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Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. 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 magazine that he calls I Apologize.
In prose that is taut, rhythmic, charged, chillingly precise, and beautifully controlled, Cooper examines his characters’ motivations not as the product of cultural coercion but as the emanations of something hungry and amoral and essentially human. Try explores “that buried need to go all the way and really possess someone,” that place where desire disintegrates into the irrational. He illuminates with utter clarity the need to claim the desirable, to possess wholly something that will fulfill the profound emptiness of the human soul.
With Try, Cooper has produced a novel even more complex than his previous books, dangerously innovative and with the startling familiarity of truth in its examination of love, obsession, devotion, and the depths of human need.
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 magazine that he calls I Apologize.
In prose that is taut, rhythmic, charged, chillingly precise, and beautifully controlled, Cooper examines his characters’ motivations not as the product of cultural coercion but as the emanations of something hungry and amoral and essentially human. Try explores “that buried need to go all the way and really possess someone,” that place where desire disintegrates into the irrational. He illuminates with utter clarity the need to claim the desirable, to possess wholly something that will fulfill the profound emptiness of the human soul.
With Try, Cooper has produced a novel even more complex than his previous books, dangerously innovative and with the startling familiarity of truth in its examination of love, obsession, devotion, and the depths of human need.
208 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1994
72 people are currently reading
2698 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
109 books1,784 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 207 reviews
June 11, 2024
And there it is, folks: The book that defeated me. This is the most disturbing and unsettling novel I have ever read. It makes the Marquis de Sade and Arthur Rimbaud, Cooper's great inspirations, seem like little rascals who indulged in harmless edgelord-ery. Let me pull a comparison that at first might seem surprising, but that's ultimately valid: Do you remember the discussion around Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, which led some people to accuse her of emotional manipulation? I always thought this argument to be nonsensical, because all fiction is emotional manipulation, Yanagihara just ran with it, and she took it pretty far by writing a non-realist novel about extreme pain and trauma and employing a Christ-like figure as a protagonist. "Try" takes the idea of how far you can push a reader's compassion and emotional limits even further, it's also non-realist and has a Christ-like figure, plus it's ultra, ultra brutal, much more brutal than "A Little Life".
At the core, "Try" tells the story of the friendship between teenage Ziggy, who was sexually abused by his adoptive father and uncle since he was a small child, and Calhoun, a heroin addict in his early 20s. Sure, the depictions of extreme sexual acts involving Ziggy's gay adoptive fathers and his uncle (the latter producing child porn with numerous victims) are where the obvious shock value lies, but it's the psychological portraits of the victims, the illustration of the damage that makes this work so relentless and hard to endure. They are young and trying to cope with a bleak world full of nihilist brutality, where they are objectified and sex becomes a grim source of power and violation.
These young characters are feeling it all, and understandably, they can't deal with their emotions: Ziggy is desperately seeking for connection, but the only attention he is used to is abuse, while Calhoun, son of an alcoholic mother, is numbing himself to the point that he wants to be Ziggy's friend, but lacks the resources to appropriately act on his wish. And then there's the female addict / dealer who loves Calhoun and truly likes Ziggy, but also helps them self-medicate / poison themselves. The last scene in the book shows no physical brutality and is still the most emotionally brutal in the whole novel - and that's the power of Cooper's writing: Sure, he really goes there when it comes to detailing gruesome violence, but the emotional impact is way, way more disturbing. Ziggy himself is obsessed with recording the effects of pain and the motivations of those inflicting it, collecting his life stories in a zine and searching for echoes in the work of his favorite band, Hüsker Dü.
This is the third installment in Cooper's five-part George Miles Cycle, dedicated to his friend who was emotionally troubled and killed himself. It's highly interesting to see how people compare the books in the cycle and what different readers rate as most disturbing: There is quite a number of people who think "Try" is the most conventional, not-that-vicious entry, and that Frisk is way worse because of the torture scenes, but I heartily disagree. What renders these discussions so worthwhile is that Cooper attacks our social and moral consciousness in numerous ways and thus poses a psychological challenge to readers that is worth pondering and talking about with others.
So while The Sluts is aesthetically more accomplished, "Try" is the Cooper that broke me. Although: I have not quite finished his oeuvre. But I will. To say that this type of literature (and make no mistake: this is no pulp, this is high-concept literature) is not for everybody is the understatement of the century, but I find it compelling in its transgressive power and emotional impact.
Here's an excellent review of "Try" written by Pulitzer winner Michael Cunningham: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...
At the core, "Try" tells the story of the friendship between teenage Ziggy, who was sexually abused by his adoptive father and uncle since he was a small child, and Calhoun, a heroin addict in his early 20s. Sure, the depictions of extreme sexual acts involving Ziggy's gay adoptive fathers and his uncle (the latter producing child porn with numerous victims) are where the obvious shock value lies, but it's the psychological portraits of the victims, the illustration of the damage that makes this work so relentless and hard to endure. They are young and trying to cope with a bleak world full of nihilist brutality, where they are objectified and sex becomes a grim source of power and violation.
These young characters are feeling it all, and understandably, they can't deal with their emotions: Ziggy is desperately seeking for connection, but the only attention he is used to is abuse, while Calhoun, son of an alcoholic mother, is numbing himself to the point that he wants to be Ziggy's friend, but lacks the resources to appropriately act on his wish. And then there's the female addict / dealer who loves Calhoun and truly likes Ziggy, but also helps them self-medicate / poison themselves. The last scene in the book shows no physical brutality and is still the most emotionally brutal in the whole novel - and that's the power of Cooper's writing: Sure, he really goes there when it comes to detailing gruesome violence, but the emotional impact is way, way more disturbing. Ziggy himself is obsessed with recording the effects of pain and the motivations of those inflicting it, collecting his life stories in a zine and searching for echoes in the work of his favorite band, Hüsker Dü.
This is the third installment in Cooper's five-part George Miles Cycle, dedicated to his friend who was emotionally troubled and killed himself. It's highly interesting to see how people compare the books in the cycle and what different readers rate as most disturbing: There is quite a number of people who think "Try" is the most conventional, not-that-vicious entry, and that Frisk is way worse because of the torture scenes, but I heartily disagree. What renders these discussions so worthwhile is that Cooper attacks our social and moral consciousness in numerous ways and thus poses a psychological challenge to readers that is worth pondering and talking about with others.
So while The Sluts is aesthetically more accomplished, "Try" is the Cooper that broke me. Although: I have not quite finished his oeuvre. But I will. To say that this type of literature (and make no mistake: this is no pulp, this is high-concept literature) is not for everybody is the understatement of the century, but I find it compelling in its transgressive power and emotional impact.
Here's an excellent review of "Try" written by Pulitzer winner Michael Cunningham: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...
May 14, 2024
adult animals assault prey to rigor mortis or to vomiting over a toilet in a foggy haze of take-me-away. repressed emotions pounded out by a fist in the throes of agony. addiction so sweet. tell me you love me.
October 12, 2016
(Re-read in October 2016) God, how did I only give this three stars when I read it for the first time ten years ago? I used to be such an idiot. I'm pretty emotionally unavailable - even to myself, maybe especially to myself - which is why Dennis Cooper's books affect me so strongly. I think the first time I read them I thought I just liked how horrifying the sex stuff seemed? But Try is really a pessimistic look at the tendency people have toward healing - and the ways it gets derailed. That stuff is fascinating to me but more importantly I had a LOT of feelings reading it. Ugh.
