[In The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, Matt Cohen] examines the Frank and Malone families, introduced in earlier stories where they appeared sporadically as misfits, drunks, idlers and fighters. They are still drunks and fighters, but because their powers are dwindling and because they haltingly, painfully question why they are misfits in their own home, they gradually gain in depth and dignity. This is a novel about middle age: it presents the loss of innocence of a man of forty-nine.

Cohen is a good storyteller and particularly deft at portraying character. He makes his plain narration and dialogue rich by interweaving flashbacks, shifts in perspective, imagery and dreams. In a brief episode he can convey the weight of experience and emotion that makes a person unique. His plainness is misleading, as is the apparent simplicity of his characters who are unsophisticated but passionate, and whose straightforward story involves unexpected complexities and ironies…. The novel is suffused with time and mortality. Image after image—clocks, lengthening shadows, family photos, heirlooms, layers of paint—signals the passing of time, reminding characters how they have forfeited their youth before they savoured it; how they are turning into copies of their parents; and worst of all, how they are losing hold of their very selves. What they desire is perfect self-possession…. But what they find instead is that their lives have run on ahead of them. The perfect moments are elusive and transitory, not permanent, and they are matched by a comparable sense of dispossession and panic in the face of death….

This condition is both mitigated and confirmed by the importance of the family. As in The Disinherited, an earlier novel, Cohen presents a kind of family chronicle, in the sense not only that he describes successive generations, but that he explores the family as the basis of value, power and frustration. On one hand, the family triumphs over time and confers identity on its members by providing continuity through the generations, and a stability that Cohen expresses through the image of houses: family centres rooted in the land. On the other hand, the individual is lost within his dynasty because he is subsumed by an impersonal process of regeneration and degeneration. The novel ends with a wedding and a funeral, celebrated simultaneously. At this time, several characters feel that in some strange way they are merging with their relatives and neighbours, blending in love and sorrow. The feeling is both welcome and frightening, because it affirms their deep and violent kinship, yet denies their individuality. The bitter irony of the book and its title is that self-possession is allied to self-destruction, and is gained only through the family, which at once affirms and denies the self….

Cohen excels at showing the extraordinary forces underlying ordinary life. The reader has observed the struggle necessary to arrive at so commonplace a conclusion, and realizes what a triumph it is.