Freud: The Paris Notebooks

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

The title is a joke. Freud is not about Sigmund Freud, but instead
largely concerns his fictitious cut-rate nephew Robert, an adulterous,
cocaine-addicted present-day psychiatrist who lives in the French
capitol, and who appears in two of the three stories in Matt Cohen’s
sixth work of short fiction. (The third story concerns a literary phony
who is a friend of a friend of the nonentity nephew.) Unlike so many of
Cohen’s previous loser-heroes, however, Robert is a comic, rather than
a tragic, figure, and his exhilarating final triumph is real as well as
spiritual.

In Freud Cohen is so good at comic writing that it may be his great
strength. In “Final Cuts,” for example, Cohen writes of Robert,
“Now he had a new idea: that his uncle had belittled God in order to
substitute reason. What an ingenious way to get out of being Jewish!
Although in his case it hadn’t worked.” In order to convey his humor
consistently, Cohen’s prose is deft, vivid, pared, and clever; note
here, for example, his skillful use of numbers and repetition to convey
Robert’s procrastination: “Stacked neatly in the center of his desk
were four square-backed notebooks with hard black pebble-grained covers.
Each set of covers imprisoned 192 pages, every page had 29 horizontal
blue lines cut by a vertical red margin down the left hand side.
Otherwise the books were nothing but blank space, waiting. Waiting,
waiting.”

The 23 years of Matt Cohen’s career have seen valleys, plateaus, and
peaks. Freud is a peak.