Dennis Cooper's prose and poetry have a way of implicating the reader in their nastiness.
Perhaps that's why his fiction has made such
strong friends and enemies along the way, turning everyone on while simultaneously turning
them off. Period (Grove Press) is no
exception. It's a brilliant fiction forged in the crucible of cyber-consumption and
pop culture.
As skinny and beautiful as the very young, very sun-deprived boys floating through his
fiction, Period is
the end of a five-book cycle that has included Closer, Frisk, Try, and Guide
(all published by Grove Press). It is the search for an object of perfect desire that
unfolds in a rural town. Two boys, Leon and Nate, watch a
third -- Dagger, a sullen deaf mute -- scribble in a notebook. Nate is seeing Bob,
a sculptor obsessed with his dead ex-lover, George
Miles. Intertwined in this narrative is the story of a goth rock band on a tour
that never ends, as they drive around the country picking up young
men and murdering them.
Cooper's writing has been compared to that of William S. Burroughs, Gustave Flaubert,
Georges Bataille, and Edgar Allen Poe, but his work also
embraces non-literary sources. I think of the mannered paintings of Francis Bacon
when I read some
of the passages in the "quintology": blurred, sexy, and abject images of bodies
straining at their seams, the inside trying to get out. There is
a spare quality to Period that is felt not only in the book's minimalist
structure and bony, inarticulate characters, but in
the language:
Nate lies by the road. It weaves off into the mountains out there. And it reeks.
He's been here for hours, partly obscured by the brush, awaiting
the right car to pass, and a nice passerby. Someone in elegant clothes, whom he
can fleece. God forgive him, he's broke. The sun's creepy, a hard piece
of scalding red shit that has no consciousness of its own, so Nate can't tell
it anything real, like Go away.
In Cooper's prose, language is incapable of describing the terrors of modern capitalism.
His characters stutter, hem, and haw. This is fiction -- or history, depending on
how you want to look at it -- stripped down to its bare ugliness. A little
black dot, Period is the end of a sentence, a brooding finale to
a fantasy gone terribly wrong.
--Lawrence Chua
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