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God Jr.
Dennis Cooper's sparely crafted novels have earned him an international reputation-even as his subject matter has made him a controversial figure. God Jr. is a stunningly accomplished new novel that marks a new phase in Cooper's noteworthy career.
God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son - at the expense of his job and marriage - but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?
A tender, wrenching look at guilt, grief, and the tenuous bonds of family, God Jr. is unlike anything Dennis Cooper has yet written. It is a triumphant achievement from one of our finest writers.
God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son - at the expense of his job and marriage - but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?
A tender, wrenching look at guilt, grief, and the tenuous bonds of family, God Jr. is unlike anything Dennis Cooper has yet written. It is a triumphant achievement from one of our finest writers.
176 pages, Paperback
First published July 10, 2005
25 people are currently reading
1243 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
109 books1,781 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 149 reviews
May 1, 2012
"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
God Jr. does not contain graphic and gratuitous violence and sex and as such is apparently the most unusual book Dennis Cooper has written. This is the first and, so far, only of his books I've read, but several fellow readers are big fans and I've gleaned what I know about his work through their reviews. Instead of having a cast of gay characters engaged in scene after scene of violent sex and death, we have a presumably straight father quietly loosening his grip on reality in a disorienting fog of grief and marijuana. In the wake of a car accident that leaves him locked into a wheelchair and his teenage son dead, he makes strange and lonely and desperate attempts at properly grieving by trying to connect with a son-no-longer-there who he was disconnected from while alive. One way he does this is by playing a goofy video game that the son played and by smoking the weed the son smoked. In the context of this book--clouded with mourning the loss of a family member and being stoned--just about everything is haunting and a bit surreal, including the descriptions of the silly Nintendo world.
There's a reviewer I'm fond of who uses the word 'harrowing' to describe this book and I think that this is an apt description within a review that I wish I'd written. I direct you there as supplemental material for this review.
Looking at the reviews here on Goodreads, it seems a lot of Cooper's fans didn't like this book at all, though some certainly did. I thought it was incredibly moving in both expected and unexpected ways. The father really isn't even terribly sympathetic, despite his misfortune, but I found myself, as I often do, feeling raw and exposed and shudderingly sensitive to The Overwhelming Fact that uncountable numbers of animals, both human and not, with emotions and families and pains and desires, are birthed and snuffed out every single day--that sometimes there is no comforting eulogy available, that sometimes things just remain depressing, that groping for a word of comfort or wisdom in dark times can merely be an exercise in compounded despair, but also that we feeling thinking hoping despairing organisms can occasionally find real respite from these realities--temporarily, yes, but real all the same.
God Jr. does not contain graphic and gratuitous violence and sex and as such is apparently the most unusual book Dennis Cooper has written. This is the first and, so far, only of his books I've read, but several fellow readers are big fans and I've gleaned what I know about his work through their reviews. Instead of having a cast of gay characters engaged in scene after scene of violent sex and death, we have a presumably straight father quietly loosening his grip on reality in a disorienting fog of grief and marijuana. In the wake of a car accident that leaves him locked into a wheelchair and his teenage son dead, he makes strange and lonely and desperate attempts at properly grieving by trying to connect with a son-no-longer-there who he was disconnected from while alive. One way he does this is by playing a goofy video game that the son played and by smoking the weed the son smoked. In the context of this book--clouded with mourning the loss of a family member and being stoned--just about everything is haunting and a bit surreal, including the descriptions of the silly Nintendo world.
There's a reviewer I'm fond of who uses the word 'harrowing' to describe this book and I think that this is an apt description within a review that I wish I'd written. I direct you there as supplemental material for this review.
Looking at the reviews here on Goodreads, it seems a lot of Cooper's fans didn't like this book at all, though some certainly did. I thought it was incredibly moving in both expected and unexpected ways. The father really isn't even terribly sympathetic, despite his misfortune, but I found myself, as I often do, feeling raw and exposed and shudderingly sensitive to The Overwhelming Fact that uncountable numbers of animals, both human and not, with emotions and families and pains and desires, are birthed and snuffed out every single day--that sometimes there is no comforting eulogy available, that sometimes things just remain depressing, that groping for a word of comfort or wisdom in dark times can merely be an exercise in compounded despair, but also that we feeling thinking hoping despairing organisms can occasionally find real respite from these realities--temporarily, yes, but real all the same.
October 16, 2014
Cooper does Dick without dick.
