Period [Paperback]

Dennis Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cooper, Dennis | Publication Date: March 30, 2001

The stunning conclusion to Dennis Cooper's five-book cycle, Period earned its author the accolade "a disquieting genius" by Vanity Fair and praise for his "elegant prose and literary lawlessness" by The New York Times. The culmination of Cooper's explorations into sex and death, youth culture, and the search for the ineffable object of desire, Period is a breathtaking, mesmerizing final statement to the five-book cycle it completes. Cooper has taken his familiar themes -- strangely irresistible and interchangeable young men, passion that crosses into murder, the lure of drugs, the culpabilities of authorship, and the inexact, haunting communication of feeling-and melded them into a novel of flawless form and immense power. Set in a spare, smoke-and-mirror-filled world of secret Web sites, Goth bands, Satanism, pornography, and outsider art, Period is a literary disappearing act as mysterious as it is logical. Obsessive, beautiful, and darkly comic, Period is a stunning achievement from one of America's finest writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cooper's fans will not be surprised, but the uninitiated may balk at his new novel's macabre world of disaffected young men engaging in Satanic sacrifice, gang rape, cutting-edge pornography and nonchalant mutilation and murder. Undaunted readers will find a subversive brilliance and considerable wit behind this darkly comic ride through the looking glass of marginal youth culture. Cooper (Closer; Frisk; Try; Guide) imbues the fifth and final novel in his "Sex and Death" series with a mythic tone, centering the action in a remote, nondescript town and a mysterious house, all black on the inside except for a large mirror. Events take place on both sides of the mirror in two (or more) equally dangerous worlds that reflect and affect one another. But that is only the beginning of the mirror imagery. The main characters are a string of young men who eerily resemble each other, including voyeurs Leon and Nate, pothead Dagger, and Nate's boyfriend Bob, who's obsessed with dead-ex George. And there is a novel called Period within this novel, which a Satanic band called the Omen have popularized among their Goth followers. A cabal of pornographic Webmasters and their online audience likewise celebrate the inner novel, which also features a cast of interchangeable young men, a nondescript town and its mysterious house. As the two narratives, the characters and locations mirror each other, it eventually becomes clear that reality is only a series of endless reflections. Cooper plumbs themes of obsession, love, identity, authorial paradox and communication breakdown with virtuosic narrative technique. And he succeeds in wringing insight and even humor from abhorrent visions of sadism and blackness. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In the final volume of his five-book cycle Gain, Cooper not so much explores but repeats the obsessions of his other works: teenage white boys, sexual fetishism and violence, murder, drug abuse, and exploitation. Here, he adds these elements to the mix: Satanism; a maraudering Goth band; Dennis, a character who is - you've guessed it - just like the author and meant, no doubt, to raise lit-crit issues about authorial responsibility; and, finally, Internet chat, tiresome but certainly realistic. Although always lacking traditional narrative momentum, Cooper's earlier workds, especially Try, had unmistakable power and intensity. Not so here. There are too many characters, and the writing is too fractured and too self-conscious. If the point is that we don't care about these kids, it's swiftly made. Cooper has committed his last transgressive act: boring the readr to death. . A delight, no doubt, for Cooper's many fans; others should skip it.
Brian Kenney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (March 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802137830
• ISBN-13: 978-0802137838
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,424 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Love and Dismemberment, March 29, 2001

By 

Mr Jamie Russell (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Period (Paperback)

Few novelists pursue their chosen themes with such morbid enthusiasm as Dennis Cooper. For more than a decade his quintet of novels - Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and now Period - have obsessed over sex, child pornography, drugs and dismemberment. Undeterred even by death threats, Cooper has played out his violent fantasies in these novels with a disturbing purity of vision. His new novel Period marks, as its title suggests, the end of the cycle. He's claimed that it's both a `disappearing act' and a `suicide note.' Considering the spectral and sparse quality of the book both comments seem particularly appropriate.

The quintet began back in 1989 with Closer. Yet it was Cooper's 1991 novel Frisk that really stirred controversy, deliberately blurring the line between fantasy and reality and securing its author a place at the cutting edge of contemporary American literature. Period draws out the same themes and concerns as the preceding novels, charting the bored angst of gay West Coast adolescents and their middle-aged paramours as they drift into experiments with drugs, Satanism, sex and ultimately murder. Like grim parodies of Enlightenment anatomists, Cooper's protagonists believe that dismembering the bodies of their lovers will reveal the truth of existence, bringing them closer to an absent God and saving them from the demystified consumer culture that surrounds them.

What has always been so impressive about Cooper's work is his dedication to narrative forms that replicate the violent content of the books. His prose has sought to cut into the flat surface of the conventional pornographic or horror text through the use of flashbacks, narratives-within-narratives, and stream of consciousness techniques. In Period this relationship between form and content reaches its peak, creating a fragmented and confusing novel that refuses easy definition. It's certainly the sparsest of Cooper's books, a skeleton thin, episodic narrative that's like the decomposed body of one of the story's victims. Indeed, the novel is so cut up that the reader has no choice but to follow the advice of the epigraph and `keep watch over absent meaning'. Shifting between different characters' viewpoints, radio phone-ins, Internet chat rooms and diaries Cooper creates a disturbing hall of mirrors through which we're left to wander without a guide. Although Period's obliqueness is slightly dissatisfying it appears ultimately inevitable, for what else but a self-reflexive `period' could end this set of books?

Period confirms Cooper's growing reputation as the most exciting and transgressive of contemporary American novelists. However, as last year's publication of Cooper's journalism and essays - in the collection All Ears - has demonstrated, his work has much more scope than this obsessively brilliant cycle of novels. He's currently working on a book based upon the recent spate of American High School shootings and has also expressed a desire to experiment with a novel of physical comedy (he cites the films of Jacques Tatti, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Chan as a potential source of inspiration). Whatever path he may choose his next offering will be awaited eagerly on both sides of the Atlantic.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The equal of 'Frisk', September 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Period (Hardcover)

The photo of 'Walker Crane' (a take on Wes Craven, of 'Scream' fame??) at the back of the book looks like an uglier, more descript version of Tim Robbins, but maybe it's just the lighting. The character Henry is my favourite in this book. He's so obssessive that all of his victims begin to look the same and their continued existence comes to depend on a trivial yet all important event in his past. The idea that physical beauty helps us deny what we are is an important theme here. The surface is just gift wrapping, but even the 'deep, incontrovertible' truth of blood and sinew is mute and meaningless. This is the best book ever written on the pointlessness of desire. Highly recommended.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lifestyle choices?, March 16, 2000

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Period (Hardcover)

this one's even foggier, you just don't know what's going on, hardly any of the ultra detailed descriptions of, say, Guide, instead you're left with voices, diary entries and 'anonymous' internet chat, while the 'plot' just vanishes inside this multi mirrored projection hall. we're not really in the city anymore either, it's a small town, then a forest, then a house in a forest, and then someone gets lost in this house. Blair Witch? this is even scarier, I suppose, as we're left with traces, memories, voices and the usual all consuming dance of death and desire. Where next? we can't leave that house anymore, so we have to go back to 'Closer' and one of its characters, and we have to start a website with some strange photos of some distant looking boy, who we're slowly getting obsessed with...did i understand? are these still lifestyle choices? actually these are probably 5 stars, for at least 5 books. goodnight.