12.04.2005
Playing it straight
This is a winter of literature firsts. Last month came my first reading of Stephen King (the disappointing The Colorado Kid); now comes my first crack at Dennis Cooper, with God Jr. I was intrigued enough by a recent interview with Cooper in The Believer to decide to give the book a try when I came across it at the library today. It's a quick read, 160 small pages, and compelling enough to keep me plugging away throughout the afternoon.
It's a strange little book, though from what I understand it's also his most straightforward. It deals with Jim Baxter, whose son, Tommy, dies in a car accident that is Jim's fault. In his grief/guilt, Jim decides to construct a building that Tommy drew in notebooks as a monument of sorts. The building, however, seems to be little more than a challenge the stoned Tommy had trouble navigating in a video game. The book raises some interesting questions about grief, relationships and religion, though, as I've found myself wishing several times of late, the book I expected based on the jacket copy would have been more interesting than the one Cooper actually wrote. (See also: Killing Yourself to Live, Homeland)
I wasn't terribly moved by God Jr., and given Cooper's usual topics -- according to the New York Times review Cooper breaks down like so: "Obsessions: Sexual abuse, youth culture, drugs, death, the paradoxes of authorship. Worldview: a Nietzschean realm without meaning, gilded by porn, pop culture, cyberspace, zines and video games. Characters: gay or bisexual teenage boys, often unambitious artists desperate to feel love, if only they weren't so numb" -- it's not likely I'll delve much further into his back catalog. Still, I'm glad to have at least sampled his work, and I'm genuinely interested to see where he goes next.
The NYTBR this week also has a nice round-up of books about music, including a rather thorough trashing of Jim Greer's book about Guided by Voices, A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll. I had feared that a fawning Greer, whose writing occasionally lapses into "look at how clever I can be" thesaurus abuse, might not be the best person to recount the history is this band, and Dave Itskoff would seem to confirm that. Greer makes GBV leader Robert Pollard sound like "a jerk" Itskoff writes, and does so with some decidedly purple prose by proving to be "too perfect a Boswell, endlessly forgiving Pollard's personality flaws, obsessing over the band's drinking habits and excretory functions, and making generally outrageous claims in overwrought language ('you could make the case that his body of work in general is one long screed against the dying of the light')." None of that will keep me from reading it, of course.
It's a strange little book, though from what I understand it's also his most straightforward. It deals with Jim Baxter, whose son, Tommy, dies in a car accident that is Jim's fault. In his grief/guilt, Jim decides to construct a building that Tommy drew in notebooks as a monument of sorts. The building, however, seems to be little more than a challenge the stoned Tommy had trouble navigating in a video game. The book raises some interesting questions about grief, relationships and religion, though, as I've found myself wishing several times of late, the book I expected based on the jacket copy would have been more interesting than the one Cooper actually wrote. (See also: Killing Yourself to Live, Homeland)
I wasn't terribly moved by God Jr., and given Cooper's usual topics -- according to the New York Times review Cooper breaks down like so: "Obsessions: Sexual abuse, youth culture, drugs, death, the paradoxes of authorship. Worldview: a Nietzschean realm without meaning, gilded by porn, pop culture, cyberspace, zines and video games. Characters: gay or bisexual teenage boys, often unambitious artists desperate to feel love, if only they weren't so numb" -- it's not likely I'll delve much further into his back catalog. Still, I'm glad to have at least sampled his work, and I'm genuinely interested to see where he goes next.
The NYTBR this week also has a nice round-up of books about music, including a rather thorough trashing of Jim Greer's book about Guided by Voices, A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll. I had feared that a fawning Greer, whose writing occasionally lapses into "look at how clever I can be" thesaurus abuse, might not be the best person to recount the history is this band, and Dave Itskoff would seem to confirm that. Greer makes GBV leader Robert Pollard sound like "a jerk" Itskoff writes, and does so with some decidedly purple prose by proving to be "too perfect a Boswell, endlessly forgiving Pollard's personality flaws, obsessing over the band's drinking habits and excretory functions, and making generally outrageous claims in overwrought language ('you could make the case that his body of work in general is one long screed against the dying of the light')." None of that will keep me from reading it, of course.