Somehow this little book , or one section of it at least, made me feel ickier than Cooper’s books dealing explicitly with extreme sexual violence. What made me feel icky here was the long chapter that took place mostly within an inane video game. The main character, the father whose recent life has been consumed by guilt for being responsible for the death of his son, is a pot head making ill-guided efforts at reconnecting with his dead son. One of these efforts is stoned absorption in a multi-leveled video game his son was obsessed with at the end of his life. He is absorbed to the point of entering the game itself and becoming the bear who is the player’s avatar. He then communicates with the various other things and characters within the virtual world in his quest to enter a mysterious house that was a particular obsession of his son’s, in hopes that there will be some explanation of the meaning of his son’s death within. What made me feel icky was the feeling of stoner absorption in an inane game I was subjected to in Cooper’s vivid accounting. Even the rather boring nature of much of the depiction heightened the ickiness.
This feeling of stoner loserness pervaded the entire book. The dad’s sloppily errant attempts at grief adding to the overcast atmosphere of failure and avoidance. It’s an unsettling book, and given its effect on me I’m not quite sure why I’m not giving it another star, as it is something like a very effective tone poem. It’s short enough, I’ll just read it again and see if a second read will deserve another star to be added.
Somehow this little book , or one section of it at least, made me feel ickier than Cooper’s books dealing explicitly with extreme sexual violence. What made me feel icky here was the long chapter that took place mostly within an inane video game. The main character, the father whose recent life has been consumed by guilt for being responsible for the death of his son, is a pot head making ill-guided efforts at reconnecting with his dead son. One of these efforts is stoned absorption in a multi-leveled video game his son was obsessed with at the end of his life. He is absorbed to the point of entering the game itself and becoming the bear who is the player’s avatar. He then communicates with the various other things and characters within the virtual world in his quest to enter a mysterious house that was a particular obsession of his son’s, in hopes that there will be some explanation of the meaning of his son’s death within. What made me feel icky was the feeling of stoner absorption in an inane game I was subjected to in Cooper’s vivid accounting. Even the rather boring nature of much of the depiction heightened the ickiness.
This feeling of stoner loserness pervaded the entire book. The dad’s sloppily errant attempts at grief adding to the overcast atmosphere of failure and avoidance. It’s an unsettling book, and given its effect on me I’m not quite sure why I’m not giving it another star, as it is something like a very effective tone poem. It’s short enough, I’ll just read it again and see if a second read will deserve another star to be added.
September 30, 2016
(Former rating: one star. Former review follows.) I re-read this in 2016 and got super pissed at myself from 2007. What was wrong with me? This is a fantastic meditation on denial, depression, getting stoned so you can not have feelings, but mostly grief. Maybe I'm ten years older and ten percent less full of shit or something and better able to appreciate books that don't have a bunch of mutilation and sex in them. This book rules. Go to hell, me from 2007.
---
(2007)Answers the question, "what would a Dennis Cooper book be like if all the salacious stuff rang sensationalistically hollow, and then the second half of the book was 100 pages of an unsympathetic jerk you didn't care about having stoned conversations with the characters in a Nintendo game?" Fuck this book.
---
(2007)Answers the question, "what would a Dennis Cooper book be like if all the salacious stuff rang sensationalistically hollow, and then the second half of the book was 100 pages of an unsympathetic jerk you didn't care about having stoned conversations with the characters in a Nintendo game?" Fuck this book.
March 28, 2012
A pretty weird one, even by Cooper standards: grieving dad descends into the stoned video-game half-life his dead son formerly occupied in a desperate effort to escape the mess he's made of his life and extract some kind of meaning from his loss. The loneliness and alienation of grief. The necessity and unavailability of deeper significance in ordinary things. Cooper is always strangely specific with pop-culture references compared to most literary writing, though highly adept at investing them with his thematic systems and making them much more than mere reference points to whatever was going on around him at the time. This is no exception, but it's especially weird to see him conveying these complicated ideas via detailed synopsizing of actions in a pretty trivial video game. It's actually kinda hard to take them seriously at first, but Cooper makes the underpinnings of these sections so serious, so desperate, that the triviality of the actual content makes the whole thing just that much more pathetic and desperate. I guess it's kind of the same way that the deceptively simple prose works, really: minor, seemingly offhand sentences mapping out dense concepts extremely economically. Also, as with his most recent, there's this neat trick where a couple sentences sketch a progression of an idea, and then it takes where you've automatically anticipated it's going into account and does a total about face in between sentences. Hard to descibe, but impressive, and it's coded pretty deep into the rhythm and style throughout.
January 31, 2023
God Jr
By Dennis Cooper
Alright first off this is my time reading this author and....... I liked it..... But what a fucked up depressing dreary story about dealing with grief, pain, guilt ,and loss of losing someone... Or not dealing with it and just trying to hold onto that someone and learn about them because you weren't as present as you should've or could've been while they were alive. All in all I liked the book the writing is awesome but I thought the last part in the book was kinda slow. I'm definitely going to read more from Dennis Cooper in the future. If you want a fucked up trippy book about loss and grief this one should do it.
