Customer Reviews

The Sluts

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I remember reading my first Dennis Cooper novel when I was like 19 or 20, an assignment, believe it or not, for my Gay Fiction class. I devoured Frisk while curled up on a couch hidden in some corner in some alcove in some University office somewhere. It captivated and terrified me, and when I walked outside into the blazing sunlight afterward, I felt like the world I had known and grown accustomed to had melted away, leaving exposed the ragged skeleton of whatever reality had always been there, breathing furtively, one eye coolly surveying, waiting to be discovered.

If the world wasn't populated with so much detritus in the name of art, literature, film, and music then maybe Cooper wouldn't be as fragile and desperately invaluable as I think he is. Truth be told, Frisk and the rest of the early books of what came to be known as the George Miles Cycle is some of the most effective and dangerous writing I have ever happened upon. And that's really what great writing, what great art really should be about: dangerous, disturbing, disquieting, and diligent about the first three d's. Right?

I'll be honest, I haven't thought much of Cooper's last coupla efforts. God Jr. read like a bad WB movie of the week, and Period and My Loose Thread were slight and hesitant. The Sluts is the first of his books in a long while that finds and reaps the true power of Cooper's bleak vision and fiery writing. The Sluts is for intelligent people. Not puffed-up hysterics who can't see the (pitch) black humor masquerading as horror. That's not to say it is for all tastes. Some will hate this book: it is compelling and aggressively unpleasant, ugly and hilarious, deeply effective and yet cause for concern.

I'll admit it, I have always found Cooper's relentless obsessions and intertwinings of violent sex, death, and pedophiliac fantasy a bit suspect...maybe I'll go so far as to say Cooper makes me UNCOMFORTABLE--meaning I don't necessarily trust what goes on in that man's mind, nor do I really want to know the complete picture. Know what I mean? But what I've always liked about Cooper was that he was never unafraid to re-imagine the concept of DESIRE, especially gay male sexual desire, as something sick and consuming, violent, twisted, and profane, an engorged monster writhing on a battlefield.

What I also admire about Cooper is his ability to find and tweak the basest aspects of humanity, and somehow make evil seem somewhat fallible, and most importantly to steal the sing-songy plastic fabulousness of Gay Culture and show it for its smudgy disaffected malice, its vicious preoccupation with its own Lust and Doom.

The Sluts is an ingeniously-sructured "novel" that concerns the gossipy goings-on in a demented online community that reviews and comments on Gay Male Escorts. Such websites really exist. One such escort in general, Brad, captivates the community and begins to spin an endless web of lies and obsessions, even after the source of all the intrigue has long since been dissembled and becomes something of a ghost.

No other work of art that I've ever encountered has so accurately portrayed the Internet, and more specifically, humanity as it is currently evolving online, as a conglomeration of such wicked perversions, loneliness, and deceit. It's almost as if Cooper has seen our future, seen the future of humanity as it clutters up technology and loses all sense of self and morality. For that, this book is ingenious. Its tales of self-hating, utterly insane seriocomic sexual fantasy are very well-written and totally scary.

In terms of the larger picture here, the tale of a Lost Boy gone cold, eaten up by the predators of the world, stretched to the level of myth, but never given love, it's all rather mesmerizing but Cooper has gone down that route before. I never felt much affection for all those pretty waifs Cooper worshipped and wanted to tear apart with his lust, I never cared much for those characters, or for the desire they create. Blah blah blah. I appreciate Cooper's dark comic gifts and his daring, but sometimes I wish he could just show us the other side as well, at least to just engender something of a counterpoint. For all his wounded observations, and biting truth-telling Cooper never seems courageous enough to give us any hope.

Then again, maybe he doesn't have to...after all, look at this world we live in.

Dennis Cooper's new novel, The Sluts, opens with an online review of a hustler named "Brad" who has mental problems. A second review follows, and then a third. The novel is told through these reviews and through emails and posts on a website devoted to reviewing hustlers. The posts by these reviewers mix the empty, repeated, imitative language of pornography with a series of straightforward, honest sounding voices. And they lie.

They lie, and they admit to lying when they think it will help you believe their next lie. The saga of "Brad" on this website gets stranger and stranger and it becomes clear that the reviewers are obsessed. They are writing themselves into the story. We only rarely hear from Brad himself, who might have a brain tumor, who might be fourteen or eighteen or something in between, who might be real. The story that you piece together conflicts with itself and sprawls. He's in prison. His boyfriend has hired him out for violent sex and a man pays to break his legs during the act. Another man pays to cut his face and murder him. Only, maybe not.

In the end, what's real is unimportant. This is a novel about the reviewers themselves. It's about their obsessions and about their ability to live inside their own heads. The sex described is brutal and graphic and unreal and maybe none of it ever happens and maybe some of it does. In any case, The Sluts is good. It's interesting and perverted and boring and relentless and numbing and I felt like throwing the book across the room a dozen times in anger. This is a frustrating and worthwhile book about voyeurism and fantasy and you are a pervert for even reading a review about it.

