God Jr. [Paperback]

Dennis Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 10, 2005

Dennis Cooper's sparely crafted novels have earned him an international reputation-even as his subject matter has made him a controversial figure. God Jr. is a stunningly accomplished new novel that marks a new phase in Cooper's noteworthy career.
God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son-at the expense of his job and marriage-but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?
A tender, wrenching look at guilt, grief, and the tenuous bonds of family, God Jr. is unlike anything Dennis Cooper has yet written. It is a triumphant achievement from one of our finest writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Try making up a world where having killed someone you love isn't important." Cooper (Closer, etc.) does just that—and it works, for a while. Pot-smoking, 40-something L.A. depressive Jim rammed his Lexus into a telephone pole, sending his son, Tommy, flying through the windshield and leaving himself crippled. He has subsequently lied about the cause of Tommy's death (Tommy lived long enough to wander from the scene) and begun working at a children's custom clothing company run by an all-handicapped crew. Upping his pot intake and drifting further from his wife, Bette, Jim has been obsessively constructing a monument to Tommy in his yard that has drawn media (and litigious) attention. Cooper's genius has always been for dialogue: the clipped marriage and workplace exchanges feature searing ironies and delicate nuances that are arresting. In the lyrical but muddled passages that dominate the book's second half, Jim loses himself in a video game of Tommy's, communicating mystically with the video game's flora and fauna while searching for a meaning to Tommy's life and death. Cooper leaves Jim and Bette stranded in their grief, and the various forms of sage-like solace he proffers fail to add up to much, either for Jim or for us.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Jim has been an emotional mess ever since that terrible day a year ago when he got into a car accident that killed his teenage son, Tommy. Since then, Jim gets around in a wheelchair, but he has a secret: he can actually walk. He doesn't tell anyone because that would ruin a perfectly good punishment for himself: being disabled. He also smokes a lot of pot, which may explain why he is determined to turn one of his son's routine drawings into a huge monument in the backyard. When he discovers that Tommy made the sketch from a video game, Jim becomes obsessed with playing it--to the detriment of his job and marriage. The game--as well as the novel--takes on new dimensions when Jim feels he can actually communicate with aspects of the program, entering into an existential dialogue with a pixilated snowman on the nature of reality. Cooper lets the reader decided whether or not Jim has gone completely mad with grief in attempting to understand a son he knew only superficially in life. Jerry Eberle
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 163 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat (July 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802170110
• ISBN-13: 978-0802170118
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #402,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mature, Muscular Prose from Cooper, September 8, 2005

By 

Jason Malikow (Chicago, IL, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: God Jr. (Paperback)

Reexamining violence, trauma, and death from an untried perspective, God Jr. may be Dennis Cooper's strongest novel yet.

"I wanted Tommy's death to last forever. That's all." (44) So says Jim, narrating God Jr. This is the issue at the center of the text, a grieving father's search for meaning and healing in the wake of his son's accidental death. This is still a Dennis Cooper novel, however, and so a subject too frequently rendered in the pastels and sepias of greeting card sentimentality is incisively and honestly explored. The result is not a comforting, feel good story but rather a harrowing look into mourning, generational difference, and emotional trauma.

Cooper's prose has always been carefully disciplined, which cast a particular detached - almost clinical - view on what would otherwise have been gratuitous scenes of sex and violence. At the core of his project is a strong emotional resonance which is the counterpoint to the physical realities in his texts.

In God Jr. Cooper continues to discover death (as he did in My Loose Thread, the novel which followed the conclusion of the George Miles Cycle), yet the focus is not physical but mental, emotional. Death renders Cooper's characters "abstract." The dead are removed from the living immediately, but reserved at an unresolvable distance; the living know the dead in a form greater than in memory yet less than in physicality. They can communicate, but "apparently, dead people can't enunciate." (131) So says the "psychic" brought in by Tommy's mother, Bette, to help her know her son in her loss. Jim seizes upon a different course.

"The Childish Scrawl," the third section of God Jr. and the most emotionally powerful, is an allegorical and too-stoned walk through of Tommy's favorite video game. As Jim takes on the role of the Bear, the game's hero, his interaction with the other characters reveals his raw emotional state at believing himself to be his son's killer. Here the parallels and ideas explode: between father and son, Father and Son, Father and children, hero and supporting cast, and citizen and excommunicated individual. What we are immediately aware of, and what remains with us long after the end of the novel, is that a significant change in perspective is required to come to terms with the ideas Cooper has set forth.

God Jr. is thoroughly the work of Dennis Cooper. But it is not a Cooper that we recognize from the George Miles Cycle. Our author has matured in myriad ways. With this new direction comes a need to move beyond the traditional examinations of his work and begin exploring the emotional and spiritual questions and ideas with which Cooper is grappling.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars amazing- and no gore!, November 20, 2005

By 

Karin S. Chenowith "kharoe" (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: God Jr. (Paperback)

I'm a dennis cooper fan. I've always respected his choice to use "out there" subject matter. But that's not why i like his books. The draw for me is the writing itself. What is made of the subject. Period is my favorite still. But this one now takes second place. The fantastical dialogue reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut. With this book (devoid of any trace of gore, pedophelia, homosexuality, mayhem, heroin, etc) all of the fainter-hearted readers out there will have a chance to enjoy the genius of Dennis Cooper.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unexpected Gem, October 11, 2009

By 

Buddy "NoctuDraco" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God Jr. (Paperback)

For the first time, since years ago, when I first picked up a Dennis Cooper novel (one of the early George Miles cycle books) I was actually surprised by the subject matter of a Cooper work. That's not to say that I don't enjoy or appreciate Dennis Cooper's work; in fact, I'm an avid fan - having now read all but one of his novels. Still, Cooper tends to be predictable in subject matter, theme, and plot. This time, however, Cooper has done something completely new. The plot is innovative, creative, and haunting. The story itself is still Cooper-esque, disturbing and a bit sick, and it is still an examination of death. Except, this time, rather than death as a scientific experiment - in body function, sensory reaction, sexuality, etc., Cooper is explaining death through grief and love - the loss of a child and how his already troubled father tries to cope. Truly brilliant - I read it in one sitting, in a matter of 90 minutes.