By Dennis Cooper
Alright first off this is my time reading this author and....... I liked it..... But what a fucked up depressing dreary story about dealing with grief, pain, guilt ,and loss of losing someone... Or not dealing with it and just trying to hold onto that someone and learn about them because you weren't as present as you should've or could've been while they were alive. All in all I liked the book the writing is awesome but I thought the last part in the book was kinda slow. I'm definitely going to read more from Dennis Cooper in the future. If you want a fucked up trippy book about loss and grief this one should do it.
September 8, 2012
An interesting take on grief with computer game ferrets/bears instead of graveside weeping. I didn’t understand why the second part had stand-alone paragraphs on each page, nor did I see the purpose of asterisking off each new paragraph in the other sections. Otherwise, it was a semi-successful experiment. For comment on the content, see Joshua or Nate or Mike or Eddie. The author’s surname reminds me of the prepubescent sitcom Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper which was the highlight of my Sunday morning TV viewing about 9.30 after the sad cancellation of that titan of light comedy, Sister Sister. Oh my tragic youth.
October 22, 2020
This is by far the best review of Banjo Kazooie I've ever read.
May 10, 2025
Ooof. Grief fiction but with video games.
This is my first Cooper and I don't want it to be my last, though I fully understand this one deviates from his usual style and is considered tame compared to his other books. It's been sitting on my shelf, intimidating me for over 10 years, and I'm glad I finally pulled it down last night.
Jim is grieving the death of his teenaged son. A death he is responsible for. A death that has left him crippled and wheelchair bound. He becomes locally famous for building a monument in his yard. His son's drawing come to life. A structure that his son drew obsessively. And when Jim learns that the structure is part of a video game his son used to play, well, Jim picks up the controller and dumps all of his grief into the game.
Imagine carrying the weight of that. Imagine having to live with the guilt and the memory of killing your kid. Just imagine it.
"death's the end. It's erasure. It's so heavy we decide the dead are just invisible and mute. Death's so bad we'd rather go insane than know that one of us is nonexistent."
"Try making up a world where having killed someone you love isn't important."
Ugh, Cooper. You hit me right in the feels, you jerk.
If you liked this book, you may also like Joshua Mohr's Farsickness. It shares a similar hallucinatory, break from reality, video game-esque feel.
This is my first Cooper and I don't want it to be my last, though I fully understand this one deviates from his usual style and is considered tame compared to his other books. It's been sitting on my shelf, intimidating me for over 10 years, and I'm glad I finally pulled it down last night.
Jim is grieving the death of his teenaged son. A death he is responsible for. A death that has left him crippled and wheelchair bound. He becomes locally famous for building a monument in his yard. His son's drawing come to life. A structure that his son drew obsessively. And when Jim learns that the structure is part of a video game his son used to play, well, Jim picks up the controller and dumps all of his grief into the game.
Imagine carrying the weight of that. Imagine having to live with the guilt and the memory of killing your kid. Just imagine it.
"death's the end. It's erasure. It's so heavy we decide the dead are just invisible and mute. Death's so bad we'd rather go insane than know that one of us is nonexistent."
"Try making up a world where having killed someone you love isn't important."
Ugh, Cooper. You hit me right in the feels, you jerk.
If you liked this book, you may also like Joshua Mohr's Farsickness. It shares a similar hallucinatory, break from reality, video game-esque feel.
May 25, 2013
There are a number of images that might spring to mind when one considers the art of Dennis Cooper: homosexuality, violence, teenage sex and drugabuse. A common criticism of Cooper's work - by those who fail to grasp the full scale of the project Cooper has undertaken - is that there is no plotting, no character development, none of the things that we traditionally associate with a "great" novel.
And of course, this is, in a sense, perfectly true.
Every book by Cooper is seemingly a matter of life and death, a tightrope act performed without a safety net.Cooper's George Miles cycle,the series of five novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period) is as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted. Taken on their own, each novel is a brilliantly crafted piece of transgressive literature.
God Jr, was a distinct move away from the obsessions with drove the cycle as well as standalone books like My Loose Thread and The Sluts. Instead of the overlapping voices of these works, their deadpan evocations of sex, drugs and snuff imagery, we are instead presented with a meditation on grief, the falsity of memory and teenage alienation. A father's attempt to make sense of his son's death provides the backdrop for a novel, which manages - in one memorable section - to be narrated by a character in a Nintendo video game.The scenes in the book were progressively shorter, more abstracted, it gave the sense that the words themselves were burning out,all of this without losing the emotional intensity and intimacy of the original premise.
Taken as a whole,Cooper's novels are beguiling, baffling, beautiful and intelligent.To read one is to witness the idea of the novel itself imploding; to glimpse a truly vanguard form; to become aware of fiction's dizzying possibilities.
And of course, this is, in a sense, perfectly true.
