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George Miles Cycle #1
Closer
La beauté de George Miles et son étrange passivité en font l’objet des désirs de son entourage. L’un après l’autre, ces garçons (John, David, Cliff, Alex, Philippe, Steve), produits typiques d’une Amérique moyenne déboussolée, vont le soumettre à leurs fantasmes. Dans une suite d’expériences de plus en plus extrêmes, à la limite du supportable, ils vont essayer, chacun à leur manière, de découvrir ce qui se cache derrière son apparence, ce qui se dissimule à l’intérieur même de cette image, quitte à le chercher littéralement sous la peau...
Ce premier roman de Dennis Cooper, publié aux États-Unis en 1989, est une descente terrifiante dans les obsessions de l’Amérique contemporaine, un train fantôme dévalant les pentes du désir et plongeant vers la mort sur fond de rock’n’roll, le récit d’un Sade transporté à Disneyland. Tous repères effondrés, toute morale abolie, ses personnages semblent évoluer dans une dimension parallèle dont le sexe, la drogue et les films d’horreur de série Z seraient les dernières balises. Parmi eux, la figure « angélique » de George apparaît comme le déclencheur qui leur permet de découvrir et de repousser leurs limites.
Ce premier roman de Dennis Cooper, publié aux États-Unis en 1989, est une descente terrifiante dans les obsessions de l’Amérique contemporaine, un train fantôme dévalant les pentes du désir et plongeant vers la mort sur fond de rock’n’roll, le récit d’un Sade transporté à Disneyland. Tous repères effondrés, toute morale abolie, ses personnages semblent évoluer dans une dimension parallèle dont le sexe, la drogue et les films d’horreur de série Z seraient les dernières balises. Parmi eux, la figure « angélique » de George apparaît comme le déclencheur qui leur permet de découvrir et de repousser leurs limites.
208 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 28, 1989
258 people are currently reading
8151 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
109 books1,782 followersDennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
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August 21, 2019
”That’s why I’m happy I’m famous for what I’m so famous for. Being gorgeous, I mean. It helps me believe in myself and not worry that I’m just a bunch of blue tubes inside a skin wrapper, which is what everyone actually is. I am gorgeous. That’s not a brag. I can tell. People tell me so. I’m also friendly and sweet and naive except I do tend to talk way too much and I lie all the time. But you have to tell lies when somebody is judging you every minute. You have to cover yourself up with some kind of camouflage, even if that means bullshitting yourself. I do, in any case.
Dennis Cooper had a reputation in the 1980s and early 1990s of being an edgy, existentialist, controversial writer who shined a bright unflinching light on gay subculture issues. His books were passed around between my friends like an illicit drug. I remember reading Frisk, which is the second book in the quintet of novels based around George Miles. I’d always intended to read the Miles series, but somehow the years passed by, and Cooper didn’t come up on my radar as often.
His style reminds me of William S. Burroughs, but also given the lack of engagement of the characters, the boredom, and the reckless behavior they embrace to try and feel...something, I am also reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero.
The quote I begin this review was said by a character named David, but he was almost a twin to the equally gorgeous George Miles. There is a passivity tinged with melancholy that defines all of these characters, but George is the most compliant of them all. His friends use him for whatever they want and when they tire of him they toss him aside like a used kleenex. He doesn’t seem to care.
Even when his mother dies he struggles to define his lack of emotion.
”It’s strange I’m not sad about Mom. I guess it took such a long time I felt everything I could feel already. I wish I hadn’t been there, but I’m glad the last person she looked at was me. She really loved me once. Likewise, I guess.”
I had a young man working for me in the bookstore in San Francisco who was exotic and Arabic and very popular with his group of gay friends. We were working the late shift one night. We could hear the Chinese Karaoke across the street every time someone opened the door to enter the bookstore. He talked to me about the fact that he was expected to have sex with any of his friends who wanted him. He was tired of feeling so used, but at the same time he didn’t want to be excommunicated from the group for refusing to provide intimacy. I was taken aback, but realized he was talking to me about a situation I had no basis to judge it by. For me it was easy to say you need to find new friends, but at the same time I knew it was far from being that simple.
Situations that came up in this book reminded me of that conversation that night. It made me wonder if the young man did find a way to break free from what really was a bondage of friendship. I certainly hoped he never reached the level of complacency that the young men in this book reached. Where sex was just something to do to kill an hour. Most of the time they are actually thinking about screwing someone else while they are screwing George. One boy admits to George: ”I hope you understand that I’m a much better artist than I am a person.”
Things really start to spiral out of control when George meets up with some 40 something men who prey on High School age males and have unnatural dangerous appetites to achieve their pleasure. George remains compliant no matter how painful or how weird their requests became. He wanted to feel more alive and his visits to see them were the only thing in this life that he looked forward to.
This story is told from the standpoint of several different young men and also from the perspective of the older males as well. Too much money, too much time, and most alarming a growing despondency that their lives will ever really mean anything definitely left me feeling uneasy. I grew up in the 1980s and the high consumption of money, drugs, and sex was truly a hedonistic time in our history. There was a decided shift in values and an over emphasis in fashion, style, attractiveness, expensive cars, credit cards, and pleasure. The work hard and play hard concept that you see portrayed on the show Mad Man was put on steroids.
Having what we want doesn’t seem to make us better human beings.
Dennis Cooper is unflinching in his expose of the lifestyles being led by this privileged group of young gay males. They don’t know what they are looking for or even what they should be looking for. Their parents are busy and barely pay any attention to them. They are rudderless in a sea of dangerous creatures. Cooper doesn’t discuss AIDS in this book. I will be curious to see if the disease casts a long shadow over other books in the George Miles series. Cooper tells a story that needs to be told and though his books never hit the bestseller list the stark compelling writing gained him a following that went well beyond just the gay community.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Dennis Cooper had a reputation in the 1980s and early 1990s of being an edgy, existentialist, controversial writer who shined a bright unflinching light on gay subculture issues. His books were passed around between my friends like an illicit drug. I remember reading Frisk, which is the second book in the quintet of novels based around George Miles. I’d always intended to read the Miles series, but somehow the years passed by, and Cooper didn’t come up on my radar as often.
His style reminds me of William S. Burroughs, but also given the lack of engagement of the characters, the boredom, and the reckless behavior they embrace to try and feel...something, I am also reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero.
The quote I begin this review was said by a character named David, but he was almost a twin to the equally gorgeous George Miles. There is a passivity tinged with melancholy that defines all of these characters, but George is the most compliant of them all. His friends use him for whatever they want and when they tire of him they toss him aside like a used kleenex. He doesn’t seem to care.
Even when his mother dies he struggles to define his lack of emotion.
”It’s strange I’m not sad about Mom. I guess it took such a long time I felt everything I could feel already. I wish I hadn’t been there, but I’m glad the last person she looked at was me. She really loved me once. Likewise, I guess.”
I had a young man working for me in the bookstore in San Francisco who was exotic and Arabic and very popular with his group of gay friends. We were working the late shift one night. We could hear the Chinese Karaoke across the street every time someone opened the door to enter the bookstore. He talked to me about the fact that he was expected to have sex with any of his friends who wanted him. He was tired of feeling so used, but at the same time he didn’t want to be excommunicated from the group for refusing to provide intimacy. I was taken aback, but realized he was talking to me about a situation I had no basis to judge it by. For me it was easy to say you need to find new friends, but at the same time I knew it was far from being that simple.
Situations that came up in this book reminded me of that conversation that night. It made me wonder if the young man did find a way to break free from what really was a bondage of friendship. I certainly hoped he never reached the level of complacency that the young men in this book reached. Where sex was just something to do to kill an hour. Most of the time they are actually thinking about screwing someone else while they are screwing George. One boy admits to George: ”I hope you understand that I’m a much better artist than I am a person.”
