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I Wished
“I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.”
For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer , Frisk , Try , Guide , and Period , collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.” In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.
For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer , Frisk , Try , Guide , and Period , collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.” In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2021
62 people are currently reading
4851 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
109 books1,796 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 291 reviews
June 13, 2024
More than twenty years after the last part of the George Miles Cycle, Cooper has published a coda that relies less on the subconscious, the hallucinatory and psychosexual affects, and takes a more direct approach to his love for his late friend George - or, at least as direct as it gets with a poet like Cooper. I loved the The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter-reference in Guide (#4 of the cycle), and in "I Wished", McCuller's masterpiece and the movie version serve as key texts to explain the dynamics between severely bipolar George and Dennis, who both long to connect on a deep level, but are fighting the circumstances (see: Try, my favorite part of the cycle). While never directly explaining the characters, motifs, themes and plot lines in the cycle, Cooper's meditation on the wish for love is revelatory for every single entry in the pentalogy.
In biographical passages like the axe wound inflicted on the author as a kid or his first meeting with George (all also chronicled in the outstanding research work Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, which appeared before "I Wished"), we get investigations into the beginning of the author's obsessions, like his wish journal, the stiff acting skills of the Schultz twins, and John Wayne Gacy's last victim, Robert Piest (hello, Closer). The passages about Cooper's wish for George to get healthy, for them to be able to be together, are devastating, as is his writing about the wish to pay tribute to George, and struggling to find a form that seems appropriate.
In the fictional passages, there are once more iterations of "George" and "Dennis" with connections to the cycle, but everything becomes less hallucinatory and more surreal. "George" appears as the son of a Russian gymnast, he hears from Santa Claus about being an invention and gifting, he chats with the Roden Crater about being turned into art, all while "Dennis" tries to love the fictional versions of George.
This is probably the strangest eulogy to a dead lover ever written, and I love the warped poetic force and how it relates to the cycle. So sad, so disturbing, so powerful.
In biographical passages like the axe wound inflicted on the author as a kid or his first meeting with George (all also chronicled in the outstanding research work Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, which appeared before "I Wished"), we get investigations into the beginning of the author's obsessions, like his wish journal, the stiff acting skills of the Schultz twins, and John Wayne Gacy's last victim, Robert Piest (hello, Closer). The passages about Cooper's wish for George to get healthy, for them to be able to be together, are devastating, as is his writing about the wish to pay tribute to George, and struggling to find a form that seems appropriate.
In the fictional passages, there are once more iterations of "George" and "Dennis" with connections to the cycle, but everything becomes less hallucinatory and more surreal. "George" appears as the son of a Russian gymnast, he hears from Santa Claus about being an invention and gifting, he chats with the Roden Crater about being turned into art, all while "Dennis" tries to love the fictional versions of George.
This is probably the strangest eulogy to a dead lover ever written, and I love the warped poetic force and how it relates to the cycle. So sad, so disturbing, so powerful.
September 17, 2021
I can't add to the other reviews. This is Dennis Cooper's most vulnerable and painful novel.
September 15, 2021
a satisfying coda to the George Miles cycle, twenty years later. Cooper truly at his most vulnerable here.
I interviewed Dennis Cooper about this book over at AnOther.
I interviewed Dennis Cooper about this book over at AnOther.
July 22, 2022
this book is so my type.
August 16, 2021
Dennis Cooper's I Wished is an ode to a beloved who was never able to love him back.
Dennis met George when he was 15 and George was 12. George, a kid with a messed up home life and an ungrounded understanding of himself, wrestled with mental illness from the moment he had a sense of himself. Meanwhile Dennis finds himself falling in love with George, sacrificing everything for him, but in a way that can't be returned - either because of George's mental illness, his inability to love, or just simply his inability to reciprocate Dennis' love. Dennis moves on and tragedy strikes George - but Dennis only learns of this tragedy ten years later. As a result, Dennis spends the rest of his life using his writing to attempt to turn George into an understandable being; he writes book after book about George to explain him, to design him in a way that is understandable to Dennis.
What unravels in I Wished is typical of Dennis Cooper in that it blends extreme surrealistic fiction with reality. Cooper's writing puts readers at unease as they consider how connected they feel to a story that is dark and haunting. Dennis' feeling for George, after all, is not so unique: so many of us have loved a beloved who for some reason or other robs us of reciprocity. And who we spend the rest of our lives recreating in our own minds in order to explain why they never quite loved us back.