Every book by Cooper is seemingly a matter of life and death, a tightrope act performed without a safety net.Cooper's George Miles cycle,the series of five novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period) is as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted. Taken on their own, each novel is a brilliantly crafted piece of transgressive literature.
God Jr, was a distinct move away from the obsessions with drove the cycle as well as standalone books like My Loose Thread and The Sluts. Instead of the overlapping voices of these works, their deadpan evocations of sex, drugs and snuff imagery, we are instead presented with a meditation on grief, the falsity of memory and teenage alienation. A father's attempt to make sense of his son's death provides the backdrop for a novel, which manages - in one memorable section - to be narrated by a character in a Nintendo video game.The scenes in the book were progressively shorter, more abstracted, it gave the sense that the words themselves were burning out,all of this without losing the emotional intensity and intimacy of the original premise.
Taken as a whole,Cooper's novels are beguiling, baffling, beautiful and intelligent.To read one is to witness the idea of the novel itself imploding; to glimpse a truly vanguard form; to become aware of fiction's dizzying possibilities.
October 1, 2020
banjo kazooie trauma fanfic. it’s great
July 23, 2025
"'You want to be inside that love, even if it's empty, and even if the ones who hide it are divorcing you or dead.'"
Heartbreaking and stoned and confusing. I love this book so much. It gives me a similar feeling to what I felt reading and rereading Milk by Darcey Steinke. It really is all just so confusing, and it really would be so much easier if I could just live inside a digital bear inside a digital building that no one's ever seen the inside of. Nothing makes sense in any world, and every puzzle life gives us is based on a premise that didn't even make sense in the first place. Thank u again Dennis!!!
****
reread this:) criminally underrated and misunderstood. Cooper can do weed as good as he does heroin or speed. Really no limits to the way he can write, and how he can divinate the digital in any of its forms. sorta subconsciously ripped this off for a chapbook i wrote years ago (that may get published in this book slated for a couple years from now). mournful, helplessly funny, uncharacteristically sedate (the weed talking). i didnt get this when i read it first because i was stoned all the time lol. How he manages to make every exchange boil down to its most interesting pieces--how every character picks the perfect part of the preceding statement to focus on, and extract intrigue--is so fucking beyond me. Dialogue is pretty much always a professor exposition thing but somehow Cooper always gets it to reflect right back, beam straight into your head and the book itself. i just can't imagine my life without his writing. dont care anymore that he reduces me to a fangirl. we all have to worship someone, and now that i dont believe in god....
Heartbreaking and stoned and confusing. I love this book so much. It gives me a similar feeling to what I felt reading and rereading Milk by Darcey Steinke. It really is all just so confusing, and it really would be so much easier if I could just live inside a digital bear inside a digital building that no one's ever seen the inside of. Nothing makes sense in any world, and every puzzle life gives us is based on a premise that didn't even make sense in the first place. Thank u again Dennis!!!
****
reread this:) criminally underrated and misunderstood. Cooper can do weed as good as he does heroin or speed. Really no limits to the way he can write, and how he can divinate the digital in any of its forms. sorta subconsciously ripped this off for a chapbook i wrote years ago (that may get published in this book slated for a couple years from now). mournful, helplessly funny, uncharacteristically sedate (the weed talking). i didnt get this when i read it first because i was stoned all the time lol. How he manages to make every exchange boil down to its most interesting pieces--how every character picks the perfect part of the preceding statement to focus on, and extract intrigue--is so fucking beyond me. Dialogue is pretty much always a professor exposition thing but somehow Cooper always gets it to reflect right back, beam straight into your head and the book itself. i just can't imagine my life without his writing. dont care anymore that he reduces me to a fangirl. we all have to worship someone, and now that i dont believe in god....
November 17, 2007
Do people like this? How does this stuff get published? Just crappy, crappy writing. And everything's bleak. And life sucks. The end.
September 20, 2021
I don’t really know why I slept on God Jr. for so long. I have no real excuse. I had heard it involved video games, and I’m not much of a gamer so that probably had something to do with it. (Not that I have anything against video games or gamers or the depiction of video gaming in literature, it’s just not something I seek out.) But reading his newest, the incredible I Wished, got me in the mood for more Cooper and I had God Jr. onhand so I figured what the hell, let’s do it.
So. It’s very different from his other books — significantly less violent, very nearly sexless. Here the chief concerns here are grief, regret, lying, failure, sorrow, and obsession. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got was something I wasn’t anticipating: a genuinely moving reading experience, and with a softness about it… an unusual sort of warmth. And the video gaming? I’m not going to spoil anything, but that aspect of the story really ended up working for me. I was genuinely, happily surprised by what Cooper ended up doing on that front. It could have been ridiculous, very easily. But in execution, it was quite something to behold.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that of the non-George Miles Cycle books Cooper has written, this may be my new favorite. I’ll definitely be reading God Jr. again.
