Try
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Third in the George Miles Cycle: “It is finally time to admit that Cooper—whose work is constantly compared to Genet, Baudelaire, etc.—is like no other” (Paper).
Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenage son of two sexually abusive fathers. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion.
Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a journal that he calls I Apologize.
Try follows Closer and Frisk in Dennis Cooper’s award-winning George Miles Cycle, “a crowning achievement in American letters—a moment where a New World writer has created something as beguiling, baffling, beautiful and intelligent as anything by Genet or Joyce” (The Guardian).
“There was a rumor that Cooper’s new book was going to be a ‘nice’ one after the dark nightmare of Frisk, but Try is even more shocking. It may also be his most perfectly structured and moving work.” —Paper
“As improbable as it may seem, Dennis Cooper has written a love story, all the more poignant because it is so brutally crushed.” —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cooper's disturbing new novel, like Frisk and Closer , explores the gritty, homoerotic subculture of a nondescript California suburb while chronicling two days in the life of Ziggy, the adolescent, adopted son of two sexually abusive gay fathers. Angelically beautiful and extremely insecure, Ziggy scarcely sleeps or attends high school, but struggles to articulate his own emotional life by compiling the latest issue of his fanzine, a crude journal about sexual abuse called ``I Apologize.'' Ziggy's unlikely mentors include his uncle Ken, who produces child pornography, his friend Calhoun, an aspiring writer who has withdrawn into a heroin-induced haze, and Roger, the less violent of his two fathers, who, with Humbert Humbert-like detachment, extolls the virtues of Ziggy's anatomy. Cooper's narrative, clinical and often pornographic, rigorously refrains from moralizing. Cutting cinematically back and forth between characters, his prose is jumpy and convoluted when describing Ziggy, dazed and analytical when depicting Calhoun, drained of affect when chronicling the appalling antics of Ziggy's uncle, who spends much of the novel drugging and raping a 13-year-old heavy metal fan he has picked up somewhere. Cooper's novel is less a case study in sexual abuse, however, than a window on a nightmarish suburban world, where domestic norms are subverted to such a degree that adults are either pointedly absent or predatory pedophiles, and where stunted but angelic teenagers take solace in drugs, sexual promiscuity and punk rock.
