Last Seen, by Matt Cohen (Book Review)

Reviewed by Margaret Atwood

Last Seen is Matt Cohen’s best novel to date. It’s agonizing, wry and weird, and it gets down to caverns of damp zeitgeist melancholy and corners of smouldering personal hell that his work has flirted with before, but has never entered so successfully. If you’ve ever had anyone die on you, too soon and without warning, this book will turn you inside out like a sock.

Cards on the table: I know Matt Cohen. More cards: I’ve known him for decades. Yet more cards: I once acted as his editor, back in the early 70’s, when I was giving blood for small Canadian literary publishing in the form of The House of Anansi Press. The reader has a right to know such things.

Matt Cohen was one of the Anansi whiz kids. He published his first novel, Korsoniloff, in 1969, at the age of 26, and followed it with Johnny Crackle Sings in 1971; Columbus and the Fat Lady (stories, 1972) was the book I edited (which was sort of like trying to edit a cross between Kafka, the Marx Brothers, and Afternoon of a Faun, but we made it through). All three of these early books displayed an unsettling surrealism, a penchant for the non sequitur that turns out not to be, and something that in dancing would be called dazzling footwork; together, they went far beyond “an impressive debut.” Cohen was still under thirty.

Many literary writers of his generation found niches in the academic world; others sought alternate ways of paying the rent. Cohen – who studied with George Grant and once taught political philosophy – could have followed the academic route. Instead, he became a free-floating writer, and has since publishing a bewildering array of books, ranging from children’s literature, to poetry, to short stories, to experimental fiction, to “mainstream” novels – these last not always with the most convincing of results. His versatility hasn’t always served him well with critics, who have sometimes reviewed the book before, or a book from a different category; thus the experimental fiction has been put down for not being more mainstream, and vice versa. Cohen is one of those writers whose recent reputation has been higher in some of the other countries in which he’s been published than it has been in Canada.

In Last Seen, however, many of the things that Cohen has done well separately come together superbly. The look-no-hands style, yes; the edgy humour, certainly; the anomie and angst, absolutely; the beautifully-written lyrical interludes, yes; the out-and-out oddness, without a doubt. But there is an extra gravity to this book; there is also a compelling narrative drive: this book has a plot.

Last Seen begins as one of its protagonists, Harold, is going blind from brain cancer. This was not supposed to happen to Harold: he’s young, handsome, physical, a high liver, and a go-getting entrepreneur. Now, tended by his nurse, the enigmatic Francine, with whom he once shared a life episode of a more agreeable sort, he’s keeping up a cheery front. “No problem,” he says, as he collapses in agony on the bathroom floor. Harold knows he is going to die but refuses to acknowledge or accept it; what he wants is life. “Blind, lame, crippled, constipated, riddled with cancer, soaked in drugs, he was happy to suck it in, suck in life … Like the last drops of the world”s greatest bottle of wine. Get it all.” (p. 10)

The story shifts to Alec, Harold’s older brother. Alec is a smart Alec; whereas Harold’s stocks-in-trade are looks, charm, and financial flair, Alec’s – shorter, uglier, and not as good at basketball – is his intellect. He’s been a teacher, a writer, and a student of the decline of Western Man, which on the whole is a notion he’s found exhilarating. But now Harold has died, and Alec, as soaked in grief as Harold was in cancer drugs, is living in flashback-land. Through Alec, we hear of the stealthy onset of Harold’s illness, and of Alec’s subsequent shock, disbelief, and horror; of how he tries to cure Harold, with vegetable juice and shark-cartilage pills; of his clumsy efforts to cheer him up; of his flat-footed desire to be closer to him; of his equally strong desire to avoid him; and then, as Harold’s mind is increasingly affected and he becomes convinced he’s living in a bureau drawer, of Alec’s well-meant and desperate attempts to help him die.

The two brothers were very close, but as we read on, we realize that theirs was not always a cozy closeness. Cain and Abel were close too. But which of these two is which? Who is whose brother’s keeper? Each is jealous of the other: their father played them off against each other, praising Alec’s braininess to Harold, and Harold’s worldly success to Alec; they once loved the same woman, who turns out to have been the golden but vaguely sinister Francine. (Those Life Goddesses always have their Kali aspect, especially when connected with the medical profession.)

Sibling rivalry makes Siamese twins of us all: it would take more than mere death to untie the knot between the two brothers, and in fact it does take more. After the funeral, Alec goes into decline, losing interest in his work, hitting the scotch, yearning, mourning, reading obituaries, raging, blaming himself, and neglecting his long-suffering, cello-playing wife and two children; the scenes with the children are especially good. Then, as he’s wandering around in downtown Toronto, he walks into a nightclub called Club Elvis, which is staffed by Elvis impersonators in full kit. There, sitting at a table, is Harold: not someone who resembles Harold, but Harold himself. He doesn’t look dead. He suggests they have a beer. This is nightmare material, but Alec isn’t frightened: he’s overjoyed. The strange thing is that, in Cohen’s hands, it all seems very plausible.

What does Harold want? Why has he come back from the dead? What’s he doing in Club Elvis, and, later, in Francine’s apartment, and also, alarmingly, in Harold’s kitchen? What does the shrink say when Alec dutifully trudges off to see whether he’s gone crazier than a bedbug? Does Harold ever re-enter his grave? Does he manage to pull Alec in with him? And how does Alec’s increasingly pissed-off wife react when she comes across the account of all this – including her, and also the beauteous and obliging Francine – that Alec is writing on his computer?

To reveal the answers would be blowing the plot. Let’s just say that Last Seen is the textbook on grief, albeit the one with no index. But although it’s almost unbearably sad, it’s also – at times – very funny. When you descend to the Underworld, you’re supposed to come back with wisdom; and although part of Alec’s Stygian trajectory consists of bumping into the furniture, in the end – and despite a few too many tangents – he does manage that. It’s wisdom of a quirky kind and obtained left-handed, but it’s wisdom nonetheless, and at some time in our lives we’ll all need some of it. We give thanks.