Highly recommended.
So. It’s very different from his other books — significantly less violent, very nearly sexless. Here the chief concerns here are grief, regret, lying, failure, sorrow, and obsession. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got was something I wasn’t anticipating: a genuinely moving reading experience, and with a softness about it… an unusual sort of warmth. And the video gaming? I’m not going to spoil anything, but that aspect of the story really ended up working for me. I was genuinely, happily surprised by what Cooper ended up doing on that front. It could have been ridiculous, very easily. But in execution, it was quite something to behold.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that of the non-George Miles Cycle books Cooper has written, this may be my new favorite. I’ll definitely be reading God Jr. again.
Highly recommended.
April 4, 2024
“But as a wuss, I needed more. For instance, no one could keep me off the Pirates of the Caribbean. I loved its merry-making, unrelenting murders. I loved how every drunken, pistol-firing pirate was like a cuckoo clock with nonstop cuckoos. Then one time my boat got stuck inside the ride for hours. Afterward, that looping, scratched recording of a place became my hell. But I never blamed the pirates. And I never quite forgot how being shit-faced made them happy no matter whom their bullets hit. Maybe that's the reason I'm a pothead, or maybe not. All I'm thinking is this looping, violent game seems like a hell I would have loved.”
April 11, 2024
A man gets lost in a videogame his dead son used to play to hide from his grief.
August 9, 2009
God Jr. is a very important part of Cooper’s body of work—partly because, unlike most of his other fiction, all of the physical violence in God Jr. happens “off-stage.” In the absence of explicit horror I could see and feel the psychic landscape of disconnection and escapism without the voyeurism and adrenaline that clouded my reading of the earlier books. The horror in God Jr. is heartbreakingly ordinary: the failure of a father to connect with other people, especially his son, drives him to absurdity and escapism. Jim doesn’t know how to solve his grief and unhappiness any more than he knew how to solve his loneliness before his son’s death (sex and drugs didn’t work?!). He tries to make sense of his loss and connect through the things he thinks were important to his son: getting high and playing silly computer games. Surprise, surprise, this doesn’t really solve anything, but allows him to build a fantasy of connection to replace the emptiness that is truly tragic. So we watch, increasingly saddened and frustrated, as his absurdity and escapism provide him with little else than an incomplete numbness.
In the end, what Cooper leaves us with is the gut-wrenching sensation of failed connections. It is clear as the novel goes on that Jim’s attempts to find meaning and beauty primarily through fantasy and escape always kept him from meaningful human relationships. As Jim discovers that he didn’t know anything about what was important to his son, he retreats further and further into fantasy, but even his fantasies refuse to allow him peace. He fucked up, over and over and over, and now that it’s too late the only option is to disappear.
In the end, what Cooper leaves us with is the gut-wrenching sensation of failed connections. It is clear as the novel goes on that Jim’s attempts to find meaning and beauty primarily through fantasy and escape always kept him from meaningful human relationships. As Jim discovers that he didn’t know anything about what was important to his son, he retreats further and further into fantasy, but even his fantasies refuse to allow him peace. He fucked up, over and over and over, and now that it’s too late the only option is to disappear.
March 6, 2009
No one gets this book, least of all me. What is the point? A pothead loses/kills his video game-obsessed pothead son; fakes paraplegia; becomes obsessed with video games himself; and then is so high or crazy that he starts talking to the various and sundry animals in the game.
It's not that it's a great book by any means, it's that it's unique, which is difficult for a book to be in a post-postmodern world. It makes people want to talk, and I don't really consider the reading process over until you've discussed it. Both the story and format of the novel are quite different from anything I'm familiar with and I appreciate that from time to time. Would I rather read God Jr. than To Kill A Mockingbird? Lord no. But luckily I've got time for the both of 'em. GJ is maybe the literary equivalent of Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel". You take a look and then move along.
I like what God Jr. says about the nature of guilt and repentance. It reminds me of O'Connors's Wise Blood. And I like the symbolism of the monument which, it ends up, is a complete rip-off of pop cultural crap. There's an indictment of what's meaningful in society. In fact, nothing really seems to mean anything in God Jr. In that way it sort of reminds me of Walker Percy, though I wouldn't consider Dennis Cooper's book to be especially existential. It's just weird. In a depressing way.
But I don't think there's a whole lot to get. Or I don't get it either. And I like a good mindfuck every now and then.
It's not that it's a great book by any means, it's that it's unique, which is difficult for a book to be in a post-postmodern world. It makes people want to talk, and I don't really consider the reading process over until you've discussed it. Both the story and format of the novel are quite different from anything I'm familiar with and I appreciate that from time to time. Would I rather read God Jr. than To Kill A Mockingbird? Lord no. But luckily I've got time for the both of 'em. GJ is maybe the literary equivalent of Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel". You take a look and then move along.
