Two by Dennis Cooper
Recommended Reading by Steven Salardino of Skylight Books.
The Sluts
By Dennis Cooper
(Carroll & Graf)
At one point, Dennis Cooper’s British publisher made lapel buttons that said, “Dennis Cooper is cool.” That’s the truth. Like Tom Waits or Joan Didion, Nick Cave or John Lee Hooker, Patti Smith or Jack Kerouac, Dennis has a subtle atmosphere around him and everything he touches, or talks about, is intriguing and important. His writing for magazines such as Artforum and Spin have always showed him to have strange and beautiful tastes, and his demeanor at readings and other events makes you wish you had hours to hang out and drink with him discussing Slayer, Rimbaud, carnivals, Los Angeles or video games.
The Sluts takes place in a completely virtual world of Internet bulletin boards, emails, faxes, and phone calls. Through a website set up for clients to rate and trade male escort information, a story emerges surrounding desire and its effect on reality. In the virtual universe, anybody can be anybody and anything can happen. The character Brad-an escort who may or may not exist-is giving more violent clients a chance to do twisted and perverse things to him. What starts as an obsession over a very young hottie quickly becomes a violent “who-is-it.” The writing captures and mimics the pornographic language of the Internet, and it is in perfect Cooper style. It is the kind of book you want to read in a café where you can look up every so often at the other patrons, knowing that if they could read what you’re reading, their face would melt off.
God Jr.
By Dennis Cooper
(Black Cat)
Quite different is God Jr. This is perhaps a great change in Cooper’s history. A Dennis Cooper book without violence and sex is interesting, but with a heterosexual adult father as the main character, this is groundbreaking. Still completely original, God Jr. tells the story of a father trying to deal with the death of his son from a car accident that also left the narrator in a wheelchair. Trying to understand and immortalize his son, he begins to build a monument in his backyard based on an illustration that he found in his son’s journal. When he discovers that the tower was actually an image from a videogame, he gets high and plays it to the point of compulsion. Remarkably, Cooper’s telling of the father’s videogame adventures as a computer bear is some of his most unique and beautiful writing. As the father figures out different philosophical ways to interact with the videogame environment, he stumbles upon new ways to deal with the biggest puzzle of all: death. A great place to start for the uninitiated reader and a wholly original story.