[In the following review, Kaufman provides a generally favorable review of Frisk, finding both merit and dissatisfaction in the novel's experimental approach.]

The very ambition to categorize so-called gay literature may be something of a self-defeating proposition: By reflecting the larger world, certainly the better examples of the “genre” transcend any categorical limitations we might infer. To insist otherwise would be to reject the assimilation captured so well in a number of new novels, and to hazard stereotypes that they deny.

This emerges as an inescapable message now that the world of commercial publishing is embracing a range of gay male novelists who refuse to depict the world according to an outmoded dualistic convention of “gay” and “straight” (as if it ever really were that) but rather as a more varied whole, the better to describe the ways in which people lead their lives, regardless of sexual orientation. In this light, what tends to be most remarkable about the fiction of David Leavitt, Paul Monette and even newer comers such as John Weir and Michael Cunningham is how unremarkable their gay characters are. These authors demonstrate that, to pervert the cliché, fiction has always been straighter than truth. (The primary exception in mainstream publishing was to allow for gay coming-of-age novels. But in comparison with the concerns of the new generation, consider how quickly even so fine an example as Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story has acquired an Uncle Tomish aura.)

Whether relieved by gallows humor or in relentlessly somber prose, AIDS is of course also a ubiquitous presence in today's fiction, where it has arrived with the same vehemence it has in our lives. Even Alice Hoffman had to get in on the act with At Risk, an exploitative and mawkish, summer-breezy novel about an 11-year-old girl (“from a perfectly average middle-class family,” as Caryn James wrote in a related profile on Hoffman for The New York Times) who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. By now it is a truism that, along with playwrights, novelists are keeping pace with the evolution of the virus and its social ramifications in ways that Hollywood and television have been avoiding like the proverbial plague it is.

The less obvious but more intriguing point is that the twin leitmotifs of assimilation and AIDS are related: The real common denominator, whether the virus is treated explicitly or not, is a coming to terms with lost possibilities, a better understanding of the life that was or might have been, in order to get the most out of the one that remains. This is true not only of so-called AIDS novels such as Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home, and David B. Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed but also of Ken Siman's Pizza Face, set in the 1970s, before AIDS was recognized, and novels such as Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, which treats AIDS peripherally. Deliberately or not, Cunningham's novel and Halfway Home are part of a literary movement that testifies that nothing less than a new definition of the American family is in order, one that is more dynamic and capacious, more cognizant of the extended possibilities that have already permeated the society.

Although novels invested in eliminating long-held barriers between gay and straight were earlier apparent in fiction from small presses, only recently have they secured the support of commercial publishers. A turning point in literature was marked less than a decade ago by David Leavitt, with his first collection of short stories, Family Dancing, and his first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes, neither of which dealt with AIDS per se. (Nor, surprisingly, did Leavitt's second novel, Equal Affections, published in 1989, although his more recent story anthology, A Place I've Never Been, does to some extent.) But while Leavitt clearly emerges as a pivotal figure for a legion of writers with visions of an increasingly homogenized world, he also asks the question, At what price, penetration? Though he was seized as a gay writer to be reckoned with by the straight literary aristocracy early in his still-young career, the signs already indicate that Leavitt, in the way of most pioneers, may be sacrificed to the unavoidable concessions he made: In Leavitt's fiction, one still finds an opposition between gay and straight sensibilities, perpetuating the clash by default; this begins to explain why some militants consider Leavitt to be more “straight” than “gay.”

It is rather in the post-Leavitt landscape that the status has become even more difficult to define, the quo harder to locate—exactly the development worth celebrating. Phrased another way, it's the difference between a gay character and a character who happens to be gay, which is a lot less subtle a distinction than it may at first appear. And although Leavitt was welcomed specifically for making that leap, his mission has thus far been too self-conscious to achieve the results of some of his disciples, most notably Michael Cunningham. …

Though Halfway Home revolves around AIDS, which figures only as a hovering presence (and then, only in the later part) in A Home at the End of the World, it would appear to be a vacant topic in Dennis Cooper's latest novel, Frisk. But vacancy is a key to any appreciation of Frisk. And even though Cooper's notorious obsession with a connection between sex and death precedes AIDS (as Cooper himself has written elsewhere, “AIDS ruined death”), sooner or later it brings to mind grimmer aspects of an epidemic that has been permitted to flourish for too long.