Outside of his short, different-genre "God Jr.," which was brilliant, I found Cooper's last few efforts disappointing. Mostly it seemed like Cooper was disengaged and even bored by his own writing (he hinted at this a bit in some of his meta-fiction). "The Sluts," though, is one of Cooper's best, and he seems fully invigorated. Maybe the style of the book -- chat postings and E-mails -- tweaked things just enough to get him interested, or maybe it's just that that stylistic decision works so well with his acoustic prose.

Or maybe it was just that Cooper has such a fun time with his twisty plot. The novel tells the story of a typical Cooper character -- a young, androgynous kid with a lot of problems -- and all the older men who want to use and exploit him. The setting and denizens are all typical Cooper. So is the extreme sex and violence. Cooper's genre is of the pedophile-and-child-killer variety, but he gives vibrant life to these deviants, and his prose is so beautifully unadorned and perfect that he can make these ungodly subjects fascinating. Cooper's brand of evil is the scariest kind: blunt and matter of fact. Cooper is one of the few authors who can still make me shiver and wince, and "The Sluts" does that plenty.

"The Sluts" -- even with its pretzel plot -- once again explores man's primal, violent urges, which exist in all of us, and reveals how we lose ourselves in our dark fantasies.

To those who are shocked that this book contains "graphic images": what did you expect? Even a few seconds of research will tell you that Cooper is a very intense author who holds nothing back.

If you're like me and felt Cooper's last few books -- "Period," "My Loose Thread" -- weren't as good as his earlier novels, "The Sluts" is a must. It is a deliriously assured return to form.

Like the other Cooper books I have read, this one is a quick read because the content is so salacious and incendiary that you can not put down the book, that the sleep you need just sounds so tame compared to snuff movies and hustlers and castration. This book is amazing and I am sure lots of grad students probably are creaming their pants over it and the dissertations they could write about it. Cooper is so meta in this book, the setup of it being the postings to an online escort review site, and some of the posters complaining about previous posters posting fake information or posting under fake names, and throughout the novel, there being this big concern with whose reviews are real and whose are not, this whole concern with having a reliable narrator. There are also points when posters will critique other posters and their interest in snuff films, and how by having these sexual fantasies they are contributing to people's deaths, and surely, as any good pomo lit reader knows, this is Cooper chiding us and his critics, implicating us by the nature of us reading his narratives, that we are just as participant to the creation of the text's meaning as Cooper is. And there is so much to explore there, but really I think the real issue of this book, one that I have not seen mentioned in the couple of reviews I have read of it, is JT Leroy.

As some of you probably know, there is lots of debate going on, there has been for a while, about whether there is actually a JT Leroy or if it is not a big charade orchestrated by another writer, the one most often cited as being behind Leroy, being him, is Dennis Cooper. And really, I think Cooper is giving us a coda with this book, The Sluts, perhaps even admitting to being behind Leroy, or at least having fun teasing us that he might be. The whole book, Cooper's, centers on this couple, Brian and his whore, Brad, who he plans on killing, and when Brad chickens out on dying so publicly, dying at all, all the readers of this thread want the narrative to continue, want to know where Brad is now, and eventually an impostor, Zack takes on the role of Brian pretending to be him, even finding an impostor Brad, really a Thad who wants the internet fame that Brad had, and so they orchestrate this hoax, pretending to be the Brad and Brian, already this collective fantasy of all these online forum readers.

A clue that all of this might be a way of Cooper discussing Leroy's identity, and what, if anything it means, if there is actually no JT Leroy comes just once in the book, when one of the posters to the forum refers to one character Jimmy Taylor, in an abbreviated form as JT. This JT is friends with the real Brad and threatens to expose the fake one and tell his real identity unless he provided him with hush money. And here, at least, I think Cooper is acknowledging the Cooper/Leroy identity, discussing how easy it is to create these fake identities, these personas via writing, how these writings spring in an almost Bahktinian way from the collective imagination, that this stuff is already out there, the writer is just tapping into popular fantasies and making them appear real, say perhaps the fantasy of a truckstop hooker working his way across the South pretending to be a girl, say even one called Sarah.

It may seem like a stretch, a conspiracy theory, but I am pretty convinced that The Sluts is written about the ease with which fake writing identities are created, specifically that of JT Leroy's.

A wonderful, edgy book for those who can handle it.

Yes, the humor is very dark. Yes, there is a lot of violence. Yes, the prose is in a unique format, but I thought it was very clear, only a few times spiraling into overcomplexity.

I would say this book is really less about the sex/violence/drugs/prostitution but about the people who live in a world where they are consumed it. Definitely not for everyone, but if you like dark, funny, often horrifying stuff, this is it.

