Dennis Cooper, Probably

“Literature is preferable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can get to nothing.”

—Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough

It’s an infantile and homophobic belief that the obsessions fuelling the quintessential Dennis Cooper novel—pedophilia, violent murder (and mutilation, dismemberment, etc.), kiddie porn, sexual abuse, unrepentant drug use—do not constitute serious literature. Cooper himself precisely counters such sentiment in “Container”: “I shove the knot of my feelings as deep as they’ll go into as compact and smoothed-out a prose style as I can build out of what I know. But they don’t belong here, any more than a man’s fist belongs in a boy’s ass.”

This month, however, Grove/�Atlantic publishes Cooper’s eighth novel, God Jr., presumably the kind of book that Cooper’s myopic critical enemies have beseeched him to write since day one. God Jr. is the first of his books to be set in a world populated by adults. It’s the first to be virtually devoid of sex and violence. It’s the first whose primary character is heterosexual. And it’s the first that traffics in the book club, Booker-­friendly subject matter of a father’s grief over the death of his son. Time will tell whether or not these characteristics will appease the aforementioned critics who have demanded that Cooper grow up. It also remains to be seen if such a dramatic sea change will alienate the legions of admirers who have devoured his visionary, elaborate, intensely personal tales of teenaged lust. I suspect that the answer will be “no” to both questions. God Jr. is one of the most enigmatic, troubling, and strange books of the year. It’s also beautiful and profound and deeply serious. In short: typical Cooper.

But typical Cooper means probably zip to the typical reader. While Cooper has consistently produced some of the most astonishing American literature of the last thirty years, his work is still, to mainstream tastemakers, a well-kept, even dirty, secret. He has been relentlessly misread and misunderstood. His outré subject matter has repeatedly blinded readers and reviewers¹ (straight and gay) to its complexities and originality, leading to a frustrating dismissal of the author as a wholly evil and ex­ploitative provocateur whose talents, if any, have been squandered in the production of increasingly thin, dissolute narratives.² In fact, Cooper’s writings “comprise a sparse canon of daunting beauty and difficulty,” as James Quandt has said of Robert Bresson’s films. With the publication of God Jr. he will have in print eight novels: the so-called George Miles cycle which includes Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), ...