October 14, 2014
We (my wife & I) have a gay friend down the street who has told us many sex-related stories over the years; so many, in fact, that I’ve been able to notice trends and shifts in his activities. One of these shifts is an increasing focus away from bar hookups and toward on-line hookups, usually involving going to a website when “in need” and finding another “in need” who is nearby and able to meet up immediately. I am amazed how often and how easily this happens. (Has anyone ever studied the impact this has had on gay bars?) And now that he has Skype his hookups can be conducted without even leaving the comfort of his chair, with other men all over the world – two men masturbating “face to face” via the internet. He has told me that even many of his physical hookups often involve mutual masturbation, and his theory is that these men spend so much time masturbating alone, or “face to face” on-line, that it becomes the only way they can get off.
During masturbation one isn’t fucking one’s hand, but rather one is fucking an image in one’s head. A favorite author of mine, John Cowper Powys, scrawled over many a page in defense of masturbation. His reasoning was that it exercises and develops the imagination, that it helps one to see as more and more real the images one conjures and creates in one’s head. Though many of my friend’s hookups might not see it this way, I see them as people who might’ve developed their imaginations too much, to the point where the ass in their head is realer than the ass in front of them.
In this way much of literature is like masturbation. The point of much literature being to create mental images in readers’ heads that for the moment become as real as the world they physically live in. Sometimes this imaging ability becomes what I call visionary. By visionary I mean an intensely imagined scene that is as if directly transcribed from the inner visual to the outer verbal. Dennis Cooper is such a visionary writer, and it’s probably no coincidence that masturbation plays a major role in his fictions; for not only are his characters, even while engaged in the most intimately physical sex, often existing in separate imaginary worlds with a vast gulf of incomprehension between, but the scenes and characters themselves have a vividness and power that can only come from something intensely imagined: pure inner objects of sexual desire. This gives his books the quality of mind movies, of inner worlds transcribed, which contrasts harshly with the inner voids of many of his characters, but which jibes well with the conversational concision of his prose. Even with their scenes of horrible violence and abuse his books are a joy to read.
Try is by far the most conventional of the three of his I’ve read so far. The structure itself is fairly straightforward, alternating sections jumping from scene to scene which are occurring simultaneously; but even the subject matter is more conventional (if a boy having sex with his two adoptive fathers and lard ass necrophilia can ever be called conventional), with talk of love and sincere non-sexual attractions between characters. There’s even a hetero sex scene! It’s as if through all the sickness of the world of desires his characters find themselves in, some are trying to find “normality”, or rather stability; and Cooper, being the excellent stylist he is, has constructed a relatively conventional book to reflect the flirtings of his characters with conventional urges – for love, for home, for deep friendship. But there remains the gulf between the world of his characters' heads and the world of the world outside. A gulf his characters never manage to cross.
In the end, masturbation probably can not help bring people together but it can help bring wonderful books into the world.
During masturbation one isn’t fucking one’s hand, but rather one is fucking an image in one’s head. A favorite author of mine, John Cowper Powys, scrawled over many a page in defense of masturbation. His reasoning was that it exercises and develops the imagination, that it helps one to see as more and more real the images one conjures and creates in one’s head. Though many of my friend’s hookups might not see it this way, I see them as people who might’ve developed their imaginations too much, to the point where the ass in their head is realer than the ass in front of them.
In this way much of literature is like masturbation. The point of much literature being to create mental images in readers’ heads that for the moment become as real as the world they physically live in. Sometimes this imaging ability becomes what I call visionary. By visionary I mean an intensely imagined scene that is as if directly transcribed from the inner visual to the outer verbal. Dennis Cooper is such a visionary writer, and it’s probably no coincidence that masturbation plays a major role in his fictions; for not only are his characters, even while engaged in the most intimately physical sex, often existing in separate imaginary worlds with a vast gulf of incomprehension between, but the scenes and characters themselves have a vividness and power that can only come from something intensely imagined: pure inner objects of sexual desire. This gives his books the quality of mind movies, of inner worlds transcribed, which contrasts harshly with the inner voids of many of his characters, but which jibes well with the conversational concision of his prose. Even with their scenes of horrible violence and abuse his books are a joy to read.
Try is by far the most conventional of the three of his I’ve read so far. The structure itself is fairly straightforward, alternating sections jumping from scene to scene which are occurring simultaneously; but even the subject matter is more conventional (if a boy having sex with his two adoptive fathers and lard ass necrophilia can ever be called conventional), with talk of love and sincere non-sexual attractions between characters. There’s even a hetero sex scene! It’s as if through all the sickness of the world of desires his characters find themselves in, some are trying to find “normality”, or rather stability; and Cooper, being the excellent stylist he is, has constructed a relatively conventional book to reflect the flirtings of his characters with conventional urges – for love, for home, for deep friendship. But there remains the gulf between the world of his characters' heads and the world of the world outside. A gulf his characters never manage to cross.
In the end, masturbation probably can not help bring people together but it can help bring wonderful books into the world.
October 7, 2022
This one’s hard to swallow, but in its gaping aftermath, a total fucking fiver. Hardly worth repeating, but who else writes like DC? Every sentence slips, shifts, bursts, pops. The only consistent thread of his writing is his, like, inventiveness…and flair. Shit. Still geeking out about Iggy’s magazine ‘I Apologize’. Its innocent and probing homage to gorefuck, trauma? Fucking mesmeric. The scene with Robin’s interview…had my facial skin ‘“taut like one of those bank robber masks”. And his doe-eyed obsession with Calhoun? That’s some of the most mellow and genius dialogue I’ve ever read. Served with a side of Hüsker Dü, and you’ve got yourself a neon hiss of a book.
February 12, 2021
for some reason, this is the dennis cooper book that managed to break through my desensitization and disturb me. i got through the first two books in this cycle in a day each, but i had to put this one down at times and come back to it. his writing always has a surreal quality enhanced by the simplicity and nonchalance with which he describes acts of extreme depravity, and this wasn't lacking on that front, but it still felt a bit different from his other work that i've read.
it's cooper, though, so i have to give it five stars. every time you think you've just about had enough, he'll hit you with a sentence or two so stark and perfect in its universality that the ickiness of the general plot stops mattering. something something abjection something something mind-body dissonance blah blah BLAH i like dennis cooper
it's cooper, though, so i have to give it five stars. every time you think you've just about had enough, he'll hit you with a sentence or two so stark and perfect in its universality that the ickiness of the general plot stops mattering. something something abjection something something mind-body dissonance blah blah BLAH i like dennis cooper
September 19, 2023
The star rating system feels completely inappropriate for this book. Every Cooper sentence feels like a particular journey / experiment / chemical reaction, his subjects so deeply controversial, dirty. And still, ocasional moments of true beauty sometimes glint in the shadows of true evil. Human relations so flawed and candid coexisting with the worst aspects of the human experience. I just finished the book, I'm still processing it, I need a shower.
July 21, 2022
cooper has done it again. like the rest of his work, "try" is crusted in shit and cum, but there's a real, tender emotional core underneath it. this is the first book of his ive read that doesn't focus on the spectacle of abject violence but rather explores the feeling left in that violence's wake. contender for my new favorite cooper novel, actually.