Things really start to spiral out of control when George meets up with some 40 something men who prey on High School age males and have unnatural dangerous appetites to achieve their pleasure. George remains compliant no matter how painful or how weird their requests became. He wanted to feel more alive and his visits to see them were the only thing in this life that he looked forward to.
This story is told from the standpoint of several different young men and also from the perspective of the older males as well. Too much money, too much time, and most alarming a growing despondency that their lives will ever really mean anything definitely left me feeling uneasy. I grew up in the 1980s and the high consumption of money, drugs, and sex was truly a hedonistic time in our history. There was a decided shift in values and an over emphasis in fashion, style, attractiveness, expensive cars, credit cards, and pleasure. The work hard and play hard concept that you see portrayed on the show Mad Man was put on steroids.
Having what we want doesn’t seem to make us better human beings.
Dennis Cooper is unflinching in his expose of the lifestyles being led by this privileged group of young gay males. They don’t know what they are looking for or even what they should be looking for. Their parents are busy and barely pay any attention to them. They are rudderless in a sea of dangerous creatures. Cooper doesn’t discuss AIDS in this book. I will be curious to see if the disease casts a long shadow over other books in the George Miles series. Cooper tells a story that needs to be told and though his books never hit the bestseller list the stark compelling writing gained him a following that went well beyond just the gay community.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
May 22, 2022
Dennis Cooper likes to play dumb. He doesn’t like explaining. He’ll drop you in the middle of a teenager’s popstar fantasy and you’ll think “C’mon, get real” before you realise it’s not real, nor is it meant to be. He’ll drag you with his desultory creatures through sex act after sex act, and you’ll find not one shred of titillation. Gay porn? This is the opposite. Anti-porn. Sex aversion therapy. In Closer’s sequel Frisk, if he got turned on during a sex-scene he’d rewrite it. This, to me, speaks of moral purpose. That he doesn’t trumpet that purpose – that, in all likelihood, he doesn’t know what it is – speaks of courage. Tempted to file him with Brett Easton Ellis? Don’t. Only the scenery is similar. Cooper is, almost, a comment on Ellis, or on that genre of disaffected teen/twenty-something nihilism. In the face of what he calls “a widespread belief that the material my work explores is suitable only for a discrete, heavy-handed, moral kind of fiction or for low-brow horror,” he has the gall to take away the signposts. It’s what finally sold me on Closer: the ambiguity. A high school where virtually every male is gay and homophobia never was? It’s like some vision of Heaven, but – inevitably – infiltrated by Hell. A kid driving a car looks up in time to see a truck pull out; next paragraph he’s in a wheelchair. The focus is skewed, flattened, inverted, as if Cooper were scanning every cranny of his invented world for meaning. And he doesn’t flinch.
I said he doesn’t like explaining, but in an interview for The Paris Review (one of the best I’ve read) he does just that.
On realism:
On finding the “final ingredient” for his fiction in the films of Robert Bresson:
On porn:
If I were Dennis Cooper, I’d find it hard to say what Closer is about, but in a haunting scene in its penultimate chapter I think he comes close. A drunk sadist and would-be killer lies in the dark, talking inwardly with an unidentified voice:
Though I’ve picked up and flipped through Dennis Cooper’s novels at random for the past twenty years, this is the first time I’ve committed to reading one of them. That flipping-through worked against me, because in isolation his scenes don’t quite come alive. He’s not (judging by Closer, and what I’ve read of Frisk) an author whose work is “complete on every page”. The use of language is functional, convincing, but will not “wow” you. As he says himself, “for better or worse” his range is limited. But there’s a cumulative effect to his conjurings, and it’s powerful. He takes you somewhere. And though, so far, I trust him, he’s just hands-off enough in his guiding that it’s a scary place to go.
I said he doesn’t like explaining, but in an interview for The Paris Review (one of the best I’ve read) he does just that.
On realism:
I think it’s important to reiterate that my novels aren’t realist. They’re not selective transcriptions of the real world... When there’s a real-world resemblance, it’s there to create an atmosphere of familiarity that’s helpful as a comfort zone in which I can introduce things that are difficult and unsuspected. The characters are the main entrance into the work because they’re shaped like humans and they’re lit more brightly than their surroundings. But they’re not real – they don’t feel or think or want anything.
On finding the “final ingredient” for his fiction in the films of Robert Bresson:
[I recognised] that the films were entirely about emotion and, to me, profoundly moving while, at the same time, stylistically inexpressive and monotonic. On the surface, they were nothing but style, and the style was extremely rigorous to boot, but they seemed almost transparent and purely content driven. Bresson’s use of untrained nonactors influenced my concentration on characters who are amateurs or noncharacters or characters who are ill equipped to handle the job of manning a storyline or holding the reader’s attention in a conventional way.
On porn:
Porn charges and narrows the reader’s attention in a swift, no-nonsense way, and it creates an anxious, intimate, and secretive atmosphere that I find very helpful as a way to erase the context around my characters and foreground their feelings, their psychological depths, their tastes... My goal is to try to articulate what my characters wish to express during sex but can’t and to depict the way language is compromised by sex, as realistically as I can.
If I were Dennis Cooper, I’d find it hard to say what Closer is about, but in a haunting scene in its penultimate chapter I think he comes close. A drunk sadist and would-be killer lies in the dark, talking inwardly with an unidentified voice:
“How would you kill Georges?” Very slowly, so I could see everything in him and know what he has meant to me. “Would you expect to see yourself in him?” I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me.
... I am beginning to feel there is no answer for me. I am too interested in what is beautiful, and when beauty is not somewhere, I create it. But when something is beautiful it is impossible for me to understand. “How do you mean this?” I mean beauty is powerful. I feel very weak when I see it, or when I create it. No, I cannot explain.
“Death is beautiful?” It is too beautiful to explain. “But you try?” I must. “Why?” Because I must know what I love, because it is me. “I do not understand.” I do not either. “You wish to die?” No, I wish never to die, but to see myself in death. To know what I am in the answer of death.
Though I’ve picked up and flipped through Dennis Cooper’s novels at random for the past twenty years, this is the first time I’ve committed to reading one of them. That flipping-through worked against me, because in isolation his scenes don’t quite come alive. He’s not (judging by Closer, and what I’ve read of Frisk) an author whose work is “complete on every page”. The use of language is functional, convincing, but will not “wow” you. As he says himself, “for better or worse” his range is limited. But there’s a cumulative effect to his conjurings, and it’s powerful. He takes you somewhere. And though, so far, I trust him, he’s just hands-off enough in his guiding that it’s a scary place to go.
April 13, 2024
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. I'm not easily disturbed (horror movies tend to make me laugh, and I was mostly bored by The 120 Days of Sodom), but this stuff is exactly as haunting as Dennis Cooper's reputation suggests. And what made me crawl up in a ball under a blanket while reading this wasn't the physical violence or the extreme fetish sex depicted, no: The effectively rendered psychological horror will from now on live rent-free in my head, I'm afraid.
"Closer" is the first installment of Cooper's George Miles Cycle, a pentalogy based on a real person the author encountered when they were both teenagers. Cooper, who lost touch with Miles, always hoped he would read the cycle, and even tried to reach him, but couldn't - he later learnt that Miles had killed himself two years before the publication of "Closer" in 1989. This information is unfortunately rather unsurprising to everyone who encounters the fictional George Miles, as he is a drug-addicted, severely depressed gay teenager who, let's say: specializes in lying face-down pretending to be dead while various people have sex with him. Many practices are violent and degrading, he is often so intoxicated that he can't consent, and in some scenes 40+ adults commit statutory rape against him. But what's really the worst is that he keeps putting himself in these situations, that he wants to flee his dysfunctional family and (as he experiences it) meaningless existence by becoming an object, that he's spiraling down a psychological abyss and all he encounters is disaffection. It's extreme self-harm paired with neglect and cruelty, depicted in grueling detail. It's stomach-turning nihilism.
