I wished

In Cooper's surreal and elegiac conclusion to the George Miles Cycle (after Period), a writer named Dennis Cooper continues to recount his obsessive love for a friend from adolescence. Cooper declares a mission to convey a sense of George to those who "don't give a shit about some weird cult writer's books." To get there, he tells his own story. At 10, Cooper's skull was accidentally split by a rusty axe in an event that "subdivided" his consciousness, planting the seeds for his life as a writer. At 15, he meets 12-year-old George at an all-boys high school dance and talks him down from an acid trip. George wants a gun for Christmas, and Cooper imagines himself as Santa Claus, giving him a pistol and watching George shoot himself. Cooper also fantasizes about John Wayne Gacy's final victim, Robert Piest, because Piest reminds him of George. The passage is one of many boldly transgressive and strangely successful moves in the fractured narrative. Nick Drake's dark lyrics are a constant, eerie soundtrack to the boys' young lives, summed up in one of Cooper's trademark elliptical bon mots ("Nick Drake's songs are like a pack of dolphins signaling his solitude incoherently to George and other introverted messes"). With tones of John Rechy and André Aciman, this offers a cathartic sense of closure. (Sept.)

An elegy for a friend, lover, and muse that resists conventions of storytelling and expands the possibilities of the novel form with daring and vulnerability. With his five-part George Miles cycle--beginning with Closer (1989)--Cooper made his name as a Sadean enfant terrible, never shying away from depicting graphic scenes of sex and violence while capturing readers with hypnotic narrative authority. This group of novels, we learn in the opening pages of his latest, was not only an homage to his beloved friend--whose suicide at 30 the writer did not learn about until a decade later--but his only way of articulating a pain "that talking openly can't handle." Less narrative than prismatic, this book explores imagined landscapes, George's childhood, and the depths of Cooper's own psyche to ask: How does the artist alchemize his grief into a work that is legible and worthy of attention? In the first major section, a narrator explores George's traumatic upbringing by a sexually abusive father and his mental health as he transitions into adulthood while living with untreated bipolar disorder. Here, Cooper refers to himself in the third person, too, as if to examine the conditions for George's suicide through an objective eye. Other sections examine George and the author's relationship to him by way of wry humor and playful storytelling. In one section, a secular Santa Claus--described as "a kind of genius, [who] needs to love someone who's very complicated"--chooses George as his favorite yet agonizes over what kind of gift to offer him. Another section bends and twists the fairy-tale form to depict a fictional encounter between George and artist James Turrell's Roden Crater. Though the book's emotional register can seem, at times, to be stuck in a rut of despair, its fragmentary structure allows for a range of emotional valences, ranging between grief and celebration, anger and love. Cooper's urgency to relate his friend's story is felt in every word, image, and narrative move; even the most oddball structural decisions possess tremendous power. Spare but powerfully wrought, this is a book that pushes the novel's capacity to capture grief, love, and truth. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Overture I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can't handle. There's no one I can talk to, basically. Every friend I used to have who also knew him hasn't sought me out in years, which would be easy since I'm very mildly famous, whereas their last names are so commonplace that, when I search the web for them, literally thousands of candidates show up. I've talked about my friend in so many articles and interviews. If you do a search using his name, pages and pages will turn up, and every one that's not about some far-flung namesake is either by me or about me, or it's something made by someone who only knows the characters I've named for him. How could someone like him die without a single friend or member of his family ever putting up a tribute page or even mentioning his name in tweets or Facebook posts, even on his birthday or on his death day's anniversary or even randomly in reference to something in their lives or art that brought his memory to mind. Why hasn't anyone who knew him ever tried to contact me to say, "I knew him too," or "Thank you for devoting so much writing to him," or "How could you have written such disturbing things about my friend or brother or former boyfriend or son or cousin?" Is what I've done that obscure? I guess. When George doesn't cross my mind, which can happen for a while, weeks, months, I'm okay, but then I think of him and get like this. But not "like this" because I almost never talk about him, period. I'll say a little, and people will say, "That's interesting and sad." But they mean for me and not for him. Or I write about him, and my readers say, "That's sick or awesome, or he's so cute, or he's too unsympathetic, or he's very touching, or he's boring, or he's really sexy, or I knew someone like him too, or I relate to him so much," which is the best or only meaningful response that I can even hope for. That's as good as it will ever get for him. I saw a therapist for three years, and I talked about him there, but she said he was a symbol in my lifelong playing out of shit my parents did to me, and she just wanted me to talk about my past, not him. I would ask her please, please forget about me and think of me as just some person who is telling you about him. I know how difficult he was to be around, and how emotionally hot and cold, and I understand he did and said some awful things to people near the end when I wasn't with him unforgivably, but could his death really have been such a big relief to everyone? Like, I never need to think about that guy again? I had a friend who claims to be a psychic. She did a reading for me once and said she saw him hovering above my head or something. She said he's always watching over me, feeling so much love and gratitude for something that I used to do for him or have been doing since he died, and I almost believed her, and maybe I even do. That's how easy it is to hurt me. Even now I think, What if her envisioning was true, because I want so unbelievably and inexpressibly for him to know he meant and means so much to me that I have written and still keep writing all these elegies and things, even when I'm not communicating anything beyond my need to talk about him, but why? I guess because I want someone who knew my friend to read this book and find me. I want this book to be more public than my others so it will find people who don't normally read novels or who don't give a shit about some weird cult writer's books because it seems like everyone who either knew him or used to know me doesn't. I want to know that all my love for him is worth it or find someone who'll convince me he was no one much, or who'll say, "He never mentioned you," or that he referenced me offhandedly enough that it's clear I didn't mean that much to him, and that's the hope, and that's the fear, and I know that's only semi-interesting to read, but it's very hard for me to even do this. Excerpted from I Wished by Dennis Cooper All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.