Closer
A Novel
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction.”—Bret Easton Ellis
Winner of the Ferro–Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction
From “the most dangerous writer in America” (Village Voice), Dennis Cooper’s Closer is the controversial first novel in the award-winning George Miles Cycle—a haunting exploration of 1980s middle America, alienation
Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles becomes the object of his fellow students’ passions. One after another, his teenage friends rifle through George, ransacking him for love, secrets, or anything else they can plausibly extract.
Closer follows the subterranean connections that drag George into the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, an underground entrepreneur who turns his parents garage into a nightclub. Boys and men pass George from hand to hand, fascinated by the nightmarish intensity of his detachment, but soon he will be confronted by desires he may find harder to endure.
An unflinching dissection of the horrors of middle America, Closer lays bare a world where pain is an undeniable reality, the inevitable companion of truth, and a test of our commitment to life. Nearly four decades since its original publication, Dennis Cooper’s brutally frank and provocative cult classic remains unmatched, continuing to push the limits of our minds and sharpen our understanding of the life around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In chapters titled with the names of the characters on whom they focus, this brief novel links together a small, bleakly debauched cast of gay men. Dedicated to sex and violence for the catharsis these acts would seem to promise, the men settle into a dull grind of physical encounters that, no matter how searing, fail to provide transcendence. The fault of their miserable existence seems to lie not in them, but in existence itself; life by its very nature can offer little but a thrillingly painful prelude to death. The novel's problem is not Cooper's point of view but the monotony of his spare, honest treatment: his deadpan look at chronic sexual anomie is so faithful to the phenomenon it describes that the work succumbs, laconically, to weariness. Scope is further limited by Cooper's decision to address the condition of despair more than its cause. Though convincing, sometimes darkly funny evidence of dissolution and decay abounds (`` . . . men had worn him away. They'd fastened him to a treadmill that spun until there was nothing around but a vague outline, smeared in blood''), memorable details tend to languish in dolorous prose.