November 20, 2012
The most conventional of Cooper's novels I've read yet, perhaps because all of the ensemble cast of isolated self-destructive misfits, even the bit-part middle-aged necrophiliac, seem to be fighting towards some kind, any kind of normality and equilibrium. As such, it's somehow both less artificial and constructed than its predecessors Frisk and Closer, and simultaneously (contradictorily) feels less real (gets less directly at underlying reality), in that way that often defeats the supposed realism of ordinary dramatic plotting. On the other hand, it's an excellent study of the distance between love, desire, and sex -- of how these things all may mean very different things, and of how sometimes none of them can overcome a fundamental isolation, a fundamental unbridgeable gap between people who may want nothing so much as a basic human connection. All of which gives this a kind of warmth that would be unmatched in the rest of the Cooper I've read if he hadn't somehow managed to make Closer both entirely about constructed images and inexplicably warm and human. But this is good, too.
May 2, 2019
"Not giving a fuck about sex is so beautiful."
August 18, 2007
Do not read this book while you're trying to fall in love.
August 4, 2011
ziggy's lips silently form the word please about seventeen times in quick succession.
August 20, 2011
This may be the best of Cooper's novels to offer to any of your friends scared off by the aura of dark sex. There so much off-hand intelligence on display, such an offbeat sense of humor, and some real heart-felt emotion without any shielding mask of irony. Oh, here and there you'll still find some material that may shock... but it's presented in such a way you may find yourself surprised by laughter despite yourself.
December 8, 2024
(minor spelling corrections made December 2024).
I bought and read Try, Closer and the story collection Wrong in 1994 or 95 when Cooper was in the UK and signed copies of his works. I long ago lost those signed editions, the bookshop in Covent Garden where the signing took place long ago became a boutique or gourmet food store and Coopers books have been out of print in the UK for so long it is shameful but I have never heard of a publisher anywhere who could even spell shame let alone define it. Try is the third novel in the George Miles cycle (of which more anon) and I read it at least three times, but not in over twenty years. I am currently (2024) sequentially rereading and reviewing all of Cooper's novels so what can I say about Try that hasn't been said already? Probably nothing, I do think it is extraordinary, but so are all of Cooper's novels. Is it shocking? yes. Is it upsetting? yes. But it is far less shocking, disturbing or upsetting then a vast array of crime, erotica, pornography or the chic-lit-misery literature that Hanya Yanagihara is one of the most successful practitioners of.
I find it impossible to imagine anyone reading Try for sexual stimulation and no one is going to read it for the voyeristic warm fuzzy feeling of looking at life's dark side readers draw from true crime books. Nor are you going to find even an outdated guide to trendy consumer brands. That people can be offended by Cooper when our culture's most powerful totemic creations are TV programmes like Karidashans, Love Island or Naked Attraction is hard to comprehend.
It is easier to say what Try isn't than what it is. It is not really an American novel, it is the heir of Sade and Pasolini, it is profoundly 'European' in inspiration. It is not 'gay' in any conventionally recognised 'gay literary' sense - I always thought it significant that Cooper appeared only once in the eight Men on Men anthologies of the best 'new' gay fiction that appeared between 1984 and 2000. He didn't fit in with what many 'gay' authors wanted 'gay' literature to be. My memory of reading Try the first time was of how much 'gay' activists would hate the novel because it's portrait of 'gay' adoptive parents was like a cliched nightmare of the American Christian right.
Although great literature should resonate outside its time of creation all great literature does emerge from particular times and situations. Try is a novel of the 1990s. It couldn't be written today. If you don't try to understand it within its particular zeitgeist you are simply pronouncing on superficialities like subject matter and taste. I find its place in the George Miles cycle significant. Closer was about George, Frisk about Dennis, but what is Ziggy, the lost boy of Try? Is he emblematic of theme, type or fetish? To see him that way would be ridiculously reductive. While you could see George in Closer as a blank onto which others impose their dreams and fantasies and Frisk is about Dennis exploring his own obsessions Ziggy is both victim and monster. He is at the centre of a circle of grotesques who are so unable to connect with anyone, not each other and least of all themselves, that they are all versions of Munch's Scream - crying out into a void in which they do not see or hear themselves, each other or anyone else as they fail to connect on any level. As much as they are creations of the 1990s Ziggy and his circle are the children of Trumps vision.
Should you read this book? I don't see why not though there are very good reasons not to. It is upsetting but it is essential reading if you are going to read the George Miles cycle but it is also essential reading because Dennis Cooper, for far better reasons then de Sade, will be read in two hundred years.
My final comment, for now, is a question, when did the George Miles Cycle come into existence? We know in which years the novels were published but when I bought Closer and Try in 1994/5 and Frisk not long after none of the novels were identified as being linked. It may have been Cooper's intention all along to create a fiver volume cycle of novels but when were they first identified as such? It is only with the fourth volume Guide that a mention appears that the book is part of a five novel cycle.
I bought and read Try, Closer and the story collection Wrong in 1994 or 95 when Cooper was in the UK and signed copies of his works. I long ago lost those signed editions, the bookshop in Covent Garden where the signing took place long ago became a boutique or gourmet food store and Coopers books have been out of print in the UK for so long it is shameful but I have never heard of a publisher anywhere who could even spell shame let alone define it. Try is the third novel in the George Miles cycle (of which more anon) and I read it at least three times, but not in over twenty years. I am currently (2024) sequentially rereading and reviewing all of Cooper's novels so what can I say about Try that hasn't been said already? Probably nothing, I do think it is extraordinary, but so are all of Cooper's novels. Is it shocking? yes. Is it upsetting? yes. But it is far less shocking, disturbing or upsetting then a vast array of crime, erotica, pornography or the chic-lit-misery literature that Hanya Yanagihara is one of the most successful practitioners of.
I find it impossible to imagine anyone reading Try for sexual stimulation and no one is going to read it for the voyeristic warm fuzzy feeling of looking at life's dark side readers draw from true crime books. Nor are you going to find even an outdated guide to trendy consumer brands. That people can be offended by Cooper when our culture's most powerful totemic creations are TV programmes like Karidashans, Love Island or Naked Attraction is hard to comprehend.
It is easier to say what Try isn't than what it is. It is not really an American novel, it is the heir of Sade and Pasolini, it is profoundly 'European' in inspiration. It is not 'gay' in any conventionally recognised 'gay literary' sense - I always thought it significant that Cooper appeared only once in the eight Men on Men anthologies of the best 'new' gay fiction that appeared between 1984 and 2000. He didn't fit in with what many 'gay' authors wanted 'gay' literature to be. My memory of reading Try the first time was of how much 'gay' activists would hate the novel because it's portrait of 'gay' adoptive parents was like a cliched nightmare of the American Christian right.
Although great literature should resonate outside its time of creation all great literature does emerge from particular times and situations. Try is a novel of the 1990s. It couldn't be written today. If you don't try to understand it within its particular zeitgeist you are simply pronouncing on superficialities like subject matter and taste. I find its place in the George Miles cycle significant. Closer was about George, Frisk about Dennis, but what is Ziggy, the lost boy of Try? Is he emblematic of theme, type or fetish? To see him that way would be ridiculously reductive. While you could see George in Closer as a blank onto which others impose their dreams and fantasies and Frisk is about Dennis exploring his own obsessions Ziggy is both victim and monster. He is at the centre of a circle of grotesques who are so unable to connect with anyone, not each other and least of all themselves, that they are all versions of Munch's Scream - crying out into a void in which they do not see or hear themselves, each other or anyone else as they fail to connect on any level. As much as they are creations of the 1990s Ziggy and his circle are the children of Trumps vision.
