by Dennis Cooper
(Grove Press) $21Looking for meaning in Period, the fifth and final novel in Dennis Cooper's tetralogy, is like looking for free porn on the web: a circular, pointless affair with enough temptation to keep you in a frustrated loop until you either invent your own answer or give up.
Cooper's tetralogy has been an attempt to make his desire transparent, to deconstruct his sexuality, examining it from every possible camera angle until every kink becomes commonplace and depravity becomes dull. Dennis achieves this transparency by using braindead narrators whose voices reveal nothing while suggesting everything. "There's no way the world's ever gonna be totally perfect, unless nothing and no one had minds."
Sadly, his braindead characters have grown less distinct. Whereas Guide's characters became recognizably real, if only through the use of urban archetypes and skewed cultural signposts, the characters in Period retain the flat, cartoonish feel of Cooper at his most experimental (i.e. least humane). The defetishization and humanization of his characters, which continued from Try to Guide, has been discarded in favor of a frozen world. Try and Guide had, for all their depraved contexts, one of the rarest qualities in American fiction: unsentimental humanism.
Period is real sick and nasty--one last hellish Cooper fantasy before (according to the plan) he discards his disease and enters a new creative period. There's not much further to go: Whereas Guide was written from the point of view of LSD, Period is written from the point of view of crystal meth. Which means it's cruel, it's corrosive, it's without conscience.
Part of this aura is due to content (Satan, rape, human sacrifice, necrophilia), and part of it is due to structure. The first half of the book reads forward, but about halfway through, the book steps through some Cocteau-like mirror through which everything turns backwards. Names are reversed, identities are opposite, everything is backwards.
Hopefully in his new career, wherever it may roam, Dennis will step out of his obsessions and into the real world's light. PHILIP GUICHARD
FOR THE TIME BEING
by Annie Dillard
(Knopf) $22"We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present," Annie Dillard writes on the penultimate page of For the Time Being, struggling to her last breath to get it right. She fails, which is no surprise; it's impossible to pin such prickly inquisitions. Yet Dillard presses this subjective failure to her advantage: She is persistent, stubborn, shameless; her analogies rear up and leap out in a parabolic--and highly personal--search for an accountable (or merely discernible) universal agency. She understands that to capture the metaphysical present is to capture but a shadow of truth residing in prisons of metaphor. Still, she crawls the catacombs of ancient history, scours the Talmudic texts, looks deeply into the chromosomal tangles of malformed newborns, plumbs the French paleontologist's Mongolian digs, stares mesmerized at the hands of the clock....
And she discovers exactly this: Those late-night riddles posed in smoky college dormitories around the world ("What is time?" "Is there a god?" etc.) never truly get answered. People simply stop asking themselves such silly questions--out of a sense of embarrassment, or even worse, duty. For the Time Being, in other words, is another Annie Dillard head trip. It's fabulously entertaining, even exhilarating--tricky but not too tricky, probing but not ponderous. Dillard takes big risks in her essay writing, the sort of risks that once got folks burned at the stake for heresy. It's nice to still have such religious troublemakers around, even if nobody's listening anymore. RICK LEVIN
LOST AND FOUND
ROAN STALLION, TAMAR AND OTHER POEMS
by Robinson Jeffers
(Modern Library, 1927) $6 usedAfter gaining tabloid notoriety in pre-WWI Los Angeles as the college-age lover of a married socialite, Robinson Jeffers disappeared with his new bride to then-remote Carmel to raise their sons, away from the rest of the world. In 1927, the world caught up. A decade after his contemporaries Eliot, Frost, and Williams established themselves at the front of the pack, Jeffers joined them with this unjustly forgotten bestseller.
"Roan Stallion," the short narrative poem which begins the volume, is atmospheric and intense by today's pale expectations, but no preparation for what follows. The long poem Tamar is one of the most suspenseful and bizarre roller coasters in American literature, a psychologically layered B-movie which zigzags relentlessly between the strategies of "high" and "low" art. Tamar Cauldwell is a wholly human wraith who makes the bad girls played by Sharon Stone look tame. Reverberating with the depth of Greek tragedy (and sharing much with Jeffers' translation of Euripides' Medea), Tamar eats the scenery. The episode where Tamar sexually teases her father while goading her brother to kill her boyfriend makes this book the perfect gift for anyone with a "Goddess Bless" bumper sticker.
Jeffers wrote prolifically for the next 20 years, but his fierce anti-war statements lost him his broad audience. He remains the chief spokespoet for the environmental movement, and these days his work ends up more often in coffee table books than it does on bookshelves. The force of Tamar is only equaled a few times in the rest of his career, in a handful of much-anthologized poems ("The Eye" and "Shine, Perishing Republic") and the ending of his otherwise so-so last book, Hungerfield--an elegy for his dead wife that brings tears to my eyes when I just think about it. GRANT COGSWELL