This novel reads like Bret Easton Ellis channeling the Marquis de Sade while writing a movie script with Harmony Korine for Larry Clark in his "Ken Park" era. So if you're one of the people promoting trigger warnings, don't even pick this up. As Ellis and Clark tend to do in their respective works, the book does revolve around a center (George), but there are numerous minor characters who cover the themes - here: mainly alienation and the nexus between sex and violence - in different ways. I particularly liked how Cooper works with ideas of (stifled) self-expression by showing a teenage painter and an imagined pop star. You also have to give it to the book, which is not considered a classic for nothing, that the hallucinatory prose is very strong: This text is a brutal fever dream, absolutely relentless, and being caught in George's mind works perfectly as an overpowering horror show. The composition with chapters focusing on different characters also works well.
It's interesting to read "Closer" comparatively in the canon of transgressive literature, from the Maquis to Less Than Zero, Story of the Eye, No Longer Human, Naked Lunch, The Necrophiliac etc. The novel is quite the experience, and not a pleasant one. If you'll excuse me now, my Catholic self needs to take a bath in holy water.
"Closer" is the first installment of Cooper's George Miles Cycle, a pentalogy based on a real person the author encountered when they were both teenagers. Cooper, who lost touch with Miles, always hoped he would read the cycle, and even tried to reach him, but couldn't - he later learnt that Miles had killed himself two years before the publication of "Closer" in 1989. This information is unfortunately rather unsurprising to everyone who encounters the fictional George Miles, as he is a drug-addicted, severely depressed gay teenager who, let's say: specializes in lying face-down pretending to be dead while various people have sex with him. Many practices are violent and degrading, he is often so intoxicated that he can't consent, and in some scenes 40+ adults commit statutory rape against him. But what's really the worst is that he keeps putting himself in these situations, that he wants to flee his dysfunctional family and (as he experiences it) meaningless existence by becoming an object, that he's spiraling down a psychological abyss and all he encounters is disaffection. It's extreme self-harm paired with neglect and cruelty, depicted in grueling detail. It's stomach-turning nihilism.
This novel reads like Bret Easton Ellis channeling the Marquis de Sade while writing a movie script with Harmony Korine for Larry Clark in his "Ken Park" era. So if you're one of the people promoting trigger warnings, don't even pick this up. As Ellis and Clark tend to do in their respective works, the book does revolve around a center (George), but there are numerous minor characters who cover the themes - here: mainly alienation and the nexus between sex and violence - in different ways. I particularly liked how Cooper works with ideas of (stifled) self-expression by showing a teenage painter and an imagined pop star. You also have to give it to the book, which is not considered a classic for nothing, that the hallucinatory prose is very strong: This text is a brutal fever dream, absolutely relentless, and being caught in George's mind works perfectly as an overpowering horror show. The composition with chapters focusing on different characters also works well.
It's interesting to read "Closer" comparatively in the canon of transgressive literature, from the Maquis to Less Than Zero, Story of the Eye, No Longer Human, Naked Lunch, The Necrophiliac etc. The novel is quite the experience, and not a pleasant one. If you'll excuse me now, my Catholic self needs to take a bath in holy water.
January 3, 2019
I’m going to use this to make myself change, like a starting point. I think that’s the best thing to do. I won’t buy any more drugs. I’ll try not to do what I always do. I never do anything other than school and Philippe.
Passive, acid-addicted George Miles might as well be dead. He spends his time with others playing that exact role. What he needs is someone who cares.
Closer explores the minds and motives of several men that come in contact with George Miles and his beauty.
Typical postmodern Dennis Cooper: sex, drugs, and violence. Someone always gets hurt.
Passive, acid-addicted George Miles might as well be dead. He spends his time with others playing that exact role. What he needs is someone who cares.
Closer explores the minds and motives of several men that come in contact with George Miles and his beauty.
Typical postmodern Dennis Cooper: sex, drugs, and violence. Someone always gets hurt.
December 9, 2017
i burned through 5 dennis coopers in as many days and i'm in no proper state to comment. so, lemme bring to your attention two exemplary goodreaders i came across as i checked out how y'all responded to cooper's extreme punchfucking asseating & ballsniffing.
1. eddie watkins nails what's best about these books. y'see, i'd be content with some obvious booshit like calling out cooper as a postmodern genet but watkins writes this:
"The particular obsession in Frisk does originate in a mere image (a snuff still), but Cooper does a fantastic job of portraying how deeply an image seen in one’s youth can so deeply inhabit one’s psyche that for decades to come one’s larger actions are determined by it. But for Cooper it doesn’t end here, because the obsesser finds out years later that the haunting image was actually a fake, which sets up some interesting metafictional pyrotechnics and much narrative ambiguity."
it kinda irks me that he used 'deeply' twice in one sentence, but this is disposable internet bookreport bullshit so fuck it. here's some more:
"Gay Fetish Lit. Did I ever think I would read such a thing? Never. Did I even know it existed? Sure, but only vaguely. Did I enjoy it? Definitely. Does this mean that my straight married life is going crooked? Only in the imagination (a far more capacious world than we are generally allowed in workaday life), and as a straight man (with an inner asexual gay man) I'm probably more interested in reading about gay sex anyway."
2. imogen binnie. ok, this girl is not on my friends list and i'm not gonna friend request her because i hope that one day she's skimming cooper reviews and comes across this and it totally freaks her out. after reading some of her reviews (cooper and non-cooper) and seeing her picture she seems the type that i would've met in a too-crowded & low-ceilinged nyc dance cavern and feeling all sad and wonderful during a new order or morrissey song i would've acted inappropriately and she would've punched me in the face and then i would've cried to her for a while and drunkenly pathetically repeated "i'm sorry, i'm so sorry" and she would've had to tell me "it's ok. forget it." over and over and then i would've walked home alone and felt all depressed and gropey but also kind've enjoyed the general chaos of the night. but yes. she's a really good reviewer and her cooper stuff goes something like this:
"Dennis Cooper is my boyfriend so bad. It's hard to describe why teen angst, gay u/dystopias, and shit obsession are SO APPEALING when he writes about 'em. But they are."
the first sentence makes absolutely no sense.
awesome.
"I can never remember any of the specifics of his books a week after finishing them. I love him."
and
"Pssh, like I was not gonna give this five stars: my life is basically an attempt to answer the question, "What if I had been the gay boy I should have been in 1995, and also what if 1995 had never ended?" This book is full of: Dennis Cooper being a homo interviewing Keanu Reeves, Dennis Cooper being a homo interviewing Leonardo DiCaprio just before Titanic came out, Dennis Cooper writing a 20-page biography of Nan Goldin (I got so sucked into this that I missed my bus stop), Dennis Cooper writing about heroin and Kurt Cobain and raves and, y'know, it's basically him taking all the things I like (including jaded old punk bullshit, self-conscious self-obsession, and pretending not to smirk) that i've mixed up and made my blood out of, and de-alchemizing them into their individual ingredients. Pretentious! All I'm saying is, I wish that Dennis Cooper was my dad... Man, I don't even care that it gets more and more lazily copyedited toward the end, dropping punctuation and even letters. Who cares! It is punk rock apathy, which was HOT in 1995."
