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A review by futurama1979
Try by Dennis Cooper
5.0
try has been the hardest and most heartbreaking book of the cycle that i’ve read. somehow impossibly it is also the most hopeful. while frisk really got into the psychosexual side of cooper’s themes, this book dealt with the emotional. the character of ziggy spoke to me the strongest of any of the georges he’s shown us, and this, probably not coincidentally, is the closest he has let us in to any of his georges’ heads. and jesus, he doesn’t spare detail. ziggy is exaggerated but so carefully and intentionally written. the character of calhoun also stood out beyond the average cooper side character insofar. everything in it is really painful. there was almost a stark lack of structure in this compared to the past two books in the cycle; it took a bit for me to adjust but worked better and better for me the further along i got. this was also the first book in the cycle with slight breaks of the fourth wall, which i thought was just a cool touch and done so effortlessly. and then the hope element; unlike the others, there is in try a thread beneath the horror that’s not thematic but a secondary plot. the quasiplatonic love story of a listless, mostly empty teen heroin addict and the deeply traumatised bipolar artist who thinks he hung the sun.
i nearly never do this in reviews, but this passage stood out to me more than any singular bit of prose has, not just in the cycle so far but in a long time. this is some of calhoun’s conjecture as he’s starting to nod:
ziggy just winds up praying in private like calhoun is god, feeling helpless and too idealistic. because… what could he say? calhoun, your incapacitation is frightening me, or… if you o.d., i’ll be completely destroyed, meanwhile crossing his fingers in hopes his well-being still counts for anything with the guy. it does and it doesn’t. certainly calhoun can’t tell him so. luckily, ziggy’s half-learned how to sidestep his friend’s generalized behavior, decode contracted eyes, sift through that fuzz, overvalue the warmth of their rare outbound flickers. they’ve become the most beautiful things in the world, like the muffled cries of hikers trapped in landslides in the middle of nowhere. he’s learned to let them spark his imagination. still, pray and daydream as ziggy might, he can’t quite reconfigure what’s here. here: a skinny blonde teenager pickled in heroin, slack-faced, fallen limp as a corpse, brain discarding his lovers and friends for a half-life in decorous seclusion, unconcerned how it looks, or who he’s upset along the way, figuring nobody else will ever wander this far, check.
i nearly never do this in reviews, but this passage stood out to me more than any singular bit of prose has, not just in the cycle so far but in a long time. this is some of calhoun’s conjecture as he’s starting to nod:
ziggy just winds up praying in private like calhoun is god, feeling helpless and too idealistic. because… what could he say? calhoun, your incapacitation is frightening me, or… if you o.d., i’ll be completely destroyed, meanwhile crossing his fingers in hopes his well-being still counts for anything with the guy. it does and it doesn’t. certainly calhoun can’t tell him so. luckily, ziggy’s half-learned how to sidestep his friend’s generalized behavior, decode contracted eyes, sift through that fuzz, overvalue the warmth of their rare outbound flickers. they’ve become the most beautiful things in the world, like the muffled cries of hikers trapped in landslides in the middle of nowhere. he’s learned to let them spark his imagination. still, pray and daydream as ziggy might, he can’t quite reconfigure what’s here. here: a skinny blonde teenager pickled in heroin, slack-faced, fallen limp as a corpse, brain discarding his lovers and friends for a half-life in decorous seclusion, unconcerned how it looks, or who he’s upset along the way, figuring nobody else will ever wander this far, check.