Dennis met George when he was 15 and George was 12. George, a kid with a messed up home life and an ungrounded understanding of himself, wrestled with mental illness from the moment he had a sense of himself. Meanwhile Dennis finds himself falling in love with George, sacrificing everything for him, but in a way that can't be returned - either because of George's mental illness, his inability to love, or just simply his inability to reciprocate Dennis' love. Dennis moves on and tragedy strikes George - but Dennis only learns of this tragedy ten years later. As a result, Dennis spends the rest of his life using his writing to attempt to turn George into an understandable being; he writes book after book about George to explain him, to design him in a way that is understandable to Dennis.
What unravels in I Wished is typical of Dennis Cooper in that it blends extreme surrealistic fiction with reality. Cooper's writing puts readers at unease as they consider how connected they feel to a story that is dark and haunting. Dennis' feeling for George, after all, is not so unique: so many of us have loved a beloved who for some reason or other robs us of reciprocity. And who we spend the rest of our lives recreating in our own minds in order to explain why they never quite loved us back.
October 6, 2021
I pretty much read this book in one reading session, and unlike other books, I want to re-read it again, like right now. The prose is profoundly perfect, and Dennis really captures the essence of lost moments that become a vital force in itself. A homage to George Miles, or more likely the importance of such a figure in Dennis Cooper's life and work. It's a beautiful meditation. There are writers that one can study and learn from. I think of PG Wodehouse and Richard Stark's crime novels. I would add Dennis Cooper to that list as well. Of course, these writers don't have anything in common (or do they?) but in their excellence and how they tell the tale, with their skill as prose artists. I recommend this book highly.
September 25, 2021
After more than thirty years of writing fiction he has likened to the decomposing corpse of his friend, lover, and muse George Miles, Dennis Cooper attempts to finally tell the truth in I Wished. But pure honesty, Cooper quickly discovers, is both too boring and too devastating to look at directly. The novel quickly descends into surrealist autofiction — you can read the cylinders of Cooper's brain firing in all directions as it tries to make meaning out of George by repeating it's old tricks, reimagining the many Georges he could've been and was. Cooper digs into all of his most emblematic obsessions — the life and death of George Miles, the childhood accident that left Cooper's skull cracked out, the glassy-eyed boys whose lack of personality captured Cooper's young erotic imagination, and the impulse to murder — but with a new clarity afforded by speaking in the "I."
You'd think, after spending two thirds of my life reading his work, that it would lose some of its sheen, and you'd be wrong. Couldn't put it down.
You'd think, after spending two thirds of my life reading his work, that it would lose some of its sheen, and you'd be wrong. Couldn't put it down.
October 2, 2021
A mixture of fiction and non fiction….
Interesting in a neutral way ….
The parts I liked best is when the author writes about Alan Arkin in the movie in “The Heart of a Lonely Hunter”.
“How could someone like him die without a single friend or member of his family ever putting up a tribute page or even mentioning his name in tweaks or Facebook posts, even on his birthday or on his death day’s anniversary or even randomly in reference to something in their lives or art that brought his memory to mind”.
Interesting in a neutral way ….
The parts I liked best is when the author writes about Alan Arkin in the movie in “The Heart of a Lonely Hunter”.
“How could someone like him die without a single friend or member of his family ever putting up a tribute page or even mentioning his name in tweaks or Facebook posts, even on his birthday or on his death day’s anniversary or even randomly in reference to something in their lives or art that brought his memory to mind”.
June 27, 2024
2024 update: i have no idea how i was sitting in my dorm just reading this like it was fine. i sobbed so much no author has cut this close to me ever i think 😃
— "This is a novel that only wants to really, really matter to him in the hope that, if it does, that'll mean he loves me too because he'll know I could do anything I want right now, and I wrote this.
I worship the flowing lava and whatever else a billion years ago that eventually formed the ground he walks on."
2023: by far one of the most painful reading experiences i've had
— “I’ll try to answer you,” George said, “but first, and I’m not sure how to ask you this, or if the question is rhetorical, but are you the artwork, or are you just the crater where it’s situated?”
— "This is a novel that only wants to really, really matter to him in the hope that, if it does, that'll mean he loves me too because he'll know I could do anything I want right now, and I wrote this.
I worship the flowing lava and whatever else a billion years ago that eventually formed the ground he walks on."
2023: by far one of the most painful reading experiences i've had
— “I’ll try to answer you,” George said, “but first, and I’m not sure how to ask you this, or if the question is rhetorical, but are you the artwork, or are you just the crater where it’s situated?”
