Hellooooo my friends. I turned 32 on Friday. I’ve been vegan for half my life now and straight edge for all of it. I don’t even do caffeine like a bunch of other posers. My birthday was fun. I went to this badass Szechuan spot with Quinn and a few friends and subscribers. I had coconut cake and Quinn bought me a new wallet and a hood for my Barbour coat. Mose sent me a S HORTY S shirt and Arak and Justine sent me a bunch of cookies and an Aunt Sally patch.
My birthday wish is that a bunch of friends subscribe to my newsletter. If you’re friends with my friends, feel free to tell them about it.
This book review is about Dennis Cooper’s 5-book George Miles Cycle as well as his recent novel I Wished which, while not part of the cycle, acts as a coda to it. If you’re unfamiliar, you may want to skip this one. The content of Cooper’s novels are unsavory, to say the least. Think Sade, Bataille, etc. I absolutely refrain from writing about the things that some friends may not want to be read about because I myself have no desire or even ability to try to write about such things, so it’s safe to continue but still...
My hesitant review of Closer, is located here.
Frisk by Dennis Cooper (George Miles Cycle #2)
Frisk opens the George Miles Cycle up. Whereas Closer was a series of vignettes of high school boys and their obsessions, fantasies, and problems, Frisk admits the ‘I’ of the author. The distance instituted in Closer is thus removed. In fact, it’s obliterated.
Cooper not only admits the ‘I’ but also admits that the distinction between third- and first- person narration is itself a work of fiction. The third person is an object. Orthodox moments of third-person narration are perverted by the introduction of first-person singular pronouns: “he was thinking of me.” (I should have noted more of these sentences as some of them were extremely unsettling and my example doesn’t really seem all that out of the ordinary.) These moments of omnipotent first-person narration acknowledge the fetish of control that is inherent in most writing. All fiction is fantasy.
Frisk continues the curious mix of sadism and empathy that Cooper began in Closer. To me, I was able to find more of those moments of kindness and love, which softened the harder moments, allowing me to remind myself that those challenging moments were fantasy and not fact. Dennis is not just an unreliable narrator, but a narrator you really don’t want to believe.
Try by Dennis Cooper (George Miles Cycle #3)
Try is supposed to be the emotional beating heart at the center of the cycle. Here we see the fictionalized version of the author split into several different characters. All the key characteristics are embodied in a unique character, each of whom has his own relationship with the cute, traumatized, bipolar version of George that is, in this book, named Ziggy.
Calhoun, the version of Cooper who is a writer and a junkie with his own baggage, struggles with the inadequacy of language. Ziggy also struggles with this inadequacy. As the two come to need each other more and more, they are unable express themselves to each other. Both yearn to cross the gap but cannot.
Guide by Dennis Cooper (George Miles Cycle #4)
Guide feels like more of the same. It’s a weaker version of Try perhaps. According to Cooper’s website, this book is supposed to be the cerebral side. I didn’t get that in this reading. Perhaps if I had reminded myself of that before reading, I would have felt differently. Guide is much more diffuse than the previous books, but there are some interesting forces at work. The essence of the Dennis and George we have come to know are simultaneously present in characters, unlike previous books where there were discrete Dennis and George characters. Here, the two bleed into each other.
The softness comes in towards the end when the real George is finally reintroduced into the series through a few brief vignettes that, as far as I can tell, are mostly true to the story of actual Dennis and actual George.
Period by Dennis Cooper (George Miles Cycle #5)
More of the same. My interest is kind of waning. It’s been waning since Guide which I think was the best. Maybe Frisk was the best. Anyways, I’ve got far, far too much work to keep reading the same book and think of something new to say. Not that these are all the same book, they really aren’t, but the themes are consistent. Here again, as in all the others we have the inadequacy of language, the kind of Proustian experience of expectations vs reality (where place-names and appearances are exchanged for names and bodies, respectively). We have a new definition of love ( I noticed (too late) he defines love distinctly in each book and it’s never really the same). I don’t know. It’s a super interesting project I just can’t keep reading this type of book. If you’ve read Cooper, you know what I mean. I shouldn’t have read them this quickly.
I Wished by Dennis Cooper
Closer, the first in the George Miles series, was published in 1989. Period, the last, was published in 2000. This came out last month. It is the first novel that Cooper has written about his deceased best friend in 21 years.
It’s not necessarily part of the series, but it acts as a kind of resolution, explaining much of the work done in the previous 5 books. To some extent, it feels like he has made the entire series safer, which seems like an odd choice for him. Maybe as he gets older, he is tired of his books not being understood. I’m not sure.
It’s also odd because, while this reads like non-fiction, a careful reader of Cooper will know it’s not. Instead he is doing something new that is far more vulnerable than anything he’s done in the previous 5 George Miles books.
For me, I’m happy to end the series this way. It’s vulnerable and beautiful and devastating. The way the language resonates feels like reading Closer again, but maybe a much nicer version with a warmer type of love.
I finished writing this, minus some impending edits, the day before my birthday. I’ve been thinking about what book I’ll start on my birthday. What’s my birthday book? I’ve read enough books in my life now that returning to old favorites is finally something I’m compelled to do. I thought about Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, maybe the Gormenghast series, maybe Proust, maybe Middlemarch, or some Helen Dewitt, or maybe I’d read some theory since I don’t let myself do that during the school year and I just got all these new Lauren Berlant books (among many others) in the Duke 50% off sale (only a few days left!). Anyways, it’s Sebald. It was always going to be Sebald. Rings of Saturn is one of the greatest, most mysterious books I’ve ever read in my whole life and I want to see if that is still true. I’ll keep you posted!