God Jr.

I've often wondered why someone as talented as Cooper never explored another genre. I was curious how his stripped-down writing style would feel in a world not brimming with violence, murder and sex. "God Jr." answers all of those questions. "God Jr." is about soul-crushing grief and loss, and about how a father builds a tangible monument to his son to compensate for feelings he probably never had. The son died in a car accident while driving with his under-the-influence father. His parents find drawings of an odd structure and in homage to their dead son begin to build it -- at great expense -- in their backyard. Turns out the son didn't even draw it and that it is, in fact, just something he picked up from a videogame. Later in the story the father "enters" this videogame to try to discover who his son was. The son kept the main videogame character in a spot so long that the animals of the game became self-aware and began asking questions. They want to know who they are and why they're here. Because the son brought about this enlightenment, they assume he's God. The most amazing thing about this book, for me, is Cooper's prose. He's reduced his writing to the absolute bare minimum. There is not a single wasted word here. He has sharpened and sharpened his meticulous prose with a razor and the result is simple yet stunning. This book -- really a novella -- is a good companion piece to Kathryn Harrison's "Envy." It's interesting to see how two very different but equally capable writers handle similar subject matter so contrastingly.

"Dennis Cooper's modem=cardiac starts the murder game in the frozen eye of a drug fetus. His writing plays the nucleus brain of cold-blooded disease animals." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric

I'm a dennis cooper fan. I've always respected his choice to use "out there" subject matter. But that's not why i like his books. The draw for me is the writing itself. What is made of the subject. Period is my favorite still. But this one now takes second place. The fantastical dialogue reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut. With this book (devoid of any trace of gore, pedophelia, homosexuality, mayhem, heroin, etc) all of the fainter-hearted readers out there will have a chance to enjoy the genius of Dennis Cooper.

Reexamining violence, trauma, and death from an untried perspective, God Jr. may be Dennis Cooper's strongest novel yet. "I wanted Tommy's death to last forever. That's all." (44) So says Jim, narrating God Jr. This is the issue at the center of the text, a grieving father's search for meaning and healing in the wake of his son's accidental death. This is still a Dennis Cooper novel, however, and so a subject too frequently rendered in the pastels and sepias of greeting card sentimentality is incisively and honestly explored. The result is not a comforting, feel good story but rather a harrowing look into mourning, generational difference, and emotional trauma. Cooper's prose has always been carefully disciplined, which cast a particular detached - almost clinical - view on what would otherwise have been gratuitous scenes of sex and violence. At the core of his project is a strong emotional resonance which is the counterpoint to the physical realities in his texts. In God Jr. Cooper continues to discover death (as he did in My Loose Thread, the novel which followed the conclusion of the George Miles Cycle), yet the focus is not physical but mental, emotional. Death renders Cooper's characters "abstract." The dead are removed from the living immediately, but reserved at an unresolvable distance; the living know the dead in a form greater than in memory yet less than in physicality. They can communicate, but "apparently, dead people can't enunciate." (131) So says the "psychic" brought in by Tommy's mother, Bette, to help her know her son in her loss. Jim seizes upon a different course. "The Childish Scrawl," the third section of God Jr. and the most emotionally powerful, is an allegorical and too-stoned walk through of Tommy's favorite video game. As Jim takes on the role of the Bear, the game's hero, his interaction with the other characters reveals his raw emotional state at believing himself to be his son's killer. Here the parallels and ideas explode: between father and son, Father and Son, Father and children, hero and supporting cast, and citizen and excommunicated individual. What we are immediately aware of, and what remains with us long after the end of the novel, is that a significant change in perspective is required to come to terms with the ideas Cooper has set forth. God Jr. is thoroughly the work of Dennis Cooper. But it is not a Cooper that we recognize from the George Miles Cycle. Our author has matured in myriad ways. With this new direction comes a need to move beyond the traditional examinations of his work and begin exploring the emotional and spiritual questions and ideas with which Cooper is grappling.