Synopsis
Set in a world of secret Web sites, this book touches on the many aspects of modernday America, such as pornography and Satanism, in this final addition of the author's fivebook cycle, which includes Closer and Frisk.
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Reviews
Cooper's fans will not be surprised, but the uninitiated may balk at his new novel's macabre world of disaffected young men engaging in Satanic sacrifice, gang rape, cutting-edge pornography and nonchalant mutilation and murder. Undaunted readers will find a subversive brilliance and considerable wit behind this darkly comic ride through the looking glass of marginal youth culture. Cooper (Closer; Frisk; Try; Guide) imbues the fifth and final novel in his "Sex and Death" series with a mythic tone, centering the action in a remote, nondescript town and a mysterious house, all black on the inside except for a large mirror. Events take place on both sides of the mirror in two (or more) equally dangerous worlds that reflect and affect one another. But that is only the beginning of the mirror imagery. The main characters are a string of young men who eerily resemble each other, including voyeurs Leon and Nate, pothead Dagger, and Nate's boyfriend Bob, who's obsessed with dead-ex George. And there is a novel called Period within this novel, which a Satanic band called the Omen have popularized among their Goth followers. A cabal of pornographic Webmasters and their online audience likewise celebrate the inner novel, which also features a cast of interchangeable young men, a nondescript town and its mysterious house. As the two narratives, the characters and locations mirror each other, it eventually becomes clear that reality is only a series of endless reflections. Cooper plumbs themes of obsession, love, identity, authorial paradox and communication breakdown with virtuosic narrative technique. And he succeeds in wringing insight and even humor from abhorrent visions of sadism and blackness. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Skaggy warthog fiction about the serial murders committed by the Omen, a transcendence-seeking Goth band of rockers who drive in their van from small town to small town for performances while picking up likely subjects to castrate and kill for Satan. Cooper declares Period to be the final closer to his ultradepraved quintet (Guide, 1997, etc.). True, there are amusing lines too grisly for laughter. As one Omen says: We did this sort of spell where I sacrificed a guy I knew to Satan in return for him making me immortal. I dont know if it worked though. Maybe it did work. Jesus, now I dont know if I'm immortal or not. Omen-fans Nate and Leon, lovers tiring of each other, decide to pick up deaf-mute Dagger and use him for a sex sacrifice to Satan. But the pair are too swacked to work this out clearly, and Leon goes into a general store, pulls out his gun, picks up a few bills and coins, then fixates on a nickel he cant pick up and gives his gun to the clerkand is arrested. This Faulknerian irony may remind some of Virgil Snopes and Fonzo unwittingly boarding at a Memphis whorehouse in Sanctuary. When Nate gets picked up by Omen, his gods ask him: Choose between your life and our art. Which is more important, the poetry mapped by our songs or the slow accumulation of meaningless detail that constitutes your specific entity? What? Well, at least we do know that lyricist Walker Crane writes the novel Period, Nate turns into Etan and sodomizes Dagger, and the reader is left deformed and twisted, shamed, fractional, and crushed. Period. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In the final volume of his five-book cycle Gain, Cooper not so much explores but repeats the obsessions of his other works: teenage white boys, sexual fetishism and violence, murder, drug abuse, and exploitation. Here, he adds these elements to the mix: Satanism; a maraudering Goth band; Dennis, a character who is - you've guessed it - just like the author and meant, no doubt, to raise lit-crit issues about authorial responsibility; and, finally, Internet chat, tiresome but certainly realistic. Although always lacking traditional narrative momentum, Cooper's earlier workds, especially Try, had unmistakable power and intensity. Not so here. There are too many characters, and the writing is too fractured and too self-conscious. If the point is that we don't care about these kids, it's swiftly made. Cooper has committed his last transgressive act: boring the readr to death. . A delight, no doubt, for Cooper's many fans; others should skip it.
Brian Kenney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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