1. eddie watkins nails what's best about these books. y'see, i'd be content with some obvious booshit like calling out cooper as a postmodern genet but watkins writes this:
"The particular obsession in Frisk does originate in a mere image (a snuff still), but Cooper does a fantastic job of portraying how deeply an image seen in one’s youth can so deeply inhabit one’s psyche that for decades to come one’s larger actions are determined by it. But for Cooper it doesn’t end here, because the obsesser finds out years later that the haunting image was actually a fake, which sets up some interesting metafictional pyrotechnics and much narrative ambiguity."
it kinda irks me that he used 'deeply' twice in one sentence, but this is disposable internet bookreport bullshit so fuck it. here's some more:
"Gay Fetish Lit. Did I ever think I would read such a thing? Never. Did I even know it existed? Sure, but only vaguely. Did I enjoy it? Definitely. Does this mean that my straight married life is going crooked? Only in the imagination (a far more capacious world than we are generally allowed in workaday life), and as a straight man (with an inner asexual gay man) I'm probably more interested in reading about gay sex anyway."
2. imogen binnie. ok, this girl is not on my friends list and i'm not gonna friend request her because i hope that one day she's skimming cooper reviews and comes across this and it totally freaks her out. after reading some of her reviews (cooper and non-cooper) and seeing her picture she seems the type that i would've met in a too-crowded & low-ceilinged nyc dance cavern and feeling all sad and wonderful during a new order or morrissey song i would've acted inappropriately and she would've punched me in the face and then i would've cried to her for a while and drunkenly pathetically repeated "i'm sorry, i'm so sorry" and she would've had to tell me "it's ok. forget it." over and over and then i would've walked home alone and felt all depressed and gropey but also kind've enjoyed the general chaos of the night. but yes. she's a really good reviewer and her cooper stuff goes something like this:
"Dennis Cooper is my boyfriend so bad. It's hard to describe why teen angst, gay u/dystopias, and shit obsession are SO APPEALING when he writes about 'em. But they are."
the first sentence makes absolutely no sense.
awesome.
"I can never remember any of the specifics of his books a week after finishing them. I love him."
and
"Pssh, like I was not gonna give this five stars: my life is basically an attempt to answer the question, "What if I had been the gay boy I should have been in 1995, and also what if 1995 had never ended?" This book is full of: Dennis Cooper being a homo interviewing Keanu Reeves, Dennis Cooper being a homo interviewing Leonardo DiCaprio just before Titanic came out, Dennis Cooper writing a 20-page biography of Nan Goldin (I got so sucked into this that I missed my bus stop), Dennis Cooper writing about heroin and Kurt Cobain and raves and, y'know, it's basically him taking all the things I like (including jaded old punk bullshit, self-conscious self-obsession, and pretending not to smirk) that i've mixed up and made my blood out of, and de-alchemizing them into their individual ingredients. Pretentious! All I'm saying is, I wish that Dennis Cooper was my dad... Man, I don't even care that it gets more and more lazily copyedited toward the end, dropping punctuation and even letters. Who cares! It is punk rock apathy, which was HOT in 1995."
January 28, 2023
Sex as impersonal as a wad of tissues tossed casually towards a trash can. He must be cute. Even crazy will pass if it meets this requirement. Awkward utilisation, craving more. Pretty boys in deathtraps. Love in absentia, body exposed and articulated. Pass it on.
December 1, 2016
Re-read 2016. This is a book about traumatized teenagers trying to process their trauma in a world where being gay isn't really a big deal - or at least where the trauma of being gay is such a normal part of life that it no longer scans as traumatic. It's brutal and vicious and when I look back at the stuff that stuck out at me my first time through it - the salacious stuff - I get mad at my younger self. I wish I'd dog-eared the page where the word "closer" appears because that paragraph felt like something I've been trying to write for as long as I've been writing paragraphs - something about trying to get closer to your own emotions even though they're too dangerous to get close to and also drugs, or something. I dunno man. But it's powerful stuff while at the same time, like, the ostensible plot of the book is that everybody is in love with this kid George Miles, who has a perfect ass, and then at the climax of the book his ass gets all mutilated. That's ... hilarious? And also not funny at all, it's kind of brilliant if you can will yourself to get past the idea that butts are funny.
And who among us can get past the idea that butts are funny?
(2007 review:) Dennis Cooper is my boyfriend so bad. It's hard to describe why teen angst, gay u/dystopias, and shit obsession are SO APPEALING when he writes about 'em. But they are.
And who among us can get past the idea that butts are funny?
(2007 review:) Dennis Cooper is my boyfriend so bad. It's hard to describe why teen angst, gay u/dystopias, and shit obsession are SO APPEALING when he writes about 'em. But they are.
October 8, 2014
Gay Fetish Lit. Did I ever think I would read such a thing? Never. Did I even know it existed? Sure, but only vaguely. Did I enjoy it? Definitely. Does this mean that my straight married life is going crooked? Only in the imagination (a far more capacious world than we are generally allowed in workaday life), and as a straight man (with an inner asexual gay man) I'm probably more interested in reading about gay sex anyway.
What is happening to me in my early middle-age? Due to no crisis that I know of I am now listening to Punk Rock, devouring crime novels, and reading about the pretty ass of a stoned-out pretty boy squeezing out turds on command for the delectation of an older Frenchmen.
Closer is an interrelated series of portraits of gay high-schoolers in (I think) early 70's Southern California. They are all for the most part spaced-out partiers with death wishes, and with all their focus on dicks and asses they're all fairly disgusted by the body and its workings. They're mostly obsessed/tormented by what to do with the pretty images they're so attracted to. To fuck them is the most obvious solution, but as they get closer to the body of their beloved the more disgusted they get. What does one do with a lovely image? Adore it from a distance. But what to do with this tangle of primal urges compelling one to move closer, to penetrate and devour?
It's a dirty world we live in. With loads of loveliness too.
The Frenchman got it as right as can be - to find shit lovely and delicious.
What is happening to me in my early middle-age? Due to no crisis that I know of I am now listening to Punk Rock, devouring crime novels, and reading about the pretty ass of a stoned-out pretty boy squeezing out turds on command for the delectation of an older Frenchmen.
Closer is an interrelated series of portraits of gay high-schoolers in (I think) early 70's Southern California. They are all for the most part spaced-out partiers with death wishes, and with all their focus on dicks and asses they're all fairly disgusted by the body and its workings. They're mostly obsessed/tormented by what to do with the pretty images they're so attracted to. To fuck them is the most obvious solution, but as they get closer to the body of their beloved the more disgusted they get. What does one do with a lovely image? Adore it from a distance. But what to do with this tangle of primal urges compelling one to move closer, to penetrate and devour?
It's a dirty world we live in. With loads of loveliness too.
The Frenchman got it as right as can be - to find shit lovely and delicious.
April 29, 2025
Do I love George Miles?
This question arises every chapter and is asked by different characters. By every man that admires, uses, fantasises, tortures, fucks, caresses, kisses, hits, draws, watches and brutalises the beautiful high school student. This question underpins the writing, and I get the feeling the work, the life, of author Dennis Cooper. George Miles was, after all, his childhood friend and lover.
Is this love? This obsession?
Cooper reminds me of Hadrian, founding a modern-day cult of Antinous. Words as a temple, rewriting reality, deifying a boy. Miles committed suicide a decade before Cooper knew. He found out whilst on tour for the fourth book in the George Miles cycle.
'"How would you kill Georges?” Very slowly, so I could see everything in him and know what he has meant to me. “Would you expect to see yourself in him?” I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me.'
There is a haunted house in the neighbourhood of Closer, explored and referenced throughout. Its potential is debated and reputation chilling. Although dilapidated, the house endures. There are even remnants of lives lived: a mattress on the floor. The purpose of a house, to provide space for life, for refuge or secrecy or escape, remains, as long as it stands.