January 9, 2022
can't really talk about this and what it meant to me without talking about my own grief and i just don't feel like doing that at the moment. but that aside, you could pull any one sentence from this book and it will probably be gold. beautiful work
December 24, 2021
It’s his most honest book, and consequently his most painful, though of course all the books that have preceded it had their fair share of honesty and pain. The thing that sets I Wished apart is that its subject is mostly stripped bare of the wild fantasies and formal denseness found in Cooper’s earlier novels; while it’s clearly not a memoir or even a non-fiction book, and takes place very much within a literary imagination (with all the attendant surrealism, horror, and sparing humor), it doesn’t hide its aims, and the core essence, for once, is very clear and truthful. It’s just a deep, vulnerable, profoundly sincere meditation on the love Cooper felt and continues to feel for his friend George Miles, the love that stands at the root of his whole artistic project and the grief that has come to define it, and also (this is more typical of Cooper) an interrogation of the capacity of art to make sense of suffering. That he manages to communicate the intensity of his love within the space of less than 150 pages, along the way employing such varied devices as Santa Claus and the Roden Crater, is a testament to the stylistic wizardry he has basically perfected over the 32-odd years since Closer was published. A beautiful, generous, devastating novel.
Reread from December 21st to 24th, 2021: my original review belies the actual formal complexity of the text, which is as dense and strange and kaleidoscopic as any of Cooper’s novelistic experiments. But it’s such a perfectly translucent construction (though not without its secrets, of course) that the emotion comes through as powerfully and resoundingly as if you were reading someone else’s love letter.
Reread from December 21st to 24th, 2021: my original review belies the actual formal complexity of the text, which is as dense and strange and kaleidoscopic as any of Cooper’s novelistic experiments. But it’s such a perfectly translucent construction (though not without its secrets, of course) that the emotion comes through as powerfully and resoundingly as if you were reading someone else’s love letter.
August 8, 2021
This was pretty pretentious, and I don’t say that lightly. I couldn’t tell if it was Cooper speaking sometimes or George. This felt like it was a journal that should have stayed on their personal shelf because it is more or less a discombobulated mess of stories intersecting and having no ending. And when it wasn’t that it was just pages of random thoughts. It gave me Rupi Kapur Vibes 🤢 I could skip a few paragraphs and still have no idea what he was talking about. It just felt so PRETENTIOUS, like he was trying so hard to make us sympathize for George. He did absolutely nothing to convince us George was a great person despite his flaws. This was the longest 125 page book I’ve ever had to read.
September 19, 2021
Cooper isn’t known for his writing’s warmth, and rightfully so. But as he’s aged, I’ve noticed it seeping into his work in more and more pronounced ways, and I think I Wished represents the grand culmination of that growth. Never fear though — this novel isn’t sappy or traditionally sentimental, but more than any of his other works it manages to strike a satisfying balance between his darker, colder, melancholic, violent(ly sexual) tendencies and that elusive thing I’ll refer to as genuine human feeling. As a longtime Cooper reader, I can honestly say I was completely caught off guard by this one in the best possible way. For all of its tragedy and regret, it stands as a genuinely beautiful and moving work.
Five stars with the caveat that I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting place for a new Cooper reader. Do yourself a favor and save this one until you’ve at least worked your way through the George Miles Cycle.
Highly recommended.
Five stars with the caveat that I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting place for a new Cooper reader. Do yourself a favor and save this one until you’ve at least worked your way through the George Miles Cycle.
Highly recommended.
April 10, 2022
dennis cooper is a beautiful writer. this novel is work of art. each chapter is a story wrapped within itself. it’s interesting and heartbreaking
i wanted to read from him for a while now and saw this available at my library. definitely not what i originally planned to pick up from him but i’m glad i did read this. it was insanely relatable at times. with having bpd i’ve always had soul crushing ‘loves’ for others and saw a lot of myself in this work.
i wanted to read from him for a while now and saw this available at my library. definitely not what i originally planned to pick up from him but i’m glad i did read this. it was insanely relatable at times. with having bpd i’ve always had soul crushing ‘loves’ for others and saw a lot of myself in this work.
February 15, 2025
'I Wished' is a beautiful and moving celebration of love. Not the facile celebration of cliches but a dive into a confrontation with love as something essential but, which even a lifetime is not sufficient time to be sure what any it means to be in love or what someone means when they say they are in love us.
Before proceeding with my review I have to say something about sex and violence in the work of Dennis Cooper. I have said much of it in other reviews so I am indicating the piece at the beginning and end with 'Sex & Violence in the Work of Dennis Cooper' and placed it with '[]' so it can easily be skipped over if you want or feel you already know my views.
