MATT COHEN is writing wonderful stuff these days. Last year it was the fine novel Emotional Arithmetic; now comes Freud: The Paris Notebooks. This latest is only 120 pages long; but readers who agree with Borges that "the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance` won`t mind. To rephrase a sports metaphor: a great little one will beat a mediocre big one any day of the week. Freud: The Paris Notebooks, complex, cosmopolitan, and win can be read either as a novel or as a set of three interlinked stories, according to the reader`s preference. The book deals with the life of Sigmund Freud`s down-to-earth psychiatrist-nephew, Doctor Robert Freud ("Marry for money, he advised his female patients. Marry and stay married. Love and money may not mix, but money and sex - there is a combination you can count on"). The appearance of Sigmund himself in the work raises the theoretical question about the legitimacy of mixing together historical figures with fictional ones. Here, Cohen implies that history (like psychiatry) condones or privileges certain fictions above others, to bolster notions such as "reality" and "certainty." The approach here is reminiscent of Cohen`s earlier short-story collections Columbus and the Fat Lady (1972) and Night Flights (1978): it`s avant-garde in the least repellent sense of that term. In the manner of Robbe-Grillet, Cohen deals with surfaces - the perceptible outsides of people, as opposed to their hypothesized insides. Robert Freud represents the profoundly superficial; he is preoccupied with appearances: That evening Freud stood at the bathroom mirror. On the counter in front of him were protractors, tape measures, compasses, a pair of nail scissors, horizontal and vertical levels. It wasn`t easy, cutting his beard in a triangle, making the two long sides appear exactly the same length. Of course, it`s possible to talk about The Notebooks in traditional ways: characters (the three main ones are Doctor Robert Freud; Trevanien, a phoney journalist; and Maurice, a perhaps-phoney writer); setting (Paris, where the three are doing their expatriate thing); theme (the unknowableness of the mind); plot (weird and symbolic things do occur). But such categories, vital as they might be in more traditional novels, are plainly not the focus here. Indeed, they are, in John Hawkes`s words, "the true enemies" of this kind of fiction. The book presents a vision of a certain kind of surreal anarchy; devices like plot and theme - which try to make order out of apparent chaos - are at odds with such an encompassing perception. Cohen is a more cynical version of the late Donald Barthelme, and uses similar methods to tie his work together. Parody is the major tool, applied here particularly to the quackery of psychiatry, but also to the delusions of authors (Maurice, for instance, who "excelled at writing descriptions of light"). A wild sense of valuelessness permeates the novel, a freedom the reader is invited to revel in. All of this may make the work sound very serious, which it is, yet is not. It is hilarious, but not laughable. One of Beckett`s last injunctions was this: "to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." Matt Cohen, in this brief work (and perhaps a work of this kind needs to be brief), has found such a form.