Matt Cohen’s memoir, Typing, was written over a period of five months from his lung cancer diagnosis to just before his death, in December 1999, at age 58. Elegiac and cranky, Cohen settles scores, bestows credit, abridges and annotates history.

His fiction helped feather a fledgling CanLit, but despite some great editors, Cohen says that at 45 years old he was “totally washed up.” As a Jew, “a person in exile from nowhere,” he claims to be “outside the Canadian cultural mainstream,” an outsider seen, “in terms of the recognition, rewards and prizes it has to offer, as unimportant and marginal.” Overlook recent accolades for Elizabeth and After: he didn’t like the book anyway.

Cohen’s generalizations can seem too broad or too pointed. He has barbs for certain small press editors, and also for Robert Fulford and Robert Weaver, those “guardians of Toronto’s closed literary gates.” When he applauds how “the networks of critics that once supported and shaped” the scene “are no longer visible,” though, Cohen underestimates the endurance of those two arbiters – and others who are hipper but no less exclusive.

Cohen praises the talents of today’s moneyed, mainstreamed baby writers but is angered by the industry’s homogenizing of national identity. As well, he contends that “so-called” Canadian culture now amounts to “a mosaic of ethnic folk dances to be celebrated by a few people with long memories after they’ve had a few drinks.” That Cohen wit, though only intermittent, is caustic, often self-deprecating, and charming. But self-analysis and revelations are cryptic, likewise details and anecdotes.

In an introductory note, Cohen’s partner, Patsy Aldana, suggests the book is missing “many important people and events” and that it is only “about what led him to be a writer and what shaped the books he wrote.” This sounds like a warning and if heeded, Typing is just fine. Five months isn’t long; neither is the memoir. Cohen does not elaborate.