I like what God Jr. says about the nature of guilt and repentance. It reminds me of O'Connors's Wise Blood. And I like the symbolism of the monument which, it ends up, is a complete rip-off of pop cultural crap. There's an indictment of what's meaningful in society. In fact, nothing really seems to mean anything in God Jr. In that way it sort of reminds me of Walker Percy, though I wouldn't consider Dennis Cooper's book to be especially existential. It's just weird. In a depressing way.
But I don't think there's a whole lot to get. Or I don't get it either. And I like a good mindfuck every now and then.
August 4, 2017
La ferocia di un altro romanzo dell'autore ("Frisk") mi aveva sconvolto, affascinato. Mi ero detto: "Devo leggere qualcos'altro di suo".
Ho optato per "God Jr", in quanto considerato "Il suo romanzo capolavoro".
Bah. Innocuo. Scorre via senza lasciar nulla.
Come non averlo letto, praticamente.
Ho optato per "God Jr", in quanto considerato "Il suo romanzo capolavoro".
Bah. Innocuo. Scorre via senza lasciar nulla.
Come non averlo letto, praticamente.
February 11, 2024
4.5 ⭐️ rounded up
i honestly went into this with very low expectations because it’s rather different to the other dennis cooper works that i’ve read this far, but since i’ve made it my goal to read everything he has ever written i ended up with a copy of it on my shelf.
well, thank God i ended up giving this the shot it deserved. i really should’ve known i would like this, because ofc i would, it’s dennis cooper after all!
this was emotional and intriguing and just wonderful. i don’t particularly have experience with grieving someone who died, but i do imagine that cooper’s portrayal of how the different characters dealt with it was very realistic, and especially how flawed each of these characters was (with the main character of course being the most flawed) made them just feel so human.
i would like to say that i read this in one sitting in the common area of the hostel in staying at and that it is 1am by now, so if this review seems senseless and disjointed, now you know why.
i honestly went into this with very low expectations because it’s rather different to the other dennis cooper works that i’ve read this far, but since i’ve made it my goal to read everything he has ever written i ended up with a copy of it on my shelf.
well, thank God i ended up giving this the shot it deserved. i really should’ve known i would like this, because ofc i would, it’s dennis cooper after all!
this was emotional and intriguing and just wonderful. i don’t particularly have experience with grieving someone who died, but i do imagine that cooper’s portrayal of how the different characters dealt with it was very realistic, and especially how flawed each of these characters was (with the main character of course being the most flawed) made them just feel so human.
i would like to say that i read this in one sitting in the common area of the hostel in staying at and that it is 1am by now, so if this review seems senseless and disjointed, now you know why.
June 19, 2016
Amazing sentences. The, "What is this about" is sort of Lifetime-like. Dad & son are involved in car crash (with light post) and dad kills son because son goes through windshield. (But if son wasn't wearing seat belt ...right?) After that, rest of book is pretty inventive. Dad is obsessed with drawings he believes son drew. Begins to play Banjo Kazooie-esque video game his son played a lot. Son was a pothead. Dad is a pothead. Wife is wanting to leave dad. Kind of funny to read something so intellectual about what equivocates to a stupid video game overall. The vide game bits probably make up 2/3 of the book. Anyway, dad becomes super-involved in said video games and then novel sort of ends super abrupt-like. A little infuriating as I feel the one thing I really loved (Cooper's use of sentence structure here) was also, at the same time, sort of confusing to me. In the way that Cooper never really explicitly states or ever explains exactly what is happening. A lot is implied and then <> left up for interpretation. I don't like that. Sometimes, I like to be told what is actually going on. And Cooper doesn't do that a lot here. But certainly, I have never read another book like this (yet). Sort of shows that you can really meditate on just about anything and make it your own story. There's a part (actually, there are a lot of parts) where the dad just watches the video game character of the bear sitting there idly, but as is the case in many modern video games, characters rarely ever sit there idly doing nothing, so he sort of zones out a lot (the dad) and ends up watching the video game character (a bear) do things like scratch his ass and huff & puff and then we are privy to his inner-musings. Overall, this is three and a half stars, but it was the classic, "More questions asked than answered." And I dunno, I guess I was more in the, "Let's get some answers here, please," camp, while reading this. Definitely going to have to revisit in the coming years. And now that I think about it some, the abrupt ending sort of definitely makes sense.
February 6, 2020
This is the first and only book of Dennis Cooper’s that I’ve read.
