centered Woody Allen. Someone who's used to the media (he's wearing what he describes as his TV pants), but who doesn't feel compelled to play to it. Within 15 minutes he's talking about his surprise at the rave reviews he's been getting for Elizabeth and After, a book he describes as "an albatross" he's had hanging around his neck for over a decade. "I actually started writing it a long time ago, in 1986. It started with Carl coming back to town and working in a video store, because I thought this would be a peculiar place to end up in a rural setting. I wrote for a while, but it wasn't really going anywhere, so I started writing about Carl's parents. Meanwhile, years are passing by and it's 1992 and Elizabeth has taken the thing over and it's started to be more and more about her. Then it started turning into this big mess and I had to make the decision of whether I was going to make it more simple or more complicated, so that's when I brought in Adam. Eventually it ended up as it was. "I was so anxious to get rid of it, really sick of it, I made up a sort of manuscript after about 10 drafts and gave it to my editor, my agent and my publisher. I said to them, 'Normally, when I give you something, I want you to sit down and read it right through, right away, and call me by the time I get home to tell me how great it is. In this case, what I want you to do is read this over the next few months, then tell me to forget it.' I just wanted someone to give me permission to ship it off to the basement. But then they all liked it, and that was really horrible because it meant I had to keep working on it." Has he since figured out why everyone likes it? "No. I guess it's a combination of plot and character." A combination that somehow ended up creating a book that readers may have as hard a time letting go of as its author did. Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen, Knopf, hc, 370pp, $32
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Twenty-eight-year-old Carl McKelvey is the archetypal aimless, smouldering, bad boy anti-hero. He sums himself up in this imaginary personal: "White trash male, late twenties. Seeks understanding woman to do all the work. Nursing experience not required but would be helpful."