Quietly prolific, Matt Cohen writes interesting, but occasionally flawed fiction. If his short stories lack the mastery of Alice Munro's or Mavis Gallant's, his novels fall short of Hemingway's or Updike's virtuoso performances (cited in Last Seen as lasting influences on him). In The Spanish Doctor he offers an epic sweep of Jewish history without stylistic complexity, while in Nadine he reverses his strategy in favour of technical experimentation at the expense of narrative flow. Emotional Arithmetic returns to familiar Canadian terrain, yet carries on with the Santangel ancestry from earlier novels, as the narrative successfully weaves together nuclear and extended Jewish families through tightened cyclical structure and imagery. Similarly, The Bookseller deals with deaths in the family, as the first-person narrator composes in front of his blue screen and recalls the novels of Dickens and Flaubert.
The title of his latest novel is a double entendre befitting the duality at its heart: Cohen, thinly disguised as Alec Constantine, recalls when his younger brother Harold was last seen; at the same time, he questions the very notion of a "last scene" by resurrecting his brother's memory. Last Seen focuses on problems of perception, on how to portray the death of a loved one through the act of writing fiction.
When we first meet Harold, he is groping his way toward the bathroom, barely able to support himself because of the painful cancer spreading through his lungs and spinal cord. Looking for his glasses and his contact lenses, he jokes with his nurse Francine, dreams about comets, and listens to "the proud arcs" of children's voices celebrating baseball outside. Against this opening backdrop, Cohen closes the arc of his novel with a final image of Alec-as his brother's alter ego or double-taking off his glasses and folding them in Harold's thick corduroy jacket before rolling down a hill outside his cabin in the countryside. The concluding sentence-"Harold was lying part way down the hill, his arms outstretched, his mouth arched open to receive the rain"-connects arc to arch, brother to brother, life to death, and the personal to the cosmic. Like William Kennedy in Ironweed, Cohen exhumes a member of his family for a more meaningful burial.
To fill in his family saga, Cohen also includes details of their father's death (before Harold's). The narrative shifts back and forth, much like the rhythms in a basketball game-the favourite sport of both brothers. While Alec the writer and Harold the advertising hotshot love basketball, their father, a Gold Medal chemist, wins golf trophies. But the ultimate monument to both of these lives and deaths is Alec's writing, or Matt Cohen's Last Seen.
Harold requires morphine, radiation treatments, and chemotherapy to remain alive; Alec keeps his brother alive with a special hat and Club Elvis on Queen Street. Herr Meyser is the name of Harold's hat that he wears after chemotherapy and that Alec in turn wears at Harold's funeral. The symbolic hat is named after Alec's Dutch thesis supervisor, Dr. Herbert Franz Strauss Meyser, author of White Men Dying, a book denouncing the authority of white European males. Thus, the hat is meant to link individual death to a universal condition. Added to this sociopolitical dimension is a level of intertextuality, with Alec's reading in Amsterdam about Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, another basketball fan.
Like the hat, Club Elvis is a memento mori, an immortal pop cultural icon where Alec meets his dead brother and defies death itself. Heavy smokers and drinkers, the brothers Constantine carry on with an afterlife because Harold deserved more than the thirty-seven years allotted him. Matt Cohen's metafictional commentary joins hands with Alec Constantine's blend of realism and fantasy: "My hands.have learned their skills not with a sledgehammer, but hovering above a keyboard, deciding what to tell, what to keep back, what to subtract, what to add." Emotional arithmetic and the laying on of hands play themselves out further: "At first, after my strange post-mortal encounter with Harold, my hands didn't want to tell anything. `I,' I began, and could go no further. Whatever had happened to that `I' was locked in, too painful to tell. So the `I' became `Alec' and I wrote about him as though he were not myself but someone else. As though I were relating events that had happened to some stranger. And now, having written them down, having confessed that the stranger is myself, my hands.don't want to stop. I could plead. that it started with my father's hands."
Running counterpoint to this confessional tone of selfconscious autobiography is the presence of irony in the novel. Section 3 ends with "the rich crazy unknowable irony of it all." When Alec's wife prepares to leave him because she suspects him of having an affair with Francine, she accuses him of writing about himself as "some kind of zero", as if he had no connection to anyone. Yet Alec has been shown to be a good father, son, brother, and husband. A further irony: "I would be glad to sell my soul if only I had the guarantee of a perfect book. Or even nearly perfect." This Faustian bargain soon becomes diluted to: "I gradually lost my taste for writing. Or the taste of writing itself changed. Who knows?"
When Harold visits his brother in Paris, Alec takes him to the Rue du Tournon, where the Austrian writer Joseph Roth had lived and died. "My plan was that we join his ghost," but one could look to another "ghost" writer, Philip Roth, for a closer literary lineage. Compare Cohen's novel with Roth's Patrimony (a detailed account of the death of Roth's father from a brain tumour) or Operation Shylock, where the novelist creates an alter ego or doppelganger.
Last Seen shows that Cohen is capable of touching lyricism in his natural descriptions of the scenery around his cabin, and that his fine writing style is matched by an equally fine mind seeking not only brotherly love but also the Faustian philosophy of Dr. Meyser. Yet all of these talents are no guarantee of a perfect, or even nearly perfect book. For that, we have to wait. Once again, I come away from a Matt Cohen novel, dissatisfied, hoping that his next one will win a Governor General's Award, or at least again be shortlisted for one. Cohen's hat and hands are either too magical or not magical enough. 

Michael Greenstein is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition & Discontinuity in Canadian-Jewish Literature (McGill-Queen's).