A lonely and damaged father tries to find meaning in his son’s premature accidental death by playing his favourite video game - from the son’s last save-point. Multiple narratives of self-loathing and distrust for the father’s new reality emerge, as his continued drug use and obsessive metaphorical explanations for in-game occurrences bleed into real world interactions. This spirals an ongoing mental unravelling that sees the father ascribe further meaning and symbolism to the virtual characters and occurrences of the game.
As the father’s reality drifts further from tangible grasp, the sparse writing and pointed prose see the reader question the nature of reality, and the authenticity of the narrator. Often completely heartbreaking, and sometimes confusing - both in no small part to the telegraph-style of delivery, I’ve loved this book.
Every page I’m hoping that the father finds another pathway or ‘continue’ to allow him to remain in escapism, cocooned in the soft, late-night glow of a Tv-Monitor, reflecting blue-light through a haze of thick smoke. The writing perfectly conveys an approaching crescendo of inescapable horror as the father drifts increasingly, and most dangerously close to being wrenched back to reality, releasing he is simply in his son’s room, playing video games, late at night, alone.
A lonely and damaged father tries to find meaning in his son’s premature accidental death by playing his favourite video game - from the son’s last save-point. Multiple narratives of self-loathing and distrust for the father’s new reality emerge, as his continued drug use and obsessive metaphorical explanations for in-game occurrences bleed into real world interactions. This spirals an ongoing mental unravelling that sees the father ascribe further meaning and symbolism to the virtual characters and occurrences of the game.
As the father’s reality drifts further from tangible grasp, the sparse writing and pointed prose see the reader question the nature of reality, and the authenticity of the narrator. Often completely heartbreaking, and sometimes confusing - both in no small part to the telegraph-style of delivery, I’ve loved this book.
Every page I’m hoping that the father finds another pathway or ‘continue’ to allow him to remain in escapism, cocooned in the soft, late-night glow of a Tv-Monitor, reflecting blue-light through a haze of thick smoke. The writing perfectly conveys an approaching crescendo of inescapable horror as the father drifts increasingly, and most dangerously close to being wrenched back to reality, releasing he is simply in his son’s room, playing video games, late at night, alone.
June 11, 2018
God Jr. is a highly audacious novel by Dennis Cooper that satirizes the grieving process some people go through after losing a loved one. It's the story of Jim Baxter, an obtuse pothead who loses his teenage son in an automobile accident, and decides to memorialize his son by building a ridiculous building based on a few sketches he doodled. It turns out the building was cribbed from a substandard video game Sonny played incessantly while stoned. Nintendo comes knocking threatening lawsuits!
Did I mention that the father constantly pressures his neighbor into giving up half his property so he can build this eyesore of a building, which also lacks an interior? The building is apparently so ugly that it's the neighborhood joke, visitors driving by taking photos of it and accidents occurring with cars slowing down in front of this architectural abortion.
The second half of the novel gets into some strange surrealism where Dad gets into the video game the "house" was cribbed from, and I think there are a few hints here that the son was a dimwit just like his father. I thought this was a pretty good novel to read before Father's Day.
Did I mention that the father constantly pressures his neighbor into giving up half his property so he can build this eyesore of a building, which also lacks an interior? The building is apparently so ugly that it's the neighborhood joke, visitors driving by taking photos of it and accidents occurring with cars slowing down in front of this architectural abortion.
The second half of the novel gets into some strange surrealism where Dad gets into the video game the "house" was cribbed from, and I think there are a few hints here that the son was a dimwit just like his father. I thought this was a pretty good novel to read before Father's Day.
February 27, 2015
Ok, so like not my favourite Dennis Cooper novel. It's kind of like he was trying not to write about the main thing he is obsessed with - sexviolence - to prove that he could. So we have all the stylistic concerns but they lack the same passion or obsession that drove them before. It's almost a response to the extreme excess of gross outs that is The Sluts.
What we're left with is an interesting exploration of grief that feels like it's missing something the whole time. Every page I was waiting for the main character to go online and find a hustler who looked like his dead son to have emotionally complicated and potentially violent sex with, but instead we got a bunch of intra-video game narrative that seemed to never end.
It was a good book but just not quite up to Dennis Cooper's usual quality.
What we're left with is an interesting exploration of grief that feels like it's missing something the whole time. Every page I was waiting for the main character to go online and find a hustler who looked like his dead son to have emotionally complicated and potentially violent sex with, but instead we got a bunch of intra-video game narrative that seemed to never end.
It was a good book but just not quite up to Dennis Cooper's usual quality.
July 15, 2024
”You wan’t to be inside that love, even if the ones who are hiding it are divorcing you or dead”
Dennis Cooper showing his veins and guts without putting up a wall, seeking shelter. A short but complete masterpiece.
Dennis Cooper showing his veins and guts without putting up a wall, seeking shelter. A short but complete masterpiece.
January 28, 2009
Ugh! This book is the reason why more kids are playing video games instead of reading.