['Sex and Violence in the Work of Dennis Cooper':
Almost every GR review and 'mainstream' media review of the fiction of Dennis Cooper will mention the 'high' level of 'graphic' and/or 'disturbing/transgressive' descriptions of sex and violence in his books. What is interesting is that reviewers in the 'New York Times Review of Books', 'Times Literary Supplement', 'London Review of Books', Literary Review' and publications like the (UK) Spectator Magazine and the literary pages of newspapers like the 'Guardian' and 'Independent' always comment on much or how much graphic the 'gay' sex there is, not only in the work of Dennis Cooper, but writers like David Leavitt or Alan Hollingsworth, neither of whom have ever written a 'transgressive' sentence never mind a novel. You will never find this 'health warning' applied to descriptions of heterosexual sex (please see my footnote *1 below) because the complaint about 'graphic' descriptions of gay sex is a homophobic complaint and is being made by those who want gays to shut-up and go back into the closet were they belong and stop frightening the straits with alternate to the capitalist heteronormative monopoly on how-to-behave.
Interestingly if you are looking for descriptions of sexual acts like riming or fist fucking or plain old blow-jobs as well as detailed enumeration of penise length and width you would need to read David Leavitt, Alan Hollingsworth or Edmund White (see my footnote *2 below). There is plenty of sex in Dennis Cooper's novels, what there isn't is descriptions of sex. Although there are descriptions of violence in many of Cooper's novels is, compared to recent Scandinavian police/crime novels, vestigial. The very minimalism of the violence in Cooper's work is what makes it so powerful. I still remember the effect the 45 words he used to describe the murder of the boy in the story 'Wrong' (see my footnote *3 below). Cooper used no adjectives and didn't strive for effect with Technicolor gore. But its impact on me as the reader was immediate and devastating because it was simple, honest and true (of course to achieve something 'simple, honest and true' requires a tremendous skill and discipline.]
I have loved the work of Dennis Cooper since encountering back in the 1990s and in 2024 reread the George Miles cycle and posted reviews on all the novels. Clearly 'I Wished' is related to the cycle but whether it is coda is a matter for literary scholars. It adds depths to the cycle because it is, because it is so many things: Cooper's attempt to reach out to George Miles older brother and sister who were once Cooper's friends but who has long contact with; an attempt to come to terms with how little what he has written about George Miles has to do with the real George and finally to understand what exactly his love for George is.
Of course I believe a huge part of all Cooper's writing is about 'love' but also the inadequacies of language to say anything real about love. I think 'I Wished' follows on from 'Period' (the fifth and final novel in the George Miles cycle). In the course of an interview at the time of the publication of 'I Wished' (see: https://diacritik.com/2022/04/13/para...) he reveals that the boy on the cover of 'Period' is George Miles (and I have checked my copy of this novel and this was nowhere acknowledged at the time) and there is another photograph of George Miles reproduced in this interview. When you see these pictures it makes George Miles real and he is the 'type' that Cooper describes and used various young actors and musicians as stand-ins for George in previous novels. I also think that Cooper is recognising that turning George Miles into art he has successfully banished, or overlaid, the real George so much that he doesn't any more. Maybe that is why he publishes the pictures to give George some reality. But also Cooper is struggling with what he said in 'Period':
'...you can't predict with teenagers. They're still developing. They're just human transitions...'
George never made the transition.
There are huge depths to this immensely short novel. He draws parallels with 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' but denies remembering the novel and misremembers the film (but does he really not remember that John Singer in the novel and film is deaf? That is like reading or seeing the film of The Wizard of Oz and forgetting the ruby slippers). What he doesn't mention, and I find it impossible to believe he doesn't know (Though no other reviewer I have read who mentions Cooper's use of 'The Heart is a lonely Hunter' has noticed it) is that John Singer has a friend, Spiros Antonapoulos, who becomes mentally ill and is placed in asylum. That Singer is in love with Antonapoulos is made clear in the novel, but not the film. Singer can't save or help his friend and in the end Spiros Antonapoulos dies in the asylum and Singer, isn't there, doesn't know till afterwards. The parallels with Cooper and George Miles are so obvious that I can't believe that Cooper isn't being disingenuous with his lack of acknowledgement.
But maybe there was only so much of his soul Cooper could reveal. 'Long after learning of Miles’s death, Cooper was still deeply affected by it. In Cooper’s interview for The Paris Review with his former agent Ira Silverberg in 2011, Silverberg writes, “When we talked about his friend George Miles, Cooper broke into tears; it was the first time I had ever seen him cry.”' (from an interview in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/article/cul...).
Rather than talk about the novel I would recommend reading some of the interviews with Denis Cooper (see my footnote at *4 below). Cooper is unique, in my experience, as the only much interviewed author who does not have a prepared spiel or shtick that he regurgitates at each interview. All his interviews are unique and worth reading.
'I Wished' is wonderful, moving, fascinating and Cooper is the writer people in a hundred years will be reading still.