George Miles is a haunted house. We meet him when he shakes, quivers at intimacy. Throughout the novel, via shifting perspectives, we witness the repeated degradation of his body. It is brutal and horrifying. He provides space for others to live out their fantasies. He is a muse and an actor, an avatar and a corpse. He finds hope in fellow students who then discard him. He gets caught up with a circle of predatory older men who fantasise about death and merge sex and scat and scars.
We catch his perspective a quarter of the way through. He’s abusing substances, his mother is almost dead, and he’s being passed around like a toy.
It is odd to me to call him empty. He keeps a diary, he has feelings and an obsession with Disney. In fact, I find George the most real, the most knowable character of all. When I try to pinpoint why, I can’t quite tell you. Maybe I see myself in his helplessness. But is this value I am ascribing not dependent on his use to me? Dennis Cooper has done something brilliant. He has trapped the reader into the role of perpetrator.
“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”
I had an interesting conversation with a friend about lesbian/gay/queer literature. After a particularly nourishing binge of lesbian works (thank you Eva Baltasar), I expressed my recent weariness with certain gay literature in which explorations of the bodily feel contained to the sexual and ignorant of gender in a way that feels misogynistic. Dennis Cooper (and my recent obsession, Bret Easton Ellis) do not fall into this category. Sexuality almost feels secondary to masculinity in these constructed worlds, where every alluring, shining youth has sex with men, homophobia is vague, and coming out is a ridiculous notion.
I remember once, at a drag show, my gay (former) friend grabbed my breasts, squeezed them in front of everyone. It was an unusual experience precisely because it was so familiar. Being groped by a man in a club. I laughed along in a way I wouldn’t usually. Perhaps it was my belief in the safety of the environment that delayed the shame and humiliation that soon heated my face. When I think of all the times I’ve been harassed, this memory is potent. But I struggle to call it what it was, despite the identical feeling of powerlessness.
Groomers on grindr, hazing rituals, deepfake pornography. The world of young men deals in dominance and submission. What are the rules of attraction? It is in works like this, in so-called extreme horror, that I recognise mundanity and tradition. It’s almost an inverse of the way I read Shirley Jackson’s work, where normality implies horror.
A quote from Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: “The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.”
I LOVE META-FICTION!!!!!!
This question arises every chapter and is asked by different characters. By every man that admires, uses, fantasises, tortures, fucks, caresses, kisses, hits, draws, watches and brutalises the beautiful high school student. This question underpins the writing, and I get the feeling the work, the life, of author Dennis Cooper. George Miles was, after all, his childhood friend and lover.
Is this love? This obsession?
Cooper reminds me of Hadrian, founding a modern-day cult of Antinous. Words as a temple, rewriting reality, deifying a boy. Miles committed suicide a decade before Cooper knew. He found out whilst on tour for the fourth book in the George Miles cycle.
'"How would you kill Georges?” Very slowly, so I could see everything in him and know what he has meant to me. “Would you expect to see yourself in him?” I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me.'
There is a haunted house in the neighbourhood of Closer, explored and referenced throughout. Its potential is debated and reputation chilling. Although dilapidated, the house endures. There are even remnants of lives lived: a mattress on the floor. The purpose of a house, to provide space for life, for refuge or secrecy or escape, remains, as long as it stands.
George Miles is a haunted house. We meet him when he shakes, quivers at intimacy. Throughout the novel, via shifting perspectives, we witness the repeated degradation of his body. It is brutal and horrifying. He provides space for others to live out their fantasies. He is a muse and an actor, an avatar and a corpse. He finds hope in fellow students who then discard him. He gets caught up with a circle of predatory older men who fantasise about death and merge sex and scat and scars.
We catch his perspective a quarter of the way through. He’s abusing substances, his mother is almost dead, and he’s being passed around like a toy.
It is odd to me to call him empty. He keeps a diary, he has feelings and an obsession with Disney. In fact, I find George the most real, the most knowable character of all. When I try to pinpoint why, I can’t quite tell you. Maybe I see myself in his helplessness. But is this value I am ascribing not dependent on his use to me? Dennis Cooper has done something brilliant. He has trapped the reader into the role of perpetrator.
“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”
I had an interesting conversation with a friend about lesbian/gay/queer literature. After a particularly nourishing binge of lesbian works (thank you Eva Baltasar), I expressed my recent weariness with certain gay literature in which explorations of the bodily feel contained to the sexual and ignorant of gender in a way that feels misogynistic. Dennis Cooper (and my recent obsession, Bret Easton Ellis) do not fall into this category. Sexuality almost feels secondary to masculinity in these constructed worlds, where every alluring, shining youth has sex with men, homophobia is vague, and coming out is a ridiculous notion.
I remember once, at a drag show, my gay (former) friend grabbed my breasts, squeezed them in front of everyone. It was an unusual experience precisely because it was so familiar. Being groped by a man in a club. I laughed along in a way I wouldn’t usually. Perhaps it was my belief in the safety of the environment that delayed the shame and humiliation that soon heated my face. When I think of all the times I’ve been harassed, this memory is potent. But I struggle to call it what it was, despite the identical feeling of powerlessness.
Groomers on grindr, hazing rituals, deepfake pornography. The world of young men deals in dominance and submission. What are the rules of attraction? It is in works like this, in so-called extreme horror, that I recognise mundanity and tradition. It’s almost an inverse of the way I read Shirley Jackson’s work, where normality implies horror.
A quote from Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: “The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.”
I LOVE META-FICTION!!!!!!
April 14, 2013
"Closer" by Dennis Cooper. I forget exactly when I purchased this book (most likely either in 2001 or 2002), but I recall finding it in the "gay fiction" section at the local Borders. I think the main reason why I sought it out was because Poppy Z. Brite recommended it in an interview. It was the first Cooper novel I ever read, and at the time I had no idea that not only would I befriend the author a few years later, but that he would also give me my first professional publishing credit. I was (and still am) impressed with how Cooper managed (and still manages) to create art from subject matter or sexual fantasies that many people would find intolerable or perverse, and it certainly forced me to examine some of the dark areas of my own psyche: but I think good art should do that anyway. It reminds me of that quote by Emerson: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
October 18, 2020
Such an original, assured and poetic voice.
Nails the nihilism and bleakness of adolescence. The agony of inertia, of not knowing what you're supposed to do. If anything means anything or if it's all a projection. If it's a projection then the bleakness must be your fault, your faulty projection, which leads to shame. A shame from which numbness or death—whichever—seem like nice respites. Drugs and fucking feel good for a while. And if you hate yourself, and feel powerless, it's nice to be desired for at least one's beauty. Especially if one is not clear that there is anything within one's pretty shell but ugly guts. And thus hooking up with older men can be kind of amusing, to see the power youth gives you. Even if it is easily disposed of, at least it first got used. That's better than nothing, right?
The above describes not me but countless others. There must then be something like a hideous timelessness to these emotions. But it is cathartic to see them documented. That's usually the best-case scenario when it comes to horrible moods.
Nails the nihilism and bleakness of adolescence. The agony of inertia, of not knowing what you're supposed to do. If anything means anything or if it's all a projection. If it's a projection then the bleakness must be your fault, your faulty projection, which leads to shame. A shame from which numbness or death—whichever—seem like nice respites. Drugs and fucking feel good for a while. And if you hate yourself, and feel powerless, it's nice to be desired for at least one's beauty. Especially if one is not clear that there is anything within one's pretty shell but ugly guts. And thus hooking up with older men can be kind of amusing, to see the power youth gives you. Even if it is easily disposed of, at least it first got used. That's better than nothing, right?