Considering its arrival in the wake of the vacuous American Psycho, there will probably be a temptation to dismiss Frisk as imitatively sensationalistic. Unquestionably, it is equally grotesque and disturbing to read. But if Bret Easton Ellis's irredeemably disgusting claptrap has become merely the latest rallying point for a rebellion against its type of content, it would be a shame to lose sight of Cooper's more meaningful accomplishment. It is a far more worthwhile literary exercise, even as it brings to mind much earlier literary curiosities and ventures into gay sadomasochism—such as Alfred Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, and The Story of Harold, which was published under the pseudonym Terry Andrews and prompted wild speculation as to who the author really was.

Cooper has never enjoyed Ellis's popularity or success (nor will he, in view of his propensity for subversive literary experimentation and his eschewal of standard narrative formats), but he has been forging his de Sade-like investigations since the 1970s and was writing about psychosexual serial murders at least by 1982, when Tenderness of the Wolves was published. In Frisk, Cooper achieves precisely the virtues that Ellis apparently sought in American Psycho.

Frisk is unequivocally concerned with what happens after you've “stopped feeling anything,” what remains on the other side of excess, the emptiness that needs to be filled. Or as another character says, “You can get used to anything. Then you stop feeling, you just respond, your brain reduces the world to … whatever.”

On its most forthright level, the story traces the path of a first-person narrator who happened upon some pornographic photos as an adolescent that “went on to completely direct or destroy my life in a way.” We follow him as he moves from Los Angeles through New York and finally to Amsterdam, into ever creepier recesses of his own sick mind. He becomes “totally removed from almost everyone,” investing all of his energies in an intense, suppressed “interest in sexual death.”

Along the way, he meets various hustlers and punks who, via the deadening effects of drugs, become passive accomplices to his heinous acts. “My perfect type,” says the narrator, named Dennis no less, “tends to be distant, like me. I don't mean matter-of-fact, I mean shut tight. Like he's protecting himself from other people or pain or both by excising himself from the world in every way, apart from the obvious physical stuff you need to get by such as walk, talk, eat, etc.”

Cooper is indeed matter-of-fact, and it is precisely the chilling effect of his deadpan tone, his relentless objectivity, that captures our attention and retains it through the extensive pornographic passages. The sex itself somehow becomes incidental to the pathology that motivates it. His obsession inevitably leads to episodes of repugnant murders, described in grisly detail that seems designed to stretch human comprehension.

After his first of a series of murders, Dennis reflects, “I guess I'd fantasized killing a boy for so long that all the truth did was fill in details. The feeling was already planned and decided for ten years at least.” In Amsterdam, he hooks up with two German thugs who periodically accompany him to the windmill he lives in, where the unspeakable acts are committed. “They're as fucked up as I am, just not as intelligent. They kill guys because it's a kick, whereas for me it's religious or something.”

Throughout the narrative, Dennis refers to his intention of better understanding his obsession by writing a book about his fantasies, which obviously becomes the one we're reading. Though in the end, the murders are exposed as fabrications, S&M tales within S&M tales, Cooper has made his point just the same: The effect of reading Frisk is to make us impervious to our own disgust at a profusion of violence, possibly mimicking our long-term response to TV and the daily news.

Perhaps the most telling and truly autobiographical passage is one that indirectly alludes to AIDS:

I just realized the major reason I'm so nonchalant about death is that no one I knew ever died until the last few years, when I was already pretty removed and amoral. Before then, someone else dying was strictly a sexual fantasy, a plot device in certain movies I liked. When people died in those contexts, the loss or effect or whatever was already laundered before it reached me. It was a loss to a particular storyline, say, but nothing personal. So now that ex-boyfriends have started to die off, the situation is really unique, even incomprehensible. The only thing I can do, friends and journalists tell me, is cry. But the idea of death is so sexy and/or mediated by TV and movies I couldn't cry now if someone paid me to, I don't think.

What is Frisk, finally, if not an indictment of a generation left to drown in a flood of images? As Bataille once wrote regarding his notion that literature is evil, “This concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality.’” But while Cooper is most intriguing for the heavy dose of morality he divulges through his perfectly amoral or numb tone, Frisk remains less than satisfying as a novel, which may be unavoidable for an author who repeatedly sets out to mock the novel as a form.

Though the world that Cooper portrays is exclusively gay, Frisk still subscribes to the current batch of novels that document coming of age in the past few decades—its chapter titles are dated, 1969-89.

Indeed, AIDS has not only eclipsed but also intensified the process of this thing we call life, for an entire generation of writers old before their time. It is a matter of supreme irony that gays should be coming to life in such numbers on the page, assimilated into mainstream publishing, just as we are dying in such numbers on the street.