*1 There is a UK 'Bad Sex in Fiction Award' given by the 'Literary Review' but this an award for 'bad' as opposed to good descriptive writing about sex from a literary perspective.
*2 in his 2008 'Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel' White spends almost as much time on trying to convince readers that Rimbaud was the 'top' (see my review of the book at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...) which, if you read any of Dennis Cooper's numerous posts about Rimbaud on his blog, is never mentioned or explored.
*3 From Dennis Cooper's 1992 short story collection 'Wrong'.
*4 Academic paper on George Miles and the novel 'Closer':
https://publicera.kb.se/mosp/article/...
Interview in The Paris Review:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...
Interview with Dennis Cooper in 2021 at publication of 'I Wished' in The Nation:
2023 Interview with Dennis Cooper about 'I Wished' and George Miles
https://www.neroeditions.com/is-it-so...
from which I highlight the following:
'First, I Wished is not part of the George Miles Cycle. I intend it as a separate book that isn’t connected to the Cycle. That’s interesting about you thinking that it’s connected to I Apologize. I think there’s some truth there, although I’ve never thought about the two as being related before. As for why I wrote it, there were a number of reasons. One thing is that I had never written a novel that used my own autobiography and displayed my personal emotions in a naked way. I had written novels that used my life in a disguised way, and obviously my emotions have informed my novels’ emotional life always, but I hadn’t tackled myself in a novel. I thought I should challenge myself and do that. And because I always try to novels that are difficult for me in some way, I decided if I was going to write about myself, I should write about something in my life and feelings that is very hard for me to think about and deal with, and that was George—him, our friendship, and his death.
'I also wanted to portray George in my work in a way that was true to who he really was because the character George Miles in the Cycle did not reflect his actual life in any way. I guess I wanted the people who only knew George from the Cycle to know who he was as a person and maybe come to understand in some way why I had written those books for him. I didn’t see writing the novel as therapeutic, just as a very hard challenge to me emotionally and artistically. I can’t say that it was cathartic to write it. I think when someone you love commits suicide, there is no way to resolve that. That kind of death is permanently confusing and mysterious and haunting. So, in that sense, I don’t think writing I Wished resolved anything for me. Like I said, 'I Wished' is not part of the Cycle.'
Excellent review from An Other Magazine (biannual):
https://www.anothermag.com/design-liv...
Another fine review with Cooper, particularly interesting for what he says about the AIDs crisis/era:
https://www.novembermag.com/content/d...
Before proceeding with my review I have to say something about sex and violence in the work of Dennis Cooper. I have said much of it in other reviews so I am indicating the piece at the beginning and end with 'Sex & Violence in the Work of Dennis Cooper' and placed it with '[]' so it can easily be skipped over if you want or feel you already know my views.
['Sex and Violence in the Work of Dennis Cooper':
Almost every GR review and 'mainstream' media review of the fiction of Dennis Cooper will mention the 'high' level of 'graphic' and/or 'disturbing/transgressive' descriptions of sex and violence in his books. What is interesting is that reviewers in the 'New York Times Review of Books', 'Times Literary Supplement', 'London Review of Books', Literary Review' and publications like the (UK) Spectator Magazine and the literary pages of newspapers like the 'Guardian' and 'Independent' always comment on much or how much graphic the 'gay' sex there is, not only in the work of Dennis Cooper, but writers like David Leavitt or Alan Hollingsworth, neither of whom have ever written a 'transgressive' sentence never mind a novel. You will never find this 'health warning' applied to descriptions of heterosexual sex (please see my footnote *1 below) because the complaint about 'graphic' descriptions of gay sex is a homophobic complaint and is being made by those who want gays to shut-up and go back into the closet were they belong and stop frightening the straits with alternate to the capitalist heteronormative monopoly on how-to-behave.
Interestingly if you are looking for descriptions of sexual acts like riming or fist fucking or plain old blow-jobs as well as detailed enumeration of penise length and width you would need to read David Leavitt, Alan Hollingsworth or Edmund White (see my footnote *2 below). There is plenty of sex in Dennis Cooper's novels, what there isn't is descriptions of sex. Although there are descriptions of violence in many of Cooper's novels is, compared to recent Scandinavian police/crime novels, vestigial. The very minimalism of the violence in Cooper's work is what makes it so powerful. I still remember the effect the 45 words he used to describe the murder of the boy in the story 'Wrong' (see my footnote *3 below). Cooper used no adjectives and didn't strive for effect with Technicolor gore. But its impact on me as the reader was immediate and devastating because it was simple, honest and true (of course to achieve something 'simple, honest and true' requires a tremendous skill and discipline.]