The above describes not me but countless others. There must then be something like a hideous timelessness to these emotions. But it is cathartic to see them documented. That's usually the best-case scenario when it comes to horrible moods.
September 25, 2019
I need to re-read it. I need to re-read it. I need to re-read it.
I read Dennis Cooper's Closer years ago after finding it in the library, I honestly don't remember what had happened in the story but I do remember myself thinking it's a damn great queer novel---one of the best I've read ever. The story has a lot of things to do with sexual desire, guy pinning after another guy but can't (or unwilling to) act upon it, unhealthy dreams, unhealthy way of thinking, etc. I seriously need to re-read it.
I read Dennis Cooper's Closer years ago after finding it in the library, I honestly don't remember what had happened in the story but I do remember myself thinking it's a damn great queer novel---one of the best I've read ever. The story has a lot of things to do with sexual desire, guy pinning after another guy but can't (or unwilling to) act upon it, unhealthy dreams, unhealthy way of thinking, etc. I seriously need to re-read it.
March 16, 2022
For at least a year, I have wanted to make time to reread the entire George Miles Cycle. I have read the books, but not always in order. "Closer" is superb. The stoned-out dialog bites and the landscape is dreamy but very familiar. Almost like a dream where one is always in the same building, but once awakened, you can't remember if it exists or not. And the building or that room does exist, but over time it becomes obvious. Re-reading these books is going to be entering the dream, but I think at the end I think I will gain some knowledge.
June 7, 2021
so much good stuff going on here but i was particularly wowed by the character david, who might be one of my favorite cooper creations. probably not what i would personally recommend for an introduction to dc, (the themes are a little more muted here, albeit in a way that works well for this particular novel) but what do i know i’m just some bitch
April 26, 2021
these kids are not alright
June 8, 2024
You know when everyone is in on an inside joke except for you and you feel really left out?
That’s how I feel after reading this book because I don’t understand the hype
That’s how I feel after reading this book because I don’t understand the hype
August 8, 2021
[UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!]
2021 reads, #39. I had occasion recently to be reminded of the work of Dennis Cooper, one of the authors along with Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others who were talked about in hushed, awed tones by me and my fellow edgy Generation X artists back in the 1990s, supposedly heralding a "New Transgressive" age that was to be a shining apex of all edgy art in history that had led up to that moment. Only one problem, I was reminded of when I was recently thinking about this, which is that I had never gotten around to actually reading any of Cooper's books back when we were all talking about him in hushed, awed tones; so after hopping online that day and discovering that all of them were available at the Chicago Public Library, on a whim I checked out all five volumes of his autobiographical "George Miles" novel series, the ones that made him famous (or, you know, as "famous" as you want to claim that Dennis Cooper is), and am currently in the process of burning through all of them right in a row, pretty easy to do since each of them are less than 200 pages apiece.
The one to kick them off, 1989's Closer, was not the one to make him an indie household name (that would be 1994's Try, coming a little later in this review series), but was certainly the first of his then four books of prose to get him a lot of attention, mostly because of the scandalous nature of the storyline itself. And indeed, the lasting legacy of the openly gay Cooper is that he wrote about LGBTQ issues in a way that literally no one had before; supposedly based on his real life, it's an ensemble piece about a group of disaffected gay teenage punk-rock boys all attending the same high school, and is one of the most disturbing and nihilistic portraits of a gay community that you will ever read in your life, even to this day. The young men of Closer are no shiny, happy, TikTokking, special-pronoun, rainbow-flag-waving queers, but rather the exact kind of emotionally vacant, spiritually empty shells that eventually came to define Generation X in general; numbed on a diet of junk food, pop-culture and systemic divorce, all of them display a complete and total inability to connect with each other in any way possible, using drugs and risky sex in a futile and failed attempt to at least feel something in their lives, then basically surrendering to the void when they realize that not even this will get through their thick hides and inpenetrable walls of emotional armor.
That said, one of the biggest things that strikes me by reading this for the first time a full 32 years after it was first published is just what an enormous amount this book owes to the early novels of Bret Easton Ellis, so much so that you could fairly call this novel not Closer at all but something like Less Than Closer or The Rules of Closer Attraction or what have you. This is a fact that's only become clearer with time, that pretty much all the indie literature of the entire decade between the mid-'80s to mid-'90s was unduly influenced by those first several novels of Ellis's, much like how the indie film world of the mid-'90s to mid-'00s was dominated by the looming, oversized shadow of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In Closer, there is no bottom to how low these characters will sink, no redemptive "point of no return" that in more traditional stories marks the third-act eucatastrophe into sobriety and the glimpse of a future happy life. Scat and blood play are the least of our characters' problems here; the real problem is that they react to these degrading, often physically repulsive acts with barely a stoned shrug, endless scenes of zonked-out twinks laying down on their stomachs with their bare asses in the air, resigning themselves silently to their fates.
In this, then, that's another warning to give any modern queer Wokes who might be thinking about picking this up to understand more about the history of LGBTQ literature; that despite virtually every character in this book being gay, there isn't a single positive depiction of gayness in the entire thing, with the adults in particular being an endless series of closeted sexual predators and sometimes out-and-out serial killers, choosing careers like high-school teachers specifically so they can cruise underage flesh from the comfort of their 9-to-5 jobs, and relating endless anecdotes about the alluring disgust they feel for the human body, whether that's the repulsion they feel about human skin being warm instead of room temperature, the desire to "open those bodies up" and see what's inside, and yet more very, very, very queasy details. And this also relates to pretty much the only legitimate criticism I have of this as a piece of literary art, which is that here in this early novel Cooper's writing quality is just all over the place, with it patently easy to tell which sections are based on his real journal entries of the time (namely, the sections that actually sound real), and which are the barely plausible filler that he inserted in order to make this tiny manuscript just long enough to publish as a full-length book (namely, the sections that make you frown and squint and say, "What the fuck, Cooper?").
Of course, with hindsight we now know what happened to so many of these Generation X edgy writers, which was the same fate that so many Generation X people in general suffered: as the '80s became the '90s, the need to always be transgressing even more eventually turned these people's books into cartoonish, over-the-top horror stories, snakes eating their own tails that were no longer edgy or interesting at all but now just silly and head-scratching; then in the 2000s, all of them found Jesus (or, you know, Buddha or Allah or Oprah, take your pick), and started writing books about happy little chefs in New Orleans and other unreadably sentimental pablum; then in the 2010s, when they discovered that neither Jesus nor Oprah was going to cure their ills, their nihilism came roaring back into a much more insidious form, manifesting as anti-vax screeds and QAnon essays and eventually becoming the first generation in human history to elect a fascist into the White House. That's a legitimate tragedy, the way that Generation X was never able to resolve their empty disaffection and unchecked nihilism even as they reached late middle-age, and so chose to just burn down the world and make everyone as miserable as them; but until the Christian Taliban finally take over the US government in 2024, seemingly the final end-game of Generation X still to come before their eventual bitter, miserable deaths, caused from a half-century of McDonald's, chain-smoking and serial tattoos, we have cultural artifacts like Closer, reminding of us a day when this unchecked nihilism seemed destined to be more of a creative force than a destructive one. As always, check back here soon for my look at part 2 of the George Miles cycle, 1991's Frisk, to see whether our characters finally grow up or just get worse and worse (spoiler alert: they just get worse and worse).
