[In The Disinherited, Cohen] expands his theme imaginatively, both in spirit and in time: his new novel is an ambitious attempt to trace the disintegration of Ontario's myth of idyllic rural life, over a span of four generations.

Cohen's attitude to the decline of the Thomas partriarchy—a family whose members have farmed the rocky soil on the outskirts of Kingston for more than a century—is elegiac of their failure to survive quarrels and change. All the Thomas men have visions of their doom….

The oppressive nature of Cohen's theme is conveyed in realistic narrative, focussed around the consciousness of Richard Thomas. Confined to a hospital bed and compelled to listen to the banalities of attendants and family, his mind roams backward and forward over his past, drawing into perspective the meaning of his ancestry. Cohen's method is to present a collage of experiences which gradually coheres...