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The Salon Classics Book Group
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GUIDE
BY DENNIS COOPER
BY DANIEL REITZ | homosexual literary aesthetics take many forms -- trash kitsch (Robert Bodi, Joe Keenan), elegiac AIDS memoirs and/or novels (Paul Monette), boy-Wunderkinder (Dale Peck) and celeb auteurs (David Leavitt). There are the patriarchs (Edmund White), the philosophers (Michel Foucault), the academics (Martin Duberman), the comedians (Mark O'Donnell) and the classics (James Baldwin, Jean Genet, William Burroughs). There's the mass-market mainstream, dominated by Armistead Maupin, whose beloved, banal, wildly popular books hold sway over readers on gay beaches all over America. You can read him without once being called upon to summon a thought. Then, there's Dennis Cooper, hip nihilist. In screaming opposition to Maupin's paunchy tomes, we have Cooper's lean, mean, lethal volumes published by Grove Press. Grove is historically a champion of the literary fringe and still going strong with the likes of Cooper and Kathy Acker. While Cooper shares some of Genet's obsessions -- notably the eroticism inherent in the fatal Molotov cocktail of boys with men -- as a writer Cooper is not in the same class. It's actually William Burroughs and his apocalyptic laconism whom Cooper most closely resembles. Cooper crafts his sentences carefully, tossing them off with a minimalist, soulless, L.A. efficiency; there's a stainless steel sheen to them that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion: crisp, brutal, quick. There's not a lot to say about the plot in "Guide," Cooper's new novel; in many ways, it's his usual territory. The narrator, who is named Dennis and is famous for writing Dennis Cooper-like novels, tells us on the first page he's just taken acid and is starting a novel about his friends, who seem to be composed largely of kiddie porn stars and drug addicts. Yet Cooper balances the brutality of his material with self-deprecating humor. There is a conversation in which Dennis is asked by Luke, his infatuation, "Does it bother you that I don't like your books?" Dennis replies that it doesn't and muses, "[Luke] doesn't understand why anyone would want to write about the subjects my novels recapitulate so automatically. Neither do I, so we're even." You can read "Guide" and admire the fine sentences that sound like jaunty little jazz riffs around the grisly proceedings. Watching a porn movie sex scene between adolescent Chris and Don Haggarty, a resentful adult dwarf, our narrator says: ''The porn had this strange, silly, magical ... I don't know, charm. I guess it was mostly the fact that I was watching a dwarf, with all his fairy-tale baggage." If you didn't like Cooper before, you won't like him now. "Like" is the wrong word, anyway -- you couldn't "like" Cooper's world; you'd have to be mentally unbalanced to respond emotionally. You can't read his probing, almost lyrical delineations of characters who indulge in mutilation during sex and view murder as the ultimate orgasm and take them at face value. This novel, like his others, is a sub-zero nihilist investigation. Cooper is the literary equivalent of the painter Francis Bacon, in the sense that he shares Bacon's clinical remove; unlike Bacon, whose vision was grand, epic, highly structured, Cooper's is loose, hallucinatory and grounded in pop culture.
He is also one of the few serious writers working in the literary tradition of subversion, and for my money, he is the worthy heir to the late, lamented Burroughs.
Daniel Reitz is a writer who lives in New York.
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