2021 reads, #39. I had occasion recently to be reminded of the work of Dennis Cooper, one of the authors along with Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others who were talked about in hushed, awed tones by me and my fellow edgy Generation X artists back in the 1990s, supposedly heralding a "New Transgressive" age that was to be a shining apex of all edgy art in history that had led up to that moment. Only one problem, I was reminded of when I was recently thinking about this, which is that I had never gotten around to actually reading any of Cooper's books back when we were all talking about him in hushed, awed tones; so after hopping online that day and discovering that all of them were available at the Chicago Public Library, on a whim I checked out all five volumes of his autobiographical "George Miles" novel series, the ones that made him famous (or, you know, as "famous" as you want to claim that Dennis Cooper is), and am currently in the process of burning through all of them right in a row, pretty easy to do since each of them are less than 200 pages apiece.
The one to kick them off, 1989's Closer, was not the one to make him an indie household name (that would be 1994's Try, coming a little later in this review series), but was certainly the first of his then four books of prose to get him a lot of attention, mostly because of the scandalous nature of the storyline itself. And indeed, the lasting legacy of the openly gay Cooper is that he wrote about LGBTQ issues in a way that literally no one had before; supposedly based on his real life, it's an ensemble piece about a group of disaffected gay teenage punk-rock boys all attending the same high school, and is one of the most disturbing and nihilistic portraits of a gay community that you will ever read in your life, even to this day. The young men of Closer are no shiny, happy, TikTokking, special-pronoun, rainbow-flag-waving queers, but rather the exact kind of emotionally vacant, spiritually empty shells that eventually came to define Generation X in general; numbed on a diet of junk food, pop-culture and systemic divorce, all of them display a complete and total inability to connect with each other in any way possible, using drugs and risky sex in a futile and failed attempt to at least feel something in their lives, then basically surrendering to the void when they realize that not even this will get through their thick hides and inpenetrable walls of emotional armor.
That said, one of the biggest things that strikes me by reading this for the first time a full 32 years after it was first published is just what an enormous amount this book owes to the early novels of Bret Easton Ellis, so much so that you could fairly call this novel not Closer at all but something like Less Than Closer or The Rules of Closer Attraction or what have you. This is a fact that's only become clearer with time, that pretty much all the indie literature of the entire decade between the mid-'80s to mid-'90s was unduly influenced by those first several novels of Ellis's, much like how the indie film world of the mid-'90s to mid-'00s was dominated by the looming, oversized shadow of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In Closer, there is no bottom to how low these characters will sink, no redemptive "point of no return" that in more traditional stories marks the third-act eucatastrophe into sobriety and the glimpse of a future happy life. Scat and blood play are the least of our characters' problems here; the real problem is that they react to these degrading, often physically repulsive acts with barely a stoned shrug, endless scenes of zonked-out twinks laying down on their stomachs with their bare asses in the air, resigning themselves silently to their fates.
In this, then, that's another warning to give any modern queer Wokes who might be thinking about picking this up to understand more about the history of LGBTQ literature; that despite virtually every character in this book being gay, there isn't a single positive depiction of gayness in the entire thing, with the adults in particular being an endless series of closeted sexual predators and sometimes out-and-out serial killers, choosing careers like high-school teachers specifically so they can cruise underage flesh from the comfort of their 9-to-5 jobs, and relating endless anecdotes about the alluring disgust they feel for the human body, whether that's the repulsion they feel about human skin being warm instead of room temperature, the desire to "open those bodies up" and see what's inside, and yet more very, very, very queasy details. And this also relates to pretty much the only legitimate criticism I have of this as a piece of literary art, which is that here in this early novel Cooper's writing quality is just all over the place, with it patently easy to tell which sections are based on his real journal entries of the time (namely, the sections that actually sound real), and which are the barely plausible filler that he inserted in order to make this tiny manuscript just long enough to publish as a full-length book (namely, the sections that make you frown and squint and say, "What the fuck, Cooper?").
Of course, with hindsight we now know what happened to so many of these Generation X edgy writers, which was the same fate that so many Generation X people in general suffered: as the '80s became the '90s, the need to always be transgressing even more eventually turned these people's books into cartoonish, over-the-top horror stories, snakes eating their own tails that were no longer edgy or interesting at all but now just silly and head-scratching; then in the 2000s, all of them found Jesus (or, you know, Buddha or Allah or Oprah, take your pick), and started writing books about happy little chefs in New Orleans and other unreadably sentimental pablum; then in the 2010s, when they discovered that neither Jesus nor Oprah was going to cure their ills, their nihilism came roaring back into a much more insidious form, manifesting as anti-vax screeds and QAnon essays and eventually becoming the first generation in human history to elect a fascist into the White House. That's a legitimate tragedy, the way that Generation X was never able to resolve their empty disaffection and unchecked nihilism even as they reached late middle-age, and so chose to just burn down the world and make everyone as miserable as them; but until the Christian Taliban finally take over the US government in 2024, seemingly the final end-game of Generation X still to come before their eventual bitter, miserable deaths, caused from a half-century of McDonald's, chain-smoking and serial tattoos, we have cultural artifacts like Closer, reminding of us a day when this unchecked nihilism seemed destined to be more of a creative force than a destructive one. As always, check back here soon for my look at part 2 of the George Miles cycle, 1991's Frisk, to see whether our characters finally grow up or just get worse and worse (spoiler alert: they just get worse and worse).
June 22, 2017
To be read in tandem with The Invention of Morel. What Octavio Paz wrote of the latter would serve as a good aesthetic summary of Cooper's book here under review: "[The] theme is not cosmic, but metaphysical: the body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privileged perception, the most complete and total perception not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: we not only traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows."
April 10, 2010
Closer’s plot is irrelevant. This book is a masterpiece in character study. Cooper vivisects disenchanted gay teens, exposing their fragility and humanity like a mad doctor ripping the nervous system from his subject with abject fascination. Blatantly honest yet poetically beautiful. Cooper is far ahead of his time.
October 17, 2025
Not a book I should have read on the train. NSFT. Very disturbing and disturbed. I had to sit with it a while and consider if I liked it or not. I think it's a good book, but I mostly did not enjoy reading it. I'm not sure if it could be written in another way and be equally successful in it's portrayal of trauma. At the same time, I'd like to erase what I read from my head.
April 18, 2017
Llegué a Dennis Cooper por culpa de J.T. Leroy (Típica historia, ves algo de un autor que te gusta y este habla de X autor que le gusta a él y tú vas e investigas, obvio) y lo que me he encontrado es... bueno, atípico, por así decirlo.
Quiero decir, es una historia muy del rollo Bret Easton Ellis (el de los inicios, el de Las leyes de la atracción, o Menos que cero, no el último Ellis, por favor) con chavales jovenes, sexo, violencia, drogas... pero claro, con la diferencia de que aquí todo es homosexual.
Y cuando digo todo es TODO. No hay ni una mujer en toda la novela, lo cual pues bueno, vale, ok, ¿van por ahí los tiros? vale, pues tanto da. La lectura se puede disfrutar igualmente porque en fin, independientemente de los generos, la violencia es la violencia, los sentimientos son los sentimientos y... y entonces llega la coprofília, las tendencias suicidas, los momentos ultrajodidos y todo es una hostia en la cara de la que solo te curas al final cuando lo cierras agotado y dices: "Joder, quiero leer el siguiente de este tío, YA".
Eso si, cuando pase un tiempito, porque leerse muchas novelas seguidas de este tio estoy seguro de que no puede ser sano para la puta cabeza
A destacar: Philippe y sus cosas.
Quiero decir, es una historia muy del rollo Bret Easton Ellis (el de los inicios, el de Las leyes de la atracción, o Menos que cero, no el último Ellis, por favor) con chavales jovenes, sexo, violencia, drogas... pero claro, con la diferencia de que aquí todo es homosexual.