Should you read this book? I don't see why not though there are very good reasons not to. It is upsetting but it is essential reading if you are going to read the George Miles cycle but it is also essential reading because Dennis Cooper, for far better reasons then de Sade, will be read in two hundred years.
My final comment, for now, is a question, when did the George Miles Cycle come into existence? We know in which years the novels were published but when I bought Closer and Try in 1994/5 and Frisk not long after none of the novels were identified as being linked. It may have been Cooper's intention all along to create a fiver volume cycle of novels but when were they first identified as such? It is only with the fourth volume Guide that a mention appears that the book is part of a five novel cycle.
January 24, 2022
(reread, i read this first in early 2021)
[5/5]
Absolutely staggering. I wanted to reread this since the cousins have been chipping away at the George Miles Cycle recently and I have been surprised at their takes. I wanted to be able to have a more informed conversation since I manically read all 5 books in the cycle in less than a month last year and therefore had no one to talk about them with.
I'm surprised by how follow-able this novel is. It really is like the closest thing I've seen to a traditional "novel" from Mr. Cooper, which is strange because I don't remember feeling that when I read it the first time. I feel like I actually was sort of alienated by its clarity, at that time being more comfortable within Cooper's spaced-out, hard-to-see-through prose of 'Closer' and 'Frisk' (and even 'The Sluts' I guess...). I love the character of Ziggy; he's one of my all time favorite Cooper constructions. I feel for him so much. His dirty hair and manic meaning-making and desperate artistic efforts. He's frenetic and alive;he really glows off the page and gives this book the energy it needs. I love his magazine so much 😭😭😭
What I took away most on this read was the transcendental power Cooper has when he's talking about desire. The way desire literally alters our reality, for better or for worse--our desire does not ask us for permission to desire. It's thrilling to read of desire spoken so plainly, regardless of consequence. Paradoxically I really think Cooper's books in this cycle have helped me process my own sexual abuse. There's something so liberating about reading something so candid in its perversity. I also think 'Try' manages to be really funny which is a magnificent accomplishment. I'm excited to see what all my scum cousins think when they read this one!!!!!! There's so much to chew on in this, I really have just like begun my thoughts about what this book does and how it does it. Superb experience all in all <3
[5/5]
Absolutely staggering. I wanted to reread this since the cousins have been chipping away at the George Miles Cycle recently and I have been surprised at their takes. I wanted to be able to have a more informed conversation since I manically read all 5 books in the cycle in less than a month last year and therefore had no one to talk about them with.
I'm surprised by how follow-able this novel is. It really is like the closest thing I've seen to a traditional "novel" from Mr. Cooper, which is strange because I don't remember feeling that when I read it the first time. I feel like I actually was sort of alienated by its clarity, at that time being more comfortable within Cooper's spaced-out, hard-to-see-through prose of 'Closer' and 'Frisk' (and even 'The Sluts' I guess...). I love the character of Ziggy; he's one of my all time favorite Cooper constructions. I feel for him so much. His dirty hair and manic meaning-making and desperate artistic efforts. He's frenetic and alive;he really glows off the page and gives this book the energy it needs. I love his magazine so much 😭😭😭
What I took away most on this read was the transcendental power Cooper has when he's talking about desire. The way desire literally alters our reality, for better or for worse--our desire does not ask us for permission to desire. It's thrilling to read of desire spoken so plainly, regardless of consequence. Paradoxically I really think Cooper's books in this cycle have helped me process my own sexual abuse. There's something so liberating about reading something so candid in its perversity. I also think 'Try' manages to be really funny which is a magnificent accomplishment. I'm excited to see what all my scum cousins think when they read this one!!!!!! There's so much to chew on in this, I really have just like begun my thoughts about what this book does and how it does it. Superb experience all in all <3
Read
May 19, 2024no accident imo that we 1st meet roger wearing a sebadoh shirt; similar to a freed man or a weed forestin there's too much masturbation here, too much sulking, far too much time spent indoors, suspiciously wet noises from the periphery... & then outta nowhere sth startlingly pretty will work its way loose before sinking back into the hiss. the uhhhhh paeans to various orifices make for challenging reading, but not as challenging as the feeling of bone-deep lonesomeness that radiates off just about everybody in here. ultimately it's the title of another '90s lo-fi album that comes to mind: there is no-one what will take care of you
April 22, 2023
My second Cooper, whose books I’ve been on the hunt for since reading “Frisk.”
“Try” is disgusting, not as disgusting as “Frisk,” but much more emotionally poignant, in a weird, stunted (transcendent-transgressive?) way.
I intend to keep reading - hopefully to find more books in the George Miles cycle - but I see myself struggling to recommend this author. He goes places we might not be meant - or equipped - to go . Again, I’m reminded of Georges Bataille’s plumbing (what an apt word) of the Stone Age mindscape, still intact I guess, where Eros and Thanatos do a little dance.
“Try” is disgusting, not as disgusting as “Frisk,” but much more emotionally poignant, in a weird, stunted (transcendent-transgressive?) way.
I intend to keep reading - hopefully to find more books in the George Miles cycle - but I see myself struggling to recommend this author. He goes places we might not be meant - or equipped - to go . Again, I’m reminded of Georges Bataille’s plumbing (what an apt word) of the Stone Age mindscape, still intact I guess, where Eros and Thanatos do a little dance.
May 18, 2024
Honestly I don't know how to rate this. It's exhausting to read, it's all foggy and blurry and everything is creepy as hell. But I love the way it's written, and how pretty much every character is unhinged, fucked up, and/or completely out of touch with reality. Somehow, it makes them more human, more touching. (Well, some of them at least)
On an unrelated note, I really liked the parallels between Slayer lyrics and what was happening in the book during some passages.
All in all, this was completely depressing
On an unrelated note, I really liked the parallels between Slayer lyrics and what was happening in the book during some passages.
All in all, this was completely depressing
July 30, 2025
quita el aliento
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, #44. This is volume #3 of my five-book read this month of the classic LGBTQ "George Miles" cycle by Dennis Cooper, one of the heralded "New Transgressive" authors of early Generation X that also included Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others (but for a lot more details, see my review of book #1 in the series, 1989's Closer, and book #2, 1991's Frisk). And to understand the giant jump in mainstream respectability these kinds of artists went through in this short time period from the late-'80s to the mid-'90s, look no further than the amateurish, no-budget covers of both Closer and Frisk, then compare them to the slick, indie-rock-looking cover of today's book (Ring ring! "Hello? Is this the designer of every album cover the Pixies ever put out? Say, would you happen to be free for the next couple of weeks?"), which essentially mirrors the jump in quality in the film world between Quentin Tarantino's indie debut Reservoir Dogs (released at nearly the same time as Frisk) and his mainstream studio debut Pulp Fiction (released at exactly the same time as today's book). After all, these were the years that Corporate America was finally figuring out that there was a lot of money to ironically be made from the cynical, apathetic, irony-filled lives of Generation X; and so these are the exact years when we suddenly saw poetry slams popping up on network television, and the "Do the Dew" X-Games suddenly becoming more popular among young people than even the Olympics themselves. So sure, why not put out Cooper's paen to violent pedophile sex and the erotic pleasures of serial killing through the newly Atlantic Books-acquired Grove Press, home of Republican humorist P.J. O'Rourke and military apologist books like Black Hawk Down?