Do not read this book expecting to enjoy it any more than you would expect to watch Raging Bull and find it 'enjoyable'. The nature of the subject is such that you most likely will not savor it and smile. Some of the previous reviewers have argued rather passionately for Cooper's work, but I have ambivalent feelings about its artistic merit. Imagine that Da Vinci or Vermeer painted a fly-blown pile of excrement with the most astute attention to color and composition. Does that really warrant our attention? The 'shock value' of the subject might draw us in, but have we been edified by the experience? These are questions you might want to consider before you read the book. If you are not already a fan of Cooper's work, you very well might find The Sluts to be a waste of your time.

As has been pointed out by a previous reviewer, the book really is about the people who post their online commentaries the way "Haircut" by Ring Lardner is about the barber. Is it an easy book? No. This is no Jackie Collins-style romp. It is a pastiche of online postings, apparent telephone transcriptions, letters, and conversations that bear out the manipulative and deceptive aspects of a particular segment of gay culture, especially as it develops in the cyber environment. As a meditation on the concept of identity, The Sluts is as frustrating as hell because its subjects are virtually impossible to truly know ( just like the real community they portray ). Almost every page offers a new false epiphany that contradicts what we have 'learned' from the previous page in a never-ending recursive series of "I was lying about that other stuff; here is the truth"-comments. Chatrooms have bred a new set of rules about how we communicate with others and the kind of comportment that emerges when we are given anonymity.

I have known prostitutes and indeed, for as graphic as this novel gets, the reality can be just as ugly. *There are no limits to what people are capable of doing* This novel draws that picture rather clearly. However, here is where I part ways with some of the other reviewers. I believe that great literature is able to please and to instruct. I will grant other people their unique definitions of what is pleasing. You will have a harder time convincing me that I have the opportunity to gain any kind of knowledge (self knowledge or knowledge about this culture) by reading The Sluts. Do not mistake this for my dislike of the violence in the story. The violence was actually kind of boring and I felt like Cooper really belabored it. (I hope that wasn't the point of it--that the violence becomes banal.) But I didn't find a new insight into why this segment of gay culture behaves as it does. I also didn't discover any new sympathy *or* antipathy toward these cretins. In the end I left the novel feeling like it was an ambitious work, yet just a little too self-conscious in its attempt to be 'dangerous' or 'disturbing' or whatever other terms you might wish to place upon it while wearing a beret and sipping a double espresso with some crystal meth on the side. And please don't accuse me of not appreciating the black humor that drives the narrative. There are elements of black humor here, but if this was meant as a satire or black comedy, then Jeffrey Dahmer was the greatest stand-up comic of our generation.

I'll admit it... I saw the cover of this book, skimmed over the description, and checked it out thinking it might offer a few titillating passages for my low enjoyment. On the contrary, this book never comes close to being erotic. It is all about pain, about men's disgusting (and bizarre, to me) sexual urges and eagerness to satisfy them without any consideration of others... If ever there was a book certain to encourage asexuality, this is it. I know it is only dopes like me who would expect anything sexy from this book, though; that really isn't the point. But try as I did, I couldn't really appreciate it at a 'black comedy' - yeah, the plot twists might have been entertaining, if not for the ugly feelings pervading through the book. I can't recall a single paragraph that I found to be at all amusing. And yet I spent the last 4 hours with my nose glued to it, waiting to see what would happen. So: definitely a book for intellectual considerations, perhaps seriously twisted entertainment, if you can handle it. I cannot, and am kind of worried about getting to sleep tonight...

"The Sluts" is a gay comedy. That said, and put aside, one can focus on deeper aspects of Dennis Cooper's imaginative novel. While most readers will be caught by either the sexual aspect or the gore aspect, some readers will read the novel in another level. It another level, this is a narrative about the truth of one narrative.

The whole story is told through the eyes and words of people who follow an Internet forum about escort boys, therefore there are comments from different people. Cooper, to begin with, is able to create various distinct voices for each person. Each single narrator will bring a new layer to a cake of mess, confusion, S&M, necrophilia, castration and so on. But in whom should we believe in?

In a Rashomon-like narrative, one can never be sure who is telling the truth. And since this is the Internet, it is even harder to distinct who we should trust. Cooper manages to create a fascinating Babel tower of voices - each supposedly stating his/her truth - and the writer makes the reader groundless immerse in this universe.

Many writers have tackled the Internet subject. But not many succeeded as Cooper to produce something fresh, original, and, above all, sincere. The sexual fantasies of his characters are also very realistic reminding us of how crazy human beings can be.

I just finished reading The Sluts and had to write a review. I read a lot of gay fiction and this was by far the weirdest most intriguing book I have read. I will not go into details, but the format of the story was genius! With everything happening online today and all of the possible lies that surround the internet this book drew you in from page one. Sick and disgusting in some points i have to agree with other reviewers of the book, it is not for the weak of heart.

I have loved most of Cooper's novels, especially "Closer" and "Guide," and this one actually has a riveting plot. The problem however is that the entire novel is emails and chat-room epistles, which of necessity means that the language is much more perfunctory and dumbed-down than usual. "My Loose Thread" wasn't that great either, so maybe Dennis needs to slow down rather than covering in effect the same material over and over with scant variation or deepening of effect.