Try by Dennis Cooper

From the Publisher

Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion. Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a magazine that he calls I Apologize. In prose that is taut, rhythmic, charged, chillingly precise, and beautifully controlled, Cooper examines his characters' motivations not as the product of cultural coercion but as the emanations of something hungry and amoral and essentially human. Try explores "that buried need to go all the way and really possess someone," that place where desire disintegrates into the irrational. He illuminates with utter clarity the need to claim the desirable, to possess wholly something that will fulfill the profound emptiness of the human soul. With Try, Cooper has produced a novel even more complex than his previous books, dangerously innovative and with the startling familiarity of truth in its examination of love, obsession, devotion, and the depths of human need.

Publishers Weekly

Cooper's disturbing new novel, like Frisk and Closer , explores the gritty, homoerotic subculture of a nondescript California suburb while chronicling two days in the life of Ziggy, the adolescent, adopted son of two sexually abusive gay fathers. Angelically beautiful and extremely insecure, Ziggy scarcely sleeps or attends high school, but struggles to articulate his own emotional life by compiling the latest issue of his fanzine, a crude journal about sexual abuse called ``I Apologize.'' Ziggy's unlikely mentors include his uncle Ken, who produces child pornography, his friend Calhoun, an aspiring writer who has withdrawn into a heroin-induced haze, and Roger, the less violent of his two fathers, who, with Humbert Humbert-like detachment, extolls the virtues of Ziggy's anatomy. Cooper's narrative, clinical and often pornographic, rigorously refrains from moralizing. Cutting cinematically back and forth between characters, his prose is jumpy and convoluted when describing Ziggy, dazed and analytical when depicting Calhoun, drained of affect when chronicling the appalling antics of Ziggy's uncle, who spends much of the novel drugging and raping a 13-year-old heavy metal fan he has picked up somewhere. Cooper's novel is less a case study in sexual abuse, however, than a window on a nightmarish suburban world, where domestic norms are subverted to such a degree that adults are either pointedly absent or predatory pedophiles, and where stunted but angelic teenagers take solace in drugs, sexual promiscuity and punk rock. (Mar.)

Library Journal

In a nightmarish novel reminiscent of the work of William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis, Cooper ( Wrong , LJ 5/15/92) explores the horribly dysfunctional world of Ziggy, the adopted teenage son of two gay men. Physically and sexually abused since he was eight, Ziggy drifts through his sordid life surrounded and used by heroin addicts and pushers, his pornographic filmmaker uncle, and a distant stepfather with unfamilial desires. Yet throughout, Ziggy holds onto his humanity, partly through his unrequited love for an addicted friend. At times shocking and repulsive, made more so by Cooper's precise but detached style and no-holds-barred realism, the novel is nonetheless compelling and successful. Certainly not for all tastes but recommended for large contemporary fiction collections.-- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.

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