And indeed, it's pretty clear that Cooper himself in Try had suddenly become more interested in capturing a mainstream audience, turning in the most clearly understandable storyline and prose style that his career had seen up to that point, and making the kind of commitment to pop-culture references that simply don't exist in the first two books of this series, given the references in just the first five pages alone to zine-making, Husker Du, the first generation of Macintosh laptops, and all kinds of other Gen X-friendly subjects. But the problem here -- and it's a big, huge problem, the main reason my scores for this book series have dropped from five stars to two in just the span of three volumes -- is that in his quest for mainstream respectability, Cooper here dispenses with all pretenses to realism whatsoever, taking the disaffected youthful ennui of his early characters and transforming them into a filth-covered cartoon version of their previous verisimilitude, which again can be directly compared to the shift from the gritty realism of Reservoir Dogs into the candy-colored outrageousness of Pulp Fiction.
In the previous Miles novels, the main calling card of the books is that they featured young gay men who couldn't figure out what normal, functional life was even supposed to look like, who stumbled through their drug-filled days having unhappy, unsatisfying sex, too numb to enjoy it and too numb to even understand that they were too numb, curious about these foreign concepts they've heard about called "happiness" and "enjoyment" but not quite sure what exactly they are and how they go about achieving them. But in Try this is no longer the case; the characters now know exactly what happiness is, but they choose either to ignore it and deliberately self-sabotage their lives in fear of these emotions' intensity, or gleefully acknowledge that the activities that make them happy are the kinds of things that most other people would call inhuman monstrosities, fully aware of that fact but just choosing to not particularly give a shit. And instead of these young gay men all being accidentally cruel to each other, as they stumble their way through a suburban wasteland of latchkey divorcee homes and crumbling strip malls and barely edible fast-food, now everyone's just deliberately cruel to each other on purpose, even when they don't have to be, with Cooper making a new dedication here along with his newly found pop-culture references to examining the absolutely worst ways that human beings can treat other human beings, seemingly for no other purpose than that at this point this is what he had become known for, and that in a Pulp Fiction world he was going to have to really up the ante of his dog-and-pony show if he expected to get a feature in SPIN magazine like all his Generation X New Transgressive buddies.
So in this, then, it's extremely fair to call Try a disappointing exercise in pointless torture porn, the reason I'm giving it such a low score despite the fact that it's actually written in a more assured style than any of his other books up to now. There are no insights about the human condition to learn here, no tragedies about Generation X to plumb; just a neon-bright dedication to being disgusting just to titillate, to shock just for the sake of being shocking, from a now fortysomething author who (we now know in hindsight) was just reaching the popular zenith of his career, but now with utterly nothing interesting left to say, his aging irrelevancy patently obvious when you look at how the typical middle-aged depiction of youth is starting to sneak into his characters even here, most egregiously in the 13-year-old Slayer-obsessed metalhead who might as well just be staring at his iPhone and incredulously muttering "Hashtag whateeever!" if this happened to be 2014 and not 1994. It's also telling, I think, that much more than his previous two novels in this series, this is the book page at Goodreads where you start seeing a large amount of contemporary queer Wokes write devastatingly negative reviews, regularly accusing Cooper of being a self-hating ironically gay homophobe, who paints such an overwhelmingly negative portrait of the LGBTQ community here that he might as well be a QAnon-spouting member of the Republican Party. And hey, let's just admit it -- in a novel whose main storyline is about two adult gay men who get married and adopt a child, expressly for the purpose of having an underaged person around who they can rape and beat on a daily basis with impunity, with one of these men having a brother who just openly produces snuff films in the seedy back hills of the Hollywood suburbs without anyone in the gay circles they run in seemingly having even the least little problem with it, it's admittedly quite difficult to argue with these Wokes' accusations of self-hating gay homophobia.
I've committed myself to finishing out this series, so I'll be tackling the next one beginning tomorrow, 1997's Guide; but I can't honestly say that I'm looking forward to it, given the massively downward slide in quality these books experience merely in the five years between the debut volume and this one. As always, check back here for the latest; but if you're new to Cooper's work and looking for the best examples of what made him so admired among the edgy-art crowd back in these years, Try is unfortunately not it, despite the amount of attention and money it generated (or, more sadly, perhaps precisely because of that).
2021 reads, #44. This is volume #3 of my five-book read this month of the classic LGBTQ "George Miles" cycle by Dennis Cooper, one of the heralded "New Transgressive" authors of early Generation X that also included Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others (but for a lot more details, see my review of book #1 in the series, 1989's Closer, and book #2, 1991's Frisk). And to understand the giant jump in mainstream respectability these kinds of artists went through in this short time period from the late-'80s to the mid-'90s, look no further than the amateurish, no-budget covers of both Closer and Frisk, then compare them to the slick, indie-rock-looking cover of today's book (Ring ring! "Hello? Is this the designer of every album cover the Pixies ever put out? Say, would you happen to be free for the next couple of weeks?"), which essentially mirrors the jump in quality in the film world between Quentin Tarantino's indie debut Reservoir Dogs (released at nearly the same time as Frisk) and his mainstream studio debut Pulp Fiction (released at exactly the same time as today's book). After all, these were the years that Corporate America was finally figuring out that there was a lot of money to ironically be made from the cynical, apathetic, irony-filled lives of Generation X; and so these are the exact years when we suddenly saw poetry slams popping up on network television, and the "Do the Dew" X-Games suddenly becoming more popular among young people than even the Olympics themselves. So sure, why not put out Cooper's paen to violent pedophile sex and the erotic pleasures of serial killing through the newly Atlantic Books-acquired Grove Press, home of Republican humorist P.J. O'Rourke and military apologist books like Black Hawk Down?
And indeed, it's pretty clear that Cooper himself in Try had suddenly become more interested in capturing a mainstream audience, turning in the most clearly understandable storyline and prose style that his career had seen up to that point, and making the kind of commitment to pop-culture references that simply don't exist in the first two books of this series, given the references in just the first five pages alone to zine-making, Husker Du, the first generation of Macintosh laptops, and all kinds of other Gen X-friendly subjects. But the problem here -- and it's a big, huge problem, the main reason my scores for this book series have dropped from five stars to two in just the span of three volumes -- is that in his quest for mainstream respectability, Cooper here dispenses with all pretenses to realism whatsoever, taking the disaffected youthful ennui of his early characters and transforming them into a filth-covered cartoon version of their previous verisimilitude, which again can be directly compared to the shift from the gritty realism of Reservoir Dogs into the candy-colored outrageousness of Pulp Fiction.
In the previous Miles novels, the main calling card of the books is that they featured young gay men who couldn't figure out what normal, functional life was even supposed to look like, who stumbled through their drug-filled days having unhappy, unsatisfying sex, too numb to enjoy it and too numb to even understand that they were too numb, curious about these foreign concepts they've heard about called "happiness" and "enjoyment" but not quite sure what exactly they are and how they go about achieving them. But in Try this is no longer the case; the characters now know exactly what happiness is, but they choose either to ignore it and deliberately self-sabotage their lives in fear of these emotions' intensity, or gleefully acknowledge that the activities that make them happy are the kinds of things that most other people would call inhuman monstrosities, fully aware of that fact but just choosing to not particularly give a shit. And instead of these young gay men all being accidentally cruel to each other, as they stumble their way through a suburban wasteland of latchkey divorcee homes and crumbling strip malls and barely edible fast-food, now everyone's just deliberately cruel to each other on purpose, even when they don't have to be, with Cooper making a new dedication here along with his newly found pop-culture references to examining the absolutely worst ways that human beings can treat other human beings, seemingly for no other purpose than that at this point this is what he had become known for, and that in a Pulp Fiction world he was going to have to really up the ante of his dog-and-pony show if he expected to get a feature in SPIN magazine like all his Generation X New Transgressive buddies.