I have loved the work of Dennis Cooper since encountering back in the 1990s and in 2024 reread the George Miles cycle and posted reviews on all the novels. Clearly 'I Wished' is related to the cycle but whether it is coda is a matter for literary scholars. It adds depths to the cycle because it is, because it is so many things: Cooper's attempt to reach out to George Miles older brother and sister who were once Cooper's friends but who has long contact with; an attempt to come to terms with how little what he has written about George Miles has to do with the real George and finally to understand what exactly his love for George is.
Of course I believe a huge part of all Cooper's writing is about 'love' but also the inadequacies of language to say anything real about love. I think 'I Wished' follows on from 'Period' (the fifth and final novel in the George Miles cycle). In the course of an interview at the time of the publication of 'I Wished' (see: https://diacritik.com/2022/04/13/para...) he reveals that the boy on the cover of 'Period' is George Miles (and I have checked my copy of this novel and this was nowhere acknowledged at the time) and there is another photograph of George Miles reproduced in this interview. When you see these pictures it makes George Miles real and he is the 'type' that Cooper describes and used various young actors and musicians as stand-ins for George in previous novels. I also think that Cooper is recognising that turning George Miles into art he has successfully banished, or overlaid, the real George so much that he doesn't any more. Maybe that is why he publishes the pictures to give George some reality. But also Cooper is struggling with what he said in 'Period':
'...you can't predict with teenagers. They're still developing. They're just human transitions...'
George never made the transition.
There are huge depths to this immensely short novel. He draws parallels with 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' but denies remembering the novel and misremembers the film (but does he really not remember that John Singer in the novel and film is deaf? That is like reading or seeing the film of The Wizard of Oz and forgetting the ruby slippers). What he doesn't mention, and I find it impossible to believe he doesn't know (Though no other reviewer I have read who mentions Cooper's use of 'The Heart is a lonely Hunter' has noticed it) is that John Singer has a friend, Spiros Antonapoulos, who becomes mentally ill and is placed in asylum. That Singer is in love with Antonapoulos is made clear in the novel, but not the film. Singer can't save or help his friend and in the end Spiros Antonapoulos dies in the asylum and Singer, isn't there, doesn't know till afterwards. The parallels with Cooper and George Miles are so obvious that I can't believe that Cooper isn't being disingenuous with his lack of acknowledgement.
But maybe there was only so much of his soul Cooper could reveal. 'Long after learning of Miles’s death, Cooper was still deeply affected by it. In Cooper’s interview for The Paris Review with his former agent Ira Silverberg in 2011, Silverberg writes, “When we talked about his friend George Miles, Cooper broke into tears; it was the first time I had ever seen him cry.”' (from an interview in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/article/cul...).
Rather than talk about the novel I would recommend reading some of the interviews with Denis Cooper (see my footnote at *4 below). Cooper is unique, in my experience, as the only much interviewed author who does not have a prepared spiel or shtick that he regurgitates at each interview. All his interviews are unique and worth reading.
'I Wished' is wonderful, moving, fascinating and Cooper is the writer people in a hundred years will be reading still.
*1 There is a UK 'Bad Sex in Fiction Award' given by the 'Literary Review' but this an award for 'bad' as opposed to good descriptive writing about sex from a literary perspective.
*2 in his 2008 'Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel' White spends almost as much time on trying to convince readers that Rimbaud was the 'top' (see my review of the book at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...) which, if you read any of Dennis Cooper's numerous posts about Rimbaud on his blog, is never mentioned or explored.
*3 From Dennis Cooper's 1992 short story collection 'Wrong'.
*4 Academic paper on George Miles and the novel 'Closer':
https://publicera.kb.se/mosp/article/...
Interview in The Paris Review:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...
Interview with Dennis Cooper in 2021 at publication of 'I Wished' in The Nation:
2023 Interview with Dennis Cooper about 'I Wished' and George Miles
https://www.neroeditions.com/is-it-so...
from which I highlight the following:
'First, I Wished is not part of the George Miles Cycle. I intend it as a separate book that isn’t connected to the Cycle. That’s interesting about you thinking that it’s connected to I Apologize. I think there’s some truth there, although I’ve never thought about the two as being related before. As for why I wrote it, there were a number of reasons. One thing is that I had never written a novel that used my own autobiography and displayed my personal emotions in a naked way. I had written novels that used my life in a disguised way, and obviously my emotions have informed my novels’ emotional life always, but I hadn’t tackled myself in a novel. I thought I should challenge myself and do that. And because I always try to novels that are difficult for me in some way, I decided if I was going to write about myself, I should write about something in my life and feelings that is very hard for me to think about and deal with, and that was George—him, our friendship, and his death.
