Cohen's varied works all deal with similar problems which they attempt to solve in various but related ways. In each, the central character is a misfit, malcontent, or loser, the victim of his own faults and of circumstances beyond his control, who struggles with a question posed in The Disinherited: "how do you get to be alive?" Each character explicitly or implicitly tries to grasp and accept his chaotic life and, if possible, to master it by giving it shape and purpose. He has two tasks: to understand and to act. He must understand what his life means, what it is "to be alive," even though his experience seems so haphazard and painful. And he must act on that knowledge in order to "get" to be alive, to seize his own life and "come into true possession of himself." Cohen's works, therefore, depict a series of battles for clarity of vision and freedom of action. While there are few victories and no conventional happy endings, the later novels do grow increasingly affirmative. (pp. 93-4)

Cohen's characters wage their battles for vision and action on several related fronts. They must overcome the confusion and disillusionment of failing love affairs. They must contend with strained family relations, which challenge their identity and freedom. They must confront a natural landscape that is alien and harsh, but occasionally responsive to man and a source of sustenance…. And, above all, Cohen's characters must combat an agonizing awareness of temporal dislocation, a sense that, because time is in fragments, their lives are split into unrelated bits. (p. 94)

The complexity of Cohen's writing and the increasing subtlety of his characterization arise from the contradictions encountered as his heroes fight and advance on these fronts. Their quest is parodied in Too Bad Galahad where the perfect but hapless knight finds his mission thwarted by absurdities and anachronisms and by his inability to identify or even recognize the Holy Grail. All of Cohen's characters encounter dilemmas that arise from the very nature of their search and their power to conduct it. They seek self-possession through an assured relation with love, family, nature, and time, but they betray and are betrayed by all four. They face a paradox suggested by another phrase in The Disinherited: "Everything causes its own death and dies of being itself." Characters try to "get to be alive," yet find this effort destroys them: they die of being themselves…. This central paradox explains the ferocity that prevails in Cohen's writing. The intense energy of life, which is the motive of passion, ambition, love, and conflict, is so powerful that it becomes destructive: life burns itself up. Wooden Hunters provides a description of man's essential, destructive vitality in its purest form: "and he had felt something strange and unexperienced since childhood, a current jumping through his body so forcefully he seemed to have been jolted on his feet, a current of mixed fear and violence…."

If at this date we can detect a development in Cohen's career, it lies in his treatment of his heroes' paradoxical, self-defeating, and violent condition. There is a shift in narrative technique that reflects a change in the personality of his characters. In the earlier works, the paradoxes and the contradictions lie on the surface of the texts, making some of them superficial; in the later works, they are buried deeper in the lives of people who hardly recognize the explosive powers which are latent in them. (pp. 94-5)

Whereas Johnny Crackle sees with the benefit of LSD, and Korsoniloff is a schizoid philosophy professor who is well qualified to offer existential quips, the Franks [introduced in "Country Music"] are simple, inarticulate, country folk who can hardly grasp let alone express their dilemmas. Their vision is restricted; their actions crude. Cohen seems to be drawn to the plight of unsophisticated, even (in Wooden Hunters) primitive people, and so must rely on a different style to give depth and complexity to their problems. This style, which predominates in his recent writing, is spare and unadorned. For the most part it simply asserts and describes, but at key moments it expands in rhythm, metaphor, and allusion. It falls under the influence of the characters' memories, dreams, and drunkenness. It incorporates striking images from the natural world that comment indirectly on the human action. In these passages, every paranoia is no longer indulged, but is still possible, hidden beneath the surface of everyday events, released in unexpected eloquence…. The intense vitality, the feeling of physical weight and presence, the merging of character and setting, the combined senses of wonder and menace, joy and fear—all features proclaimed explicitly in Cohen's earlier writing—are here kept implicit, almost incomprehensible to the characters themselves, but powerfully felt in the rhythms and the images of the description.

Such passages, and the alternation of laconic and lyrical styles that characterize Cohen's later fiction, recall the writing of William Faulkner, as does another feature: his fascination with family chronicles. Indeed, in the Salem novels Cohen has mapped out a Yoknapatawpha county of his own, populated it, and charted the rise and fall of its houses. (pp. 96-7)

[Now] the individual cannot assess his own life except in relation to others, especially to his family and its ambiguous legacy. Cohen's four novels examine the family as the basis of value, power, and frustration: a person's judgments, desires, his capacity for love, and his ability or inability to act decisively all depend on family pressures…. Consequently, the more a character seeks independence by rejecting his family and his past, the more he confirms his kinship with them….

Through family chronicles, Cohen dramatizes all his themes of vision and action, identity and freedom, and above all, time. By its very nature the family is bound up with time. Although only The Disinherited traces in detail the fate of a Canadian dynasty, all the novels are concerned with problems of inheritance and disinheritance, with the continuity and disruption of time. All measure time, its rewards and indignities, by the succession of generations. Cohen's characters find their struggle to unite the fragments of their lives both sustained and subverted by their families: sustained because the family confers identity, subverted because it obscures the individual within his lineage. On one hand, the family provides a continuity of kinship that triumphs over the dislocations of time. On the other, the family denies importance or uniqueness to the individual by subsuming his brief span of years within a larger process of regeneration and degeneration. (p. 98)

For the reader, the book is haunted by the past, and tokens of it—often in the form of scars and wounds which testify to previous suffering—mark the present scene. Cohen is not concerned with present action: little happens in any of his novels and the one exception, The Colours of War, which shows Canada in the midst of a mysterious revolution, has difficulties with plot and narration. Instead, Cohen is concerned with past events. Almost every chapter of Wooden Hunters, like Cohen's other novels, begins by establishing a fictional present, but then lapses into memory or family background, with the result that the novel tells two stories at once, though they are really aspects of the same story occurring at different times. Only at the end do the two threads join in an instant of truth that dares the characters to "live out this moment which had now ensnared them all." This moment assimilates the past and forces the characters to face what they have made of their lives.

The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone uses a similar digressive technique to fracture but finally reunite time, to obscure the logic of events and family relations but finally argue toward a moment of peaceful lucidity. This novel, Cohen's best since The Disinherited, tells a story of middle age and second chances possible only when people realize how much was risked and lost in the first chance. Cohen, though still young himself, seems to be interested in the old and middle aged because they are more the victims of time. (p. 99)