So in this, then, it's extremely fair to call Try a disappointing exercise in pointless torture porn, the reason I'm giving it such a low score despite the fact that it's actually written in a more assured style than any of his other books up to now. There are no insights about the human condition to learn here, no tragedies about Generation X to plumb; just a neon-bright dedication to being disgusting just to titillate, to shock just for the sake of being shocking, from a now fortysomething author who (we now know in hindsight) was just reaching the popular zenith of his career, but now with utterly nothing interesting left to say, his aging irrelevancy patently obvious when you look at how the typical middle-aged depiction of youth is starting to sneak into his characters even here, most egregiously in the 13-year-old Slayer-obsessed metalhead who might as well just be staring at his iPhone and incredulously muttering "Hashtag whateeever!" if this happened to be 2014 and not 1994. It's also telling, I think, that much more than his previous two novels in this series, this is the book page at Goodreads where you start seeing a large amount of contemporary queer Wokes write devastatingly negative reviews, regularly accusing Cooper of being a self-hating ironically gay homophobe, who paints such an overwhelmingly negative portrait of the LGBTQ community here that he might as well be a QAnon-spouting member of the Republican Party. And hey, let's just admit it -- in a novel whose main storyline is about two adult gay men who get married and adopt a child, expressly for the purpose of having an underaged person around who they can rape and beat on a daily basis with impunity, with one of these men having a brother who just openly produces snuff films in the seedy back hills of the Hollywood suburbs without anyone in the gay circles they run in seemingly having even the least little problem with it, it's admittedly quite difficult to argue with these Wokes' accusations of self-hating gay homophobia.
I've committed myself to finishing out this series, so I'll be tackling the next one beginning tomorrow, 1997's Guide; but I can't honestly say that I'm looking forward to it, given the massively downward slide in quality these books experience merely in the five years between the debut volume and this one. As always, check back here for the latest; but if you're new to Cooper's work and looking for the best examples of what made him so admired among the edgy-art crowd back in these years, Try is unfortunately not it, despite the amount of attention and money it generated (or, more sadly, perhaps precisely because of that).
April 4, 2024
Whereas in Closer and Frisk Cooper took an analytical approach to his construction and deconstruction of image, Try grounds itself in an emotional reality that feels directly commentative on the fantasys that are built and deconstructed in the earlier cycle books. Theres a Cooper quote (cant remember it exactly) where he says Try is where he shows why he wouldn't act on his fantasies, thats a great way to explain it. Because this novel is much more grounded in an emotional realiry of the main characrer, with the same explorations we have seen of trauma, fetishization of murder, sex, drugs, etc. In Try we discover the real psychological damage thats inflicted upon each character. Its formalism is some of Cooper s best ive read, feeling like a much more explosive and loose (while also being more tightly constructed) version of Closer. Where we cut between different characters and their thoughts/reasonings and emotional struggles. With all that in mind it does make Try a much more difficult read (on the basis of its content). Because everything is real, when looking at Frisk, we have sections that are difficult, but exist to be deconstructed. Whereas in Try it feels as if every action has a direct influence on each amd every character, warped dynamics and their direct harm to the psychological health of our main character. Both the internal and external factors of addiction, both the construction of fantasy and deconstruction (through showing its external harm) by way of cutting between the 2. So we have a constant parallel of construction and deconstruction that sits along side the emotional outbursts of the entire novel which all leads up to its final catharsis/release in friendship/love/someone who even cares. Fuck Everything Else. Better than both Frisk and Closer in its pure honesty, Cooper still manages to be one of the best
Its also interesting how this novel directly parallels closer (the structures are identical--while try is still much more frantic with it--they both cut between different characters), hiwever where in closer others built their image of george (which was deconstructed), George himself was an empty slate. The same happens in Try (though a tad bit more subtle) where others idolize and build their imahe of Ziggy, which is later deconstruxted. However, Ziggy is the polar opposite of an empty slate. Pure emotion, and images are deconstructed through this emotion. Genius
Its also interesting how this novel directly parallels closer (the structures are identical--while try is still much more frantic with it--they both cut between different characters), hiwever where in closer others built their image of george (which was deconstructed), George himself was an empty slate. The same happens in Try (though a tad bit more subtle) where others idolize and build their imahe of Ziggy, which is later deconstruxted. However, Ziggy is the polar opposite of an empty slate. Pure emotion, and images are deconstructed through this emotion. Genius
Read
December 2, 2023Will come right out and say that this is probably, outside of The Sluts, my favourite Dennis Cooper work, and it’s for sure my favourite in the George Miles Cycle. While on this Cooper marathon journey, I’ve found the complete erasure of morality to be testing. It can feel a novelty when you only consume this world in bitesize chunks, but purposefully enmeshing the world around you does have a real life effect. My whispered masochism allows for relief in some ways, but after setting “Try” down at it’s end, it really felt like the perfect tonic.
We pick up in a similar fashion to Closer and Frisk, in terms of atmosphere, with the grunged buzz echoing in our ears from those first two instalments in the cycle. Voices overlap and pile on top of one another to create an overload on the senses that feels suffocating and hellish. Much enjoyment is to be had here, but I felt that Cooper struck a sweet spot with this book’s conclusion. To my surprise, we stumble upon an uplifting note, with a feel for legitimate hope that the characters can escape from the darkness that they all inhabit in their own ways.
Don’t wish to reveal too much, but this felt like the peak of the hill after the climb for Dennis Cooper. The first two books in the cycle are wonderful in their own right, but I found added bonuses in the shift in tones that he was able to employ here, as well as the balanced approach to extra layers.
We pick up in a similar fashion to Closer and Frisk, in terms of atmosphere, with the grunged buzz echoing in our ears from those first two instalments in the cycle. Voices overlap and pile on top of one another to create an overload on the senses that feels suffocating and hellish. Much enjoyment is to be had here, but I felt that Cooper struck a sweet spot with this book’s conclusion. To my surprise, we stumble upon an uplifting note, with a feel for legitimate hope that the characters can escape from the darkness that they all inhabit in their own ways.
Don’t wish to reveal too much, but this felt like the peak of the hill after the climb for Dennis Cooper. The first two books in the cycle are wonderful in their own right, but I found added bonuses in the shift in tones that he was able to employ here, as well as the balanced approach to extra layers.
April 5, 2024
For those that do not know, I am moving to Storygraph for the time being as it more easily allows me to add novels not present in their database compared to Goodreads. I'll cross post my reviews for now, but I might not remember to or might choose not too soon if I find myself liking Storygraph enough to commit to it. If you have an account there, feel free to follow me!
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile...
Dennis Cooper's "emotional" deconstruction of closer is as patently devastating as one could imagine. Every bit of coldness that marks his earlier work is destroyed in service of pure emotional turmoil. Idea's of people become people, violence has consequences of the physical, and every moment and interwoven storyline is somehow more devastating than the last.
Cooper's final lines have a tendency to make me cry, every one has so far. Try's not only made me cry, but totally gutted me. Every tiny bit of safety I somehow felt I could hold onto in Cooper's worlds was torn away from me - which is entirely by design. Fiction like Cooper's should never and could never be safe. It was never designed to comfort or placate, and it never has, but Try, somehow, manages to pierce one's heart even more in totality than anything the Cycle has offered before.
