[In the following interview, Bing provides an overview of Cooper's life, literary career, and thematic concerns and relays comments from Cooper regarding his work and critical reception.]

In the tradition of the best grass-roots art, Dennis Cooper has been publishing his poetry and fiction at the margins of the cultural marketplace, in fanzines, chapbooks and obscure literary journals, since graduating from high school in the early 1970s. Yet many of Cooper's readers only know of his most recent work, a series of slim and startling books from Grove Press—the novels, Closer and Frisk, and the short-story collection Wrong—each an ice-cold glimpse of gay teenaged sexual turmoil, drug abuse and obsessive violence rendered in his signature spare and meticulous narrative style.

At once clinical and creepily meditative, Cooper's fiction has been championed by some as a bold, dystopian vision of sexual desire and moral laxity in contemporary life, but it has also proven too unsavory for others. Even Cooper's books with Grove have until now remained cultish and marginal: his emotionally drained, gay teen and 20-something characters are hustlers, punk rockers, artists and loners who fill their time with anonymous sex, horror films, amateurish artistic ventures and random acts of self-mutilation.

With the publication of Try this month by Grove/Atlantic, Cooper may finally win over a much wider audience. Try is a wrenching portrait of a manic teenager named Ziggy who is sexually brutalized, in excruciating detail, by his two gay foster fathers. Spaced out, deeply confused and magnetically sexy, Ziggy ditches high school, struggles to articulate his own emotional turmoil by publishing a fanzine about his sexual abuse and devotes himself to his best friend, a hopelessly strung-out writer. Try presents a broader spectrum of male, female, gay and straight characters, and a far more compassionate view of the complexities of human relationships than any of Cooper's previous books, broadening the horizons of his fictional world while retaining its stylistic tautness and its power.

Cooper receives PW in his modest East Hollywood apartment on a sunny Saturday a few days after the Los Angeles earthquake. Compared to the malevolent look of his publicity photos, the 41-year-old author, dressed casually in a T-shirt, black jeans and white Converse sneakers, is genial, with pale, angular features that give him a lanky and ascetic appearance. Asked how he's weathered the earthquake and its aftershocks, Cooper admits, “I'm really enjoying it. I know it's terrible, but I grew up with it.”

Like the disaffected teens of his fiction, Cooper came of age, in his own estranged and unhappy fashion, in Arcadia, Calif., an improbably named, affluent Los Angeles suburb. “I was raised very badly,” he points out. “I was a mess and miserable and did a lot of drugs.” Cooper attended a private boys' school and began writing obsessively after discovering Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade at the age of 15. At that stage, he explains, “I was writing these weird parodies. I wrote this whole novel that was based on The 120 Days of Sodom, and I took all the guys in high school that I wanted to sleep with and I cast them in it and just killed them off.”

Cooper was expelled from private school in 11th grade, which raises the question of whether his subsequent fixation with high school reflects a desire to come to grips with whatever trauma he experienced at that age. “There's no literal event it's about,” he shrugs. “I set them in high school because I like young people, and because I just resist the adult world.” Cooper's voyeuristic fascination with adolescent runaways, punks and social castoffs has led some to view him as the Jean Genet of the American suburbs. Indeed, the glory that Cooper, like Genet, finds in social abjection reflects a relentless revolt against authority, and adults appear in Cooper's fiction in the most reprehensible roles—as serial killers, cold-blooded fetishists or drunk and neglectful parents. “I always hated adults, and I still do,” he observes nonchalantly. “Most of my heroes were rock stars or writers, so I had imaginary adult mentors more than real mentors.”

But, according to Cooper, the conflicted desires and hang-ups of adolescence make the strongest grist for his fiction. “It's a point at which your childhood's eating at you and adulthood's eating at you and you're just in chaos. I feel like that's the truth or something. People in that state are in touch with what the world's really about.”