July 28, 2022
TW: death of child, cheating, drugs, grief, depression
*****SPOILERS*****
About the book:God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son - at the expense of his job and marriage - but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?
Release Date: July 10th, 2005
Genre: lgbtq+ Fiction
Pages: 163
Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
What I Liked:
1. Short and to the point
2. Mention of The Cult (band)
What I Didn't Like:
1. The childish scrawl was weird & confusing
2. Last part of the book was boring
Overall Thoughts: Honestly I liked the first part of this book. I thought it was good and that it was going somewhere with meaning, but it just kind of petered out at the end. This one is about grief and depression and dealing with the loss of a child. Marianne spends the book talking about how she is over the death of her son all the while hiring psychics to reach him beyond the grave. Then Jim is retreating into the games his son loved to be connected to him. I get the reasonings and I get the plot but what I don’t get is the point.
Final Thoughts: I will continue to read his other books because he writes some really messed up stuff.
IG|Blog
*****SPOILERS*****
About the book:God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son - at the expense of his job and marriage - but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?
Release Date: July 10th, 2005
Genre: lgbtq+ Fiction
Pages: 163
Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
What I Liked:
1. Short and to the point
2. Mention of The Cult (band)
What I Didn't Like:
1. The childish scrawl was weird & confusing
2. Last part of the book was boring
Overall Thoughts: Honestly I liked the first part of this book. I thought it was good and that it was going somewhere with meaning, but it just kind of petered out at the end. This one is about grief and depression and dealing with the loss of a child. Marianne spends the book talking about how she is over the death of her son all the while hiring psychics to reach him beyond the grave. Then Jim is retreating into the games his son loved to be connected to him. I get the reasonings and I get the plot but what I don’t get is the point.
Final Thoughts: I will continue to read his other books because he writes some really messed up stuff.
IG|Blog
September 12, 2020
Sparse and bleak, but beautiful in its mastery of tone. Its short length made it digestible...any longer and you'd expect some turn around for the main character. But as is, we can leave him sinking further into his reality-denying hole.
This is my first Dennis Cooper, and I only heard of him because he was mentioned as an influence behind Pig Destroyer lyrics. Had to find out why, and I guess some of the author's more well-known forays into violence would fill out that particular grindcore image. Nonetheless, I can see strands of the same nihilistic DNA here.
Always loved the theme of obsession as escape, and what better escape pod for a grieving father than Banjo Kazooie?
This is my first Dennis Cooper, and I only heard of him because he was mentioned as an influence behind Pig Destroyer lyrics. Had to find out why, and I guess some of the author's more well-known forays into violence would fill out that particular grindcore image. Nonetheless, I can see strands of the same nihilistic DNA here.
Always loved the theme of obsession as escape, and what better escape pod for a grieving father than Banjo Kazooie?
January 14, 2023
“The last time I saw him, there was an ugly hole right there, and no other grave could compete. Now it’s just the same extremely smooth grass that squashes everyone.”
Piquant striker. Read overnight in a parking lot. Mixes the delirious, joyous whimsy of Animal Crossing with soul-wrenching loss of the maximum degree. Underlines our last ditch earnest triumph to pay homage and sacrifice what’s left of us, only to be scoffed at by an omniscient snowman.
“Let’s say the extremely smooth grass in cemeteries is fake grass, and there is no one and nothing underneath it.”
Piquant striker. Read overnight in a parking lot. Mixes the delirious, joyous whimsy of Animal Crossing with soul-wrenching loss of the maximum degree. Underlines our last ditch earnest triumph to pay homage and sacrifice what’s left of us, only to be scoffed at by an omniscient snowman.
“Let’s say the extremely smooth grass in cemeteries is fake grass, and there is no one and nothing underneath it.”
August 8, 2023
unfortunately didnt work for me as well as his other work, but that was bound to happen at some point :(
— “My program was simple, kill or be killed. I wasn’t meant to live forever. I wasn’t meant to think, consider, daydream, pontificate. I’m like an elderly athlete. This club I’m holding seems heavy, even if it isn’t. I’m so bored. We all are. If you have any mercy, erase this game and kill us. We’ll be fine. We’ll come back fresh and stupid and what you would call cheerful. It won’t be like killing your son. We won’t wander around bleeding and confused.”
— “My program was simple, kill or be killed. I wasn’t meant to live forever. I wasn’t meant to think, consider, daydream, pontificate. I’m like an elderly athlete. This club I’m holding seems heavy, even if it isn’t. I’m so bored. We all are. If you have any mercy, erase this game and kill us. We’ll be fine. We’ll come back fresh and stupid and what you would call cheerful. It won’t be like killing your son. We won’t wander around bleeding and confused.”
September 30, 2023
this proves he can do it all (as if it was ever a question)
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