A patently gutting portrait of abuse and its after-effects. Highly empathetic and immensely human, in all it's ugly, ugly depravity in its contents and beautiful care in its construction.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile...
Dennis Cooper's "emotional" deconstruction of closer is as patently devastating as one could imagine. Every bit of coldness that marks his earlier work is destroyed in service of pure emotional turmoil. Idea's of people become people, violence has consequences of the physical, and every moment and interwoven storyline is somehow more devastating than the last.
Cooper's final lines have a tendency to make me cry, every one has so far. Try's not only made me cry, but totally gutted me. Every tiny bit of safety I somehow felt I could hold onto in Cooper's worlds was torn away from me - which is entirely by design. Fiction like Cooper's should never and could never be safe. It was never designed to comfort or placate, and it never has, but Try, somehow, manages to pierce one's heart even more in totality than anything the Cycle has offered before.
A patently gutting portrait of abuse and its after-effects. Highly empathetic and immensely human, in all it's ugly, ugly depravity in its contents and beautiful care in its construction.
January 12, 2021
Of the George Miles novels, this one seems to have the most conventional structure, and maybe even a plot!
Closer is still my favourite so far.
What is this guy up to?
And will George Miles ever reappear in his own novel cycle?
I will soon find out I'm sure :D
Closer is still my favourite so far.
What is this guy up to?
And will George Miles ever reappear in his own novel cycle?
I will soon find out I'm sure :D
January 11, 2013
There are many books in my personal library that defy expectations for a person like me. For example, I am a straight man yet I have numerous Yaoi(gay erotic) manga. For me in the 21st century, in this country, homosexuality is the new forbidden love. Being a fan of forbidden love since I viewed Baz Lurhman's Moulin Rouge in Jr High I see this as a perfect extension of my personality. In short, gay relationships fascinate me.
I remember hearing about Dennis Cooper from one of my many Bizarro author friends on facebook. Cooper had a started a series of books called "Little House on the Bowery" which produced Matthew Stokoe's classic of ick "Cows" which I devoured on a rainy day in my Kent State dorm room and after doing some research I found that his own novels had a sense of against the grain perversion that drew me into finally purchasing this and his novel "The Sluts" with my Christmas money. I am glad I did.
Try is a tale with many narrators. There's Ziggy, an anti social teen who was molested by his adopted gay parents and spends most of his time getting high and reflecting on his life. There is also Ziggy's adopted Dad, Roger, who fantasizes about Ziggy and ends up returning to his ex-partner's home for a tryst with the boy, Calhoun, Ziggy's heroin addicted friend who Ziggy harbors an almost sexual attraction, and Ziggy's Uncle Ken, who makes underground kiddie porn. These stories frequently intertwine as all of them spiral down into their own psycho-sexual hell.
This book is kind of icky. There is frequent depictions of gay sex and descriptions that would turn off any person who even thinks about getting off to this book. Yet this realism is needed. Cooper is trying to make a serious book about trying to find your place in the world amidst the damaged and broken souls that surround you. It is a book about recovery and forgiveness, a book about desire and commitment. It is about what it means to be a messed up youth. It is whatever you want it to be.
Cooper writes in a very realistic prose, descriptive but also filled with youth and vigor. It is like it is not written by a middle aged man but by the people who exist in this work, teenagers, perverts and druggies. This book haunted me after I finished it. Had I not have been called into the Dr's office I would have reread this book again. I felt connected to these characters, and few books have done this to me.
I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to know what postmodern lit is like beyond the many Brett Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuk clones they find at Barnes and Nobel. This is a serious book for serious bookworms. Read at your discretion
If you're willing, take this journey. I did, and it was the best I have ever had.
I remember hearing about Dennis Cooper from one of my many Bizarro author friends on facebook. Cooper had a started a series of books called "Little House on the Bowery" which produced Matthew Stokoe's classic of ick "Cows" which I devoured on a rainy day in my Kent State dorm room and after doing some research I found that his own novels had a sense of against the grain perversion that drew me into finally purchasing this and his novel "The Sluts" with my Christmas money. I am glad I did.
Try is a tale with many narrators. There's Ziggy, an anti social teen who was molested by his adopted gay parents and spends most of his time getting high and reflecting on his life. There is also Ziggy's adopted Dad, Roger, who fantasizes about Ziggy and ends up returning to his ex-partner's home for a tryst with the boy, Calhoun, Ziggy's heroin addicted friend who Ziggy harbors an almost sexual attraction, and Ziggy's Uncle Ken, who makes underground kiddie porn. These stories frequently intertwine as all of them spiral down into their own psycho-sexual hell.
This book is kind of icky. There is frequent depictions of gay sex and descriptions that would turn off any person who even thinks about getting off to this book. Yet this realism is needed. Cooper is trying to make a serious book about trying to find your place in the world amidst the damaged and broken souls that surround you. It is a book about recovery and forgiveness, a book about desire and commitment. It is about what it means to be a messed up youth. It is whatever you want it to be.
Cooper writes in a very realistic prose, descriptive but also filled with youth and vigor. It is like it is not written by a middle aged man but by the people who exist in this work, teenagers, perverts and druggies. This book haunted me after I finished it. Had I not have been called into the Dr's office I would have reread this book again. I felt connected to these characters, and few books have done this to me.
I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to know what postmodern lit is like beyond the many Brett Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuk clones they find at Barnes and Nobel. This is a serious book for serious bookworms. Read at your discretion
If you're willing, take this journey. I did, and it was the best I have ever had.
January 13, 2024
try has been the hardest and most heartbreaking book of the cycle that i’ve read. somehow impossibly it is also the most hopeful. while frisk really got into the psychosexual side of cooper’s themes, this book dealt with the emotional. the character of ziggy spoke to me the strongest of any of the georges he’s shown us, and this, probably not coincidentally, is the closest he has let us in to any of his georges’ heads. and jesus, he doesn’t spare detail. ziggy is exaggerated but so carefully and intentionally written. the character of calhoun also stood out beyond the average cooper side character insofar. everything in it is really painful. there was almost a stark lack of structure in this compared to the past two books in the cycle; it took a bit for me to adjust but worked better and better for me the further along i got. this was also the first book in the cycle with slight breaks of the fourth wall, which i thought was just a cool touch and done so effortlessly. and then the hope element; unlike the others, there is in try a thread beneath the horror that’s not thematic but a secondary plot. the quasiplatonic love story of a listless, mostly empty teen heroin addict and the deeply traumatised bipolar artist who thinks he hung the sun.
i nearly never do this in reviews, but this passage stood out to me more than any singular bit of prose has, not just in the cycle so far but in a long time. this is some of calhoun’s conjecture as he’s starting to nod:
ziggy just winds up praying in private like calhoun is god, feeling helpless and too idealistic. because… what could he say? calhoun, your incapacitation is frightening me, or… if you o.d., i’ll be completely destroyed, meanwhile crossing his fingers in hopes his well-being still counts for anything with the guy. it does and it doesn’t. certainly calhoun can’t tell him so. luckily, ziggy’s half-learned how to sidestep his friend’s generalized behavior, decode contracted eyes, sift through that fuzz, overvalue the warmth of their rare outbound flickers. they’ve become the most beautiful things in the world, like the muffled cries of hikers trapped in landslides in the middle of nowhere. he’s learned to let them spark his imagination. still, pray and daydream as ziggy might, he can’t quite reconfigure what’s here. here: a skinny blonde teenager pickled in heroin, slack-faced, fallen limp as a corpse, brain discarding his lovers and friends for a half-life in decorous seclusion, unconcerned how it looks, or who he’s upset along the way, figuring nobody else will ever wander this far, check.