'I also wanted to portray George in my work in a way that was true to who he really was because the character George Miles in the Cycle did not reflect his actual life in any way. I guess I wanted the people who only knew George from the Cycle to know who he was as a person and maybe come to understand in some way why I had written those books for him. I didn’t see writing the novel as therapeutic, just as a very hard challenge to me emotionally and artistically. I can’t say that it was cathartic to write it. I think when someone you love commits suicide, there is no way to resolve that. That kind of death is permanently confusing and mysterious and haunting. So, in that sense, I don’t think writing I Wished resolved anything for me. Like I said, 'I Wished' is not part of the Cycle.'
Excellent review from An Other Magazine (biannual):
https://www.anothermag.com/design-liv...
Another fine review with Cooper, particularly interesting for what he says about the AIDs crisis/era:
https://www.novembermag.com/content/d...
April 28, 2022
*2.5*
Mhmmm, la verdad no se como sentirme al respecto, porque la verdad no entendí muy bien que quería hacer este libro.
Por lo que investigué, Dennis Cooper se enamoró de George Miles hace muchos años y se entero que este se habá quitado la vida 10 años después de que sucedió. Luego, le escribió 5 libros que son el "George Miles' Cycle" donde trataba de enmendar su imagen a través de diferentes representaciones en los años 90. I Wished es el primer libro después de 20 años que habla de George.
¿Por qué digo todo esto? Porque no se si no entendí ente libro por no haber leído los otros 5.
Cuando leí la sinopsis en Scribd me esperaba algo completamente distinto, más al estilo Lie With Me, pero no fue así. Tiene una estructura muy rara, ya que al mismo tiempo mezcla la no ficción con la ficción y la línea que las separa es muy delgada. Había veces donde estaba completamente perdido y no sé que era real y que no.
Es un libro que creo llega a rozar lo pretencioso pero me gustó mucho como estaba escrito. Lastima que la historia en sí no me hay encantado tanto.
Medio raro. Lo más seguro es que nunca vuelva a pensar en él tbh.
Mhmmm, la verdad no se como sentirme al respecto, porque la verdad no entendí muy bien que quería hacer este libro.
Por lo que investigué, Dennis Cooper se enamoró de George Miles hace muchos años y se entero que este se habá quitado la vida 10 años después de que sucedió. Luego, le escribió 5 libros que son el "George Miles' Cycle" donde trataba de enmendar su imagen a través de diferentes representaciones en los años 90. I Wished es el primer libro después de 20 años que habla de George.
¿Por qué digo todo esto? Porque no se si no entendí ente libro por no haber leído los otros 5.
Cuando leí la sinopsis en Scribd me esperaba algo completamente distinto, más al estilo Lie With Me, pero no fue así. Tiene una estructura muy rara, ya que al mismo tiempo mezcla la no ficción con la ficción y la línea que las separa es muy delgada. Había veces donde estaba completamente perdido y no sé que era real y que no.
Es un libro que creo llega a rozar lo pretencioso pero me gustó mucho como estaba escrito. Lastima que la historia en sí no me hay encantado tanto.
Medio raro. Lo más seguro es que nunca vuelva a pensar en él tbh.
April 10, 2023
This book feels like I am sitting in my room and suddenly i realize I’m not in my room and my things are not my things and my bed is not my bed and the underwear in the drawer is not my underwear and there’s a man sitting besides me and his name is dennis cooper and I realize this room is his room and I’ve walked into his room thinking it was mine because his room looks so similar to mine and suddenly I can see everything he is and every thought that has crossed his mind because it’s like I’ve found myself inside his head and that to get out i have to crawl out his ear only to look back and realize that there was something familiar about his room but its not my room and then I as I’m crawling out I make sure to be soft because I don’t want to break the fragile inside of his head on my way out just in case
March 7, 2022
I have been a fan of Dennis Cooper ever since a friend recommended The Sluts to me. This is a deeply sad and tender book, and probably his most intimate. It is rare to have a romance and a passion for a lover like Dennis had for George, but it can be as horrible as it is beautiful, and it fractures a person's psyche permanently.
Most of Cooper's writing is experimental and fractured, but he really allowed himself to feel and express himself with a rare kind of sincerity.
Most of Cooper's writing is experimental and fractured, but he really allowed himself to feel and express himself with a rare kind of sincerity.
March 2, 2022
“I worship the flowing lava and whatever else a billion years ago that eventually formed the ground he walks on.”
