Dennis Cooper, 70, was born in Los Angeles and lives in Paris. His novels include The Sluts (2004) and the five-book George Miles cycle, an experimental tableau of disturbingly violent gay desire that began with 1989’s Closer, now reissued as a Serpent’s Tail classic. The New York Times called the series “high-risk literature” exploring “extreme boundaries of human behaviour and amorality”. For Irvine Welsh, it “pushes the limits of liberal tolerance as far as [they] can go”; for Bret Easton Ellis, it’s the work of a “supremely elegant stylist [who] might also be the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction”. The Mars Room author Rachel Kushner recently said: “My generation is very much marked by Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle: in the 1990s, everyone read these books; I was awed by them.”
How come Closer is being reissued now?
I don’t know! They just said: can we? And I said: sure! All my books are out of print in the UK. I haven’t been able to find a publisher there for a very long time.
Do you recall where the novel began?
I’d been trying for years to develop the whole five-book cycle before I started writing any of them, doing graphs, figuring it out, because it’s a complicated structure. In 1985, I was living in Amsterdam and I came down with this thing called rodehond – “red dog”, [German] measles – and I was really sick. A lot of my friends were dying at that point. I thought, this is it: Aids. That kicked my ass and I just buckled down: I started writing while I was recovering, unable to get out of bed.
Were you out to challenge readers?
Totally. I’ve always been drawn to the horrors and attractions of sex and death and objectification. That kind of subject matter had already been legitimised – Bret Easton Ellis had published Less Than Zero just before I published Closer – but I definitely felt that what I was doing was pretty strange. I like Bret’s work, but when Less Than Zero came out, all my friends said: “Don’t read this book! It’ll drive you crazy.” So I didn’t until I finished Closer, just to be safe, then I read it and was like: OK, this guy has the same background and interests but he’s doing it in a much more conventional way.
What fed your confrontational approach to sex and violence?
I was a fucked-up kid with a very weird imagination and I wanted to communicate with people I felt might be like me. It’s difficult to write about those things in a way that doesn’t just titillate or shock and makes readers actually think about the feelings of the person being victimised and the feelings of the victimiser – it’s not just an evil guy and a victim. It was reading Sade that made me want to try to work out how to use style to lure readers into being challenged to think about those dynamics.