Y cuando digo todo es TODO. No hay ni una mujer en toda la novela, lo cual pues bueno, vale, ok, ¿van por ahí los tiros? vale, pues tanto da. La lectura se puede disfrutar igualmente porque en fin, independientemente de los generos, la violencia es la violencia, los sentimientos son los sentimientos y... y entonces llega la coprofília, las tendencias suicidas, los momentos ultrajodidos y todo es una hostia en la cara de la que solo te curas al final cuando lo cierras agotado y dices: "Joder, quiero leer el siguiente de este tío, YA".
Eso si, cuando pase un tiempito, porque leerse muchas novelas seguidas de este tio estoy seguro de que no puede ser sano para la puta cabeza
A destacar: Philippe y sus cosas.
April 7, 2023
I was not prepared for the amount of literal shit that was going to be in this book. The synopsis of the book is vague, so I basically knew nothing about the plot. I was expecting it to be pretty dark, sexual, and violent based on seeing the trailer for the movie adaptation of the second book in the series… But I was still caught off guard by all the scat stuff.
Dennis Cooper’s writing has an enchanting quality even when covering extremely messed up topics. The book also has an interesting structure, there isn’t a large overarching plot. It’s mostly about a collection of teenage boys and their experiences with sex, violence, drugs, and abuse. Each chapter follows a different boy, but you see them interacting with each other and how their stories intersect.
This isn’t a book I’d recommend lightly. But I think if you’re interested in a very raw, queer, indie book from the 1980s then maybe give it a shot.
Dennis Cooper’s writing has an enchanting quality even when covering extremely messed up topics. The book also has an interesting structure, there isn’t a large overarching plot. It’s mostly about a collection of teenage boys and their experiences with sex, violence, drugs, and abuse. Each chapter follows a different boy, but you see them interacting with each other and how their stories intersect.
This isn’t a book I’d recommend lightly. But I think if you’re interested in a very raw, queer, indie book from the 1980s then maybe give it a shot.
March 2, 2014
weird how this is the first in the george miles cycle and it's the last one in the cycle for me to read. I wish i started with this book then work through them even though they don't fit in story wise. I wish this because i would have been able to see this stunning author grow. Like i did with Bret Easton Ellis. The novel is in the sparse and vague fashion that I have came to love so much, this is the main attraction to any of his works except The Marbled Swarm which was the first novel and hardest i found to digest (haha). Any way, this is a good book to break the ice with. whatever.
February 11, 2019
4.5. Might change it to a 5 after I give it more thought.
January 16, 2023
Honestly, I don’t know how to rate this so I’m giving it 3 stars. Some art should make you uncomfortable, right? Well, this book made me very uncomfortable. I can’t say I enjoyed it but I can appreciate it for what it is. I honestly don’t know if I’ll continue this series because the description of the second book sounds even more disturbing yet, maybe I’ll change me mind and want to challenge myself more.
I’d compare this to William S. Burroughs’ work but I also felt it was easier to see the actual artistic integrity in his books.
I’d compare this to William S. Burroughs’ work but I also felt it was easier to see the actual artistic integrity in his books.
March 1, 2025
Shock
July 23, 2011
This is harsh stuff, the most miserable of highschool desire and isolation and obsession, rendered simply readable through oddly desensitized viewpoints, anesthetized by repeated disappointment, emotional denial, and drugs. This makes the prose, at the start, sort of oddly emptied and minimal, often believably high-school-histrionic even as it's totally detached from the actual horribleness going on. It's part of an awareness of its own content, I guess, a current of post-modern reflection on narrative presentation, as characters re-see the same scenes in different styles dictated by their own thoughts -- as immediate experience or distanced into film scripts or pornography or fantasy. Even so, in no way can this be described as pleasant, even with all the distancing mechanisms. The abjectness comes through, feels somehow real, even in its pointed constructedness. Also, probably the iffiest thing I've read on the subway, and that's including the time someone read Filth over my shoulder and started asking me questions about it.
I wrote all that partway through the book. At that point, it struck me mostly as better shock material -- sort of "these are things that happen and no one wants to talk about them" which is not without value, though also not the most compelling. But then the story turned far more brutal than I was expecting (and simultaneously sort of nervously hilarious, but still awful). And finally shifted into unexpected eloquence and pathos, and an even more unexpected thematic cohesion, that was really there all along, and I was too stuck on the individual incidents to notice right away. And I find myself totally impressed, and very likely going to continue with these. Yes, it's just the start of a five-part cycle. Yikes.
I wrote all that partway through the book. At that point, it struck me mostly as better shock material -- sort of "these are things that happen and no one wants to talk about them" which is not without value, though also not the most compelling. But then the story turned far more brutal than I was expecting (and simultaneously sort of nervously hilarious, but still awful). And finally shifted into unexpected eloquence and pathos, and an even more unexpected thematic cohesion, that was really there all along, and I was too stuck on the individual incidents to notice right away. And I find myself totally impressed, and very likely going to continue with these. Yes, it's just the start of a five-part cycle. Yikes.
March 25, 2024
Another multifaceted text from Cooper on the layered construction of identity, its relationship with myth, and the equal parts deconstruction and enabling of said myth those within and outside of the story take part in. You begin to realize as you read more of Cooper that he operates in a strange space of near anti-porn. His work functions as the functional opposite of eroticism. Revolving around sex and self-destruction, Coopers work is the ultimate in tragedy, and manages to be as engrossing as it is provoking.
Cooper walks a fine line, and at times seemingly (or even does) crosses it. That being said, he does so with so much grace and power it never defeats from what the text and form are meant to communicate. I would go as far to say that Cooper is the greatest transgressor within art I have yet engaged with.
There is a palpable power and tragedy in every line of Closer. The portrait of George especially, a friend Cooper did not know had already (TW) committed suicide by the time this novel was completed, is laced with such devastation the novel is at points hard to read.
In the end, Cooper constructs one of the most layered, meaningful, and powerful texts I have read, and he does so with such violently impactful language it leaves the reader in a state of borderline hysteria by the end. A masterpiece, not as great as the sluts but scarily close.
Cooper walks a fine line, and at times seemingly (or even does) crosses it. That being said, he does so with so much grace and power it never defeats from what the text and form are meant to communicate. I would go as far to say that Cooper is the greatest transgressor within art I have yet engaged with.
There is a palpable power and tragedy in every line of Closer. The portrait of George especially, a friend Cooper did not know had already (TW) committed suicide by the time this novel was completed, is laced with such devastation the novel is at points hard to read.
In the end, Cooper constructs one of the most layered, meaningful, and powerful texts I have read, and he does so with such violently impactful language it leaves the reader in a state of borderline hysteria by the end. A masterpiece, not as great as the sluts but scarily close.
February 22, 2020
There was a time when I watched gore and slasher movies without even blinking. I liked how violence triggered different emotions like pain and fear and sadness, the thing that I lacked I think is sympathy. After reading what I’ve read I discovered that books turned me into a more sympathetic person, I now can’t watch the Saw series in a row without even blinking. And for this novel and the gore in it what would’ve been appealing once to me was repulsing. But sometimes violence is necessary in order for us to examine pain, fear and sadness. And somehow using all this gore and drug abuse in the novel are justified.
The author uses different types of narration styles to recount the tales of different lost souls with no center plot but George's presence and no definitive ending. The prose is very good but without continuing the series I don’t think I’ll be able to know where the author is heading so I might need to investigate more.
The author uses different types of narration styles to recount the tales of different lost souls with no center plot but George's presence and no definitive ending. The prose is very good but without continuing the series I don’t think I’ll be able to know where the author is heading so I might need to investigate more.
November 15, 2007
I remember being in a Seattle bookstore when I bought this. Probably around '93. I asked for some William Burroughs and the clerk said I should give this a try. Thank you, clerk! This is one of the most disturbing and visceral books I have ever read. And it lead me to read all the other Cooper books I could get a hold of.
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