Matt Cohen strikes me as being essentially a product of the sixties' glorification of everything experimental and innovative. He specializes in oddities. Physical freaks and psychic aberrations are so liberally sprinkled throughout his stories as to (re)create a norm of the strange, and when his subject matter is commonplace (and often when it isn't) Cohen will almost invariably be found performing stylistic and structural tricks to ensure we will never lack for signs of his experimenting spirit. The variously disturbed individuals who populate his many literary worlds are, however, surprisingly undisturbing to the reader, and it is disappointingly easy to finish Night Flights every bit as complacent as one began.

Cohen appears to have got stuck in the sixties mentality to such an extent that he strives for the unusual effect even (and mainly) at the expense of genuineness of expression. The cost is too high, and his stories finally are odd only in the sad sense of being dated.

The actual freaks provide the most immediate evidence of Cohen's fetish for the unusual. From Christopher Columbus reincarnated as a disoriented circus side-show freak and the fat lady (herself admittedly a marvellous creation, with all her talk of the science of achieving her astounding bulk) in "Columbus and the Fat Lady" to the Frank twins (Mark with his cheap glass eye keeping meticulous track of the state of his brother Pat's shrinking brain), Cohen delights especially in treating the outrageously odd in a matter-of-fact manner.

Frequently linked with physical oddities are the psychic aberrations which lead so many of Cohen's characters to insanity or stagnation, but these aberrations are not handled nearly so well as the purely physical quirks. In some cases Cohen avoids explicit discussion of the psyche of the character in question. (p. 57)

The principal flaw of Cohen's writing is his tendency to be too cute, both in content and in form. There is a certain type of individual who dons a single earring, or who shaves his head in the hope that his unusual appearance will disguise his fundamental mediocrity. Cohen makes the equivalent literary mistake…. With some exceptions, Cohen's characters remain excruciatingly uninteresting in spite of (maybe partly because of) all the physical and psychic oddities he has so inventively saddled them with.

The phrasing as well as the structural games Cohen plays in several of these fifteen stories do as little for his style as that shaved head does for Telly Savalas: in fact, as before, the time and energy spent on these tricks may be partly responsible for the shoddiness of so much of the writing in Night Flights…. (p. 58)

There is too little substance behind the gimmicks, and we aren't allowed to care enough about any of the characters or about their affairs for it to affect us in any memorable way.

Despite all the brittle cleverness in Night Flights there is something impressive about Cohen's writing…. The workaday and the exotic are nicely juxtaposed in several of his stories and to good effect. And moments of humour, as in "The Toy Pilgrim" (where Elmer hestitates to visit a woman because he hasn't changed his socks for three days), are all the more delightful for being admirably understated.

It is nearly always when Cohen is being least typical that he is at his best. "Death of a Friend" on the whole rings truer than nearly any other story in the collection, and in many ways it is the most traditional in form: a simple account of a writer hearing the news of a friend's suicide and of remembering the circumstances under which the friendship blossomed. (pp. 58-9)

This is not at all to suggest that traditional writing forms are in any way necessarily better than experimental or innovative forms, but only that Cohen … succumbs too easily to the temptations of experimentation. He can write well when he relaxes and just writes. When he eschews the precious concern with technique and irritating cleverness that mar too many of his stories he achieves the very success that so eludes him when he strives for it. (p. 59)