I Wished by Dennis Cooper is a love letter from the author to George Miles. Truth is that I was not familiar with any of Dennis Cooper’s previous work before picking this one up. I simply walked into Epilogue Books in Chapel Hill, NC and found this. The cover is minimal but beautiful (I love the line work) and the cover under the dust jacket is a wonderful minty color. It’s also one of those books that for some reason smells amazing so I had to sniff it multiple times while reading. 😄
The book contains a few short stories that are all in some way or another about George. Some harder to read than others as they describe George’s mental health issues and abusive childhood. Some a bit too weird for my taste (like the Santa one).
In its core, I Wished is a book about love and loss and how loves as great as this stay with us and accompany us for the rest of our lives.
I Wished by Dennis Cooper is a love letter from the author to George Miles. Truth is that I was not familiar with any of Dennis Cooper’s previous work before picking this one up. I simply walked into Epilogue Books in Chapel Hill, NC and found this. The cover is minimal but beautiful (I love the line work) and the cover under the dust jacket is a wonderful minty color. It’s also one of those books that for some reason smells amazing so I had to sniff it multiple times while reading. 😄
The book contains a few short stories that are all in some way or another about George. Some harder to read than others as they describe George’s mental health issues and abusive childhood. Some a bit too weird for my taste (like the Santa one).
In its core, I Wished is a book about love and loss and how loves as great as this stay with us and accompany us for the rest of our lives.
August 10, 2024
Brilliant. After finishing a scattershot, 2-year reading of the five novels that form the George Miles cycle - and really enjoying and being wowed by most of it - this one manages to transcend the others. It’s a beautiful book, I would go so far as to say it’s a perfect book.
October 3, 2021
It's hard to blame the many reviews that talk about a book with a touching level of transparency and emotion, but don't get mistaken: one of the most interesting sides of the book is the relationship between the individual George Miles and the impetus he gave in shaping Cooper's narrative voice. The idea of speaking with a "void", the imbalance, the impossibility of reciprocity is not described literally but through a series of allegorical and fictional vignettes. Certainly much closer to Cooper's latest literary experiments—the language is more laconic than Marbled Swarm though—than to the author's most celebrated books. Those of the "cycle" precisely.
November 8, 2021
I’ve never seen a by writer wear desperation on their sleeve that long, without wincing or looking away.
July 29, 2022
This book would seem like it would be better suited to be read in the context of the George Miles Cycle, but it works very well on it's own. Raw, confessional, and deeply personal. It makes me want to finally get around to reading Cooper's Cycle.
December 31, 2021
This is really outstanding. Dennis Cooper takes the artifice of fiction as a given and transforms it into a dark, wandering confession, a confounding tribute to his love and incapacity featuring Santa Claus, James Turrell, sentient craters, John Wayne Gacy, etc. “A novel” here is misleading in all the best ways, an opening rather than an enclosure. Amazing.
November 3, 2021
Reminded me of friends who mean so much to me that I can't just describe them with a couple of words, but instead have to explain them with stories. They can be (intentionally) inaccessible and muddled and contradictory, but the stories Dennis Cooper tells about George Miles come from a thorough appreciation and consuming love, both of which kept me reading and thinking.
January 29, 2024
Very lucid writing- like it’s always warping and you’re not entirely sure what’s happening or who is actually the character for the story. Like at one point a prairie dog is talking to a crater or Santa is giving someone a gun if that sums it up. It all kind of makes sense- it’s a book about grief- I just didn’t enjoy it a whole lot but someone who enjoys more metaphorical and symbolic writing and less story would. The ending wraps up really well though and it was interesting to read another book by Cooper after Sluts since Sluts is written in such a unique way.
September 19, 2021
Dennis Cooper remains one of the most challenging, disturbing, and mind-bending living writers of the last century. To see him get so personal about the unrequited love that inspired his fiction, especially after being witness to that journey for more then twenty years, was difficult to endure. My first published paper (Watermark 2016) was about Cooper's George Miles cycle of novels--the same George Miles he writes about here so intimately, and intimidatingly, in creative memoir form. What a gift. Cooper is still one of my favorites, and I still can't recommend him to anyone else.
September 16, 2021
“I’m an artist. I look at everything artistically. It’s easier that way.” (120)
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I was obsessed with Cooper’s work when I was in college. I loved the writing on bodies and sex and art. This newest work is a great summary of Cooper’s work, The George Miles Cycle specifically. Part memoir, part essay collection, part reimagining of what has come before. Pure Cooper!
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I was obsessed with Cooper’s work when I was in college. I loved the writing on bodies and sex and art. This newest work is a great summary of Cooper’s work, The George Miles Cycle specifically. Part memoir, part essay collection, part reimagining of what has come before. Pure Cooper!
October 1, 2021
Cooper's best & most brilliant hall of mirrors yet
October 2, 2021
De liefste destructie.
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