Violence, trauma, and death are among the subject matter most favored by our best contemporary writers, and most frequently returned to by those writers. Reexamining these ideas from an untried perspective, Dennis Cooper's God Jr. (Black Cat) may be his strongest book yet.
“I wanted Tommy's death to last forever. That's all.” (44) So says Jim, narrating God Jr., published in August 2005. This is the issue at the center of the text, a grieving father's search for meaning and healing in the wake of his son's accidental death. This is still a Dennis Cooper novel, however, and so a subject too frequently rendered in the pastels and sepias of greeting card sentimentality is incisively and honestly explored. The result is not a comforting, feel good story but rather a harrowing look into mourning, generational difference, and emotional trauma.
One of Cooper's greatest strengths as an artist is his mastery of a form and style which is fully Spartan. Of course, we do not mean merely that the prose is clean and spare (which it is), and we certainly do not see it as reductionist (which it is not). In addition to their ruthless economy, Cooper's words and lines and exchanges of dialogue reveal a deep and muscular power.
Cooper's prose has always been carefully disciplined, which cast a particular detached - almost clinical - view on what would otherwise have been gratuitous scenes of sex and violence. Yet the strength of the author's hand managed the strength of the prose so completely that what dissent past reviewers had been able to summon was quickly dispensed with. For Cooper was never a part of the 1980s “Brat Pack” novelists who sought to paint New York red with blood – the blood of rival's corpses or the blood of a coked-out nose. At the core of Cooper's project has always been a strong emotional resonance which is the counterpoint to the physical realities in his texts.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as his contemporaries were plunging into the shallows of literary celebrity, Cooper broke new ground with his “George Miles Cycle,” a series of five (six, if one includes 2004's The Sluts) novels which took as their overt subject sex, violence, and violent sex, post-Stonewall. Concerned with the social and cultural status of a particular subset of fetishists, the cycle examines, in part, their resistance to the mainstreaming of a bourgeois and "straight-safe" queer identity. And while work remains to be completed on the subject, certain passages late in the cycle suggest that if their resistance was successful, and if AIDS was not to claim the lives of these characters, their own appetites, fantasies, and violence may have been the end.
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1 - Pat Cummings
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