i nearly never do this in reviews, but this passage stood out to me more than any singular bit of prose has, not just in the cycle so far but in a long time. this is some of calhoun’s conjecture as he’s starting to nod:
ziggy just winds up praying in private like calhoun is god, feeling helpless and too idealistic. because… what could he say? calhoun, your incapacitation is frightening me, or… if you o.d., i’ll be completely destroyed, meanwhile crossing his fingers in hopes his well-being still counts for anything with the guy. it does and it doesn’t. certainly calhoun can’t tell him so. luckily, ziggy’s half-learned how to sidestep his friend’s generalized behavior, decode contracted eyes, sift through that fuzz, overvalue the warmth of their rare outbound flickers. they’ve become the most beautiful things in the world, like the muffled cries of hikers trapped in landslides in the middle of nowhere. he’s learned to let them spark his imagination. still, pray and daydream as ziggy might, he can’t quite reconfigure what’s here. here: a skinny blonde teenager pickled in heroin, slack-faced, fallen limp as a corpse, brain discarding his lovers and friends for a half-life in decorous seclusion, unconcerned how it looks, or who he’s upset along the way, figuring nobody else will ever wander this far, check.
October 21, 2019
This was the biggest pile of shitty garbage I've ever had to read.
[big fat trigger warning: - you've been warned and only continue reading if it doesn't trigger you] It was offensive, rapey, badly written and absolutely going nowhere. I've honestly just wasted my time reading this crap. (On the question why I did it: I had to read it for an university class on transgressive fiction and while it is transgressive, I found that it's probably bottom tier of that genre.)
Whoever says that this is written "beautifully raw" or "ironic", please take a look in the mirror and ask yourself what went wrong in your life that you have to think that. The style is absolutely garbage and confusing. I have no positive feelings for anything in this book. I wish I could rate it -10 stars.
The ratings on this site shocked me, honestly. An average of 3.9? Did we read the same book? How can you rate a book with (unreflected) abuse on literally every. single. page? Not to say the murder of a 13yr old child that was drugged, raped and abused just pages before? And then they desecrate the poor child's corpse. Not only that, an abused teen (different character, also the main character) runs around telling everybody about his abuse and everybody just shrugs it off. And then the two dads gang up on the teen, drug him and rape him again. And then there's that throwaway comment that he's been raping him since he was 8 years old. And yes, that's just one scene. At the end. Before that there's so much more problematic shit that I don't want to get into it.
I absolutely do not recommend reading this book and I'm contemplating just burning it so I don't have to look at it anymore. The overall topics presented are unreflected, problematic in its depiction and absolutely horrifying. The book contains very harmful views upon the LGBTQ+ community and showcases the worst writing style to go along with it. Keep your fingers away from it.
[big fat trigger warning: - you've been warned and only continue reading if it doesn't trigger you] It was offensive, rapey, badly written and absolutely going nowhere. I've honestly just wasted my time reading this crap. (On the question why I did it: I had to read it for an university class on transgressive fiction and while it is transgressive, I found that it's probably bottom tier of that genre.)
Whoever says that this is written "beautifully raw" or "ironic", please take a look in the mirror and ask yourself what went wrong in your life that you have to think that. The style is absolutely garbage and confusing. I have no positive feelings for anything in this book. I wish I could rate it -10 stars.
The ratings on this site shocked me, honestly. An average of 3.9? Did we read the same book? How can you rate a book with (unreflected) abuse on literally every. single. page? Not to say the murder of a 13yr old child that was drugged, raped and abused just pages before? And then they desecrate the poor child's corpse. Not only that, an abused teen (different character, also the main character) runs around telling everybody about his abuse and everybody just shrugs it off. And then the two dads gang up on the teen, drug him and rape him again. And then there's that throwaway comment that he's been raping him since he was 8 years old. And yes, that's just one scene. At the end. Before that there's so much more problematic shit that I don't want to get into it.
I absolutely do not recommend reading this book and I'm contemplating just burning it so I don't have to look at it anymore. The overall topics presented are unreflected, problematic in its depiction and absolutely horrifying. The book contains very harmful views upon the LGBTQ+ community and showcases the worst writing style to go along with it. Keep your fingers away from it.
April 1, 2024
Sadness overload/10
So...here's the thing. By book 3 in the George Miles cycle you come to expect the gore and the depraved things that happen. That doesn't normalize it, it is still horrible and makes you want to puke. But the overpowering nature of the sadness of this book is too much. This book deals with the detachment of love. The idea of a broken person searching for love in all the wrong places and not finding it. By the end of this book you feel the sense of emptiness that comes from our lead character. Another interesting thing about this series is that the main character is not narrating he story but rather you become the third person watching this story unfold. The great genius of this tactic is that by the middle of this book when everything goes up in the air you realize that Ziggy is a spectator in his own life just like George in the first book. This is the tamest book in the series so far and that's saying a lot...
Final thought: Finding love as a broken person is never easy.
So...here's the thing. By book 3 in the George Miles cycle you come to expect the gore and the depraved things that happen. That doesn't normalize it, it is still horrible and makes you want to puke. But the overpowering nature of the sadness of this book is too much. This book deals with the detachment of love. The idea of a broken person searching for love in all the wrong places and not finding it. By the end of this book you feel the sense of emptiness that comes from our lead character. Another interesting thing about this series is that the main character is not narrating he story but rather you become the third person watching this story unfold. The great genius of this tactic is that by the middle of this book when everything goes up in the air you realize that Ziggy is a spectator in his own life just like George in the first book. This is the tamest book in the series so far and that's saying a lot...
Final thought: Finding love as a broken person is never easy.
Read
October 28, 2025"Try" contains what you would expect from a Dennis Cooper novel. Sex and violence. But I found this book deeply tender and moving in a way I didn't expect. I think this is the most emotionally raw book by Cooper I've read. The main character Ziggy is horribly abused by the adults in his life and as you read, you see how it plays out. No one seems to care about him and you even get the point of view of his Dad, Roger, who with no shame uses and abuses Ziggy. The story unfolds as you see Ziggy grapple with that. Try to make sense of the world and find some love and acceptance in it.
Cooper gives us a lot to think about. A lot to work with. It's a difficult novel to read, so much disturbing violence. And having to see someone grapple with it in real time. How do they process their emotions? There is no easy answer, but Cooper writes an excellent book trying to figure it out.
Cooper gives us a lot to think about. A lot to work with. It's a difficult novel to read, so much disturbing violence. And having to see someone grapple with it in real time. How do they process their emotions? There is no easy answer, but Cooper writes an excellent book trying to figure it out.
October 28, 2019
Para entonces, ya nos tenía Cooper acostumbrados a sus desmadres y el impacto no es el mismo. Además, me pareció que se esforzaba mogollón en buscar un tema controvertido, a ver si se iba a creer Easton Ellis que estaba solo...
Recuperé mi fe en Cooper con My Loose Thread, pero bueno, este no deja de ser muy "su rollito" y a eso le llaman literatura de autor.
Recuperé mi fe en Cooper con My Loose Thread, pero bueno, este no deja de ser muy "su rollito" y a eso le llaman literatura de autor.
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