God Jr. Book

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

God Jr. does not contain graphic and gratuitous violence and sex and as such is apparently the most unusual book Dennis Cooper has written. This is the first and, so far, only of his books I've read, but several fellow readers are big fans and I've gleaned what I know about his work through their reviews. Instead of having a cast of gay characters engaged in scene after scene of violent sex and death, we have a presumably straight father quietly loosening his grip on reality in a disorienting fog of grief and marijuana. In the wake of a car accident that leaves him locked into a wheelchair and his teenage son dead, he makes strange and lonely and desperate attempts at properly grieving by trying to connect with a son-no-longer-there who he was disconnected from while alive. One way he does this is by playing a goofy video game that the son played and by smoking the weed the son smoked. In the context of this book--clouded with mourning the loss of a family member and being stoned--just about everything is haunting and a bit surreal, including the descriptions of the silly Nintendo world.

There's a reviewer I'm fond of who uses the word 'harrowing' to describe this book and I think that this is an apt description within a review that I wish I'd written. I direct you there as supplemental material for this review.

Looking at the reviews here on Goodreads, it seems a lot of Cooper's fans didn't like this book at all, though some certainly did. I thought it was incredibly moving in both expected and unexpected ways. The father really isn't even terribly sympathetic, despite his misfortune, but I found myself, as I often do, feeling raw and exposed and shudderingly sensitive to The Overwhelming Fact that uncountable numbers of animals, both human and not, with emotions and families and pains and desires, are birthed and snuffed out every single day--that sometimes there is no comforting eulogy available, that sometimes things just remain depressing, that groping for a word of comfort or wisdom in dark times can merely be an exercise in compounded despair, but also that we feeling thinking hoping despairing organisms can occasionally find real respite from these realities--temporarily, yes, but real all the same.