Cooper's work is also about the ephemeral, awkward beauty of teenaged boys, and throughout his fiction, there is one recurrent physical type, a thin, pale, sleepy-eyed figure with smooth skin and untidy dark hair who tends to subsume all others. Cooper acknowledges that many of his friends are much younger than he is and that the cadences of adolescent slang and the linguistic turmoil of teenagers attempting to give weight to authentic emotions without sounding cliched remain a powerful source of inspiration. ‘What I love about living in L.A. is that type of inarticulate grasping for clarity. The way those kids talk, it's very poetic. I find them incredibly sympathetic.”

Choosing to emulate literary rebels like Rimbaud and Genet, Cooper dropped out of school after a year at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. A prolific period of writing and publishing followed, and in 1976, Cooper launched Little Caesar, a literary journal which he sought to infuse with the anarchic spirit and do-it-yourself ethic of the nascent punk scene. He also began publishing volumes of his own poetry, including Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978), Idols (Seahorse Press, 1979) and The Tenderness of Wolves (Crossing Press, 1981). In 1983, he composed a prose poem called “My Mark,” a gritty, Petrarchan reverie for an estranged lover that was incorporated into Safe, a novella published a year later by Seahorse Press. Shortly thereafter, he stopped writing poetry altogether.

Cooper reflects with some dismay on his early writing and is not eager to see much of it reprinted. Safe was reissued by Grove/Atlantic last year in the short-story collection Wrong, a hodgepodge of older sketches and stories which Cooper now wishes had never been assembled. “Wrong has a bunch of horrible old stuff in it,” he says. “I wish it hadn't happened. My agent did Wrong as a two-book deal to get me a little extra money. I like about five things in it and the rest just embarrasses me.”

When Safe was first published, however, in 1984, Cooper suddenly gained the attention of mainstream New York publishers. Jonathan Galassi, then an editor at Random House, expressed interest in his next project, so Cooper moved to Amsterdam and confidently began work on Closer. “I was so naive. I thought, wow, this is pretty much a guarantee he's going to publish it, so I wrote it for him. And I sent it to him as soon as it was finished and he didn't like it at all.” Unagented and still living in Amsterdam, Cooper persuaded his friend, the late Chris Cox, then an editor at Ballantine, to pitch the manuscript to Michael Denneny and other major editors of gay fiction. “Nobody wanted it,” he explains. “And I was pretty despairing.” Eventually Ira Silverberg, then publicity director of Grove, showed it to Wait Bode, Grove's editor-in-chief, who bought the manuscript for ＄2000 on the condition that Cooper rewrite the first chapter. Silverberg has been Cooper's agent ever since.

Closer is an ingenious conceptual study of a circle of solipsistic high school boys centering around the angelic, drugged-out George Miles, who is seduced by an older man whose fetish is to inject his lovers with novocaine and dissect them. Cooper claims to have derived the pitiless, uninfected style of Closer from the French filmmaker Robert Bresson. “No one's seen his work but he's like my god. There's a kind of monotony to it and a kind of hermeticism. In Closer, what I was trying to do was to flatten everything out into these equal paragraphs so it's almost like you're watching a train track, so it would numb everything out.”

Closer also relates the serial iconography of the mass media to the repetition-compulsion of serial murder, a theme Cooper explored fully in his next novel, Frisk, published by Grove two years later. “By the time I was finishing Closer, I knew what I didn't like about it anymore,” Cooper explains. “I wanted to work on the violence more. That's what Frisk came out of.” Frisk depicts the fantasy life of a character named Dennis, who at age 13 encounters some snuff photos of a disemboweled teenager. Obsessed with the notion of killing the boys he picks up for casual sex, Dennis later moves to Amsterdam and pens a letter home describing a series of ritualistic murders he claims to have committed, but which prove to be imaginary.

More thoroughly than his previous work, Frisk evinces Cooper's fascination with human flesh and with the sexually laden pathological desire to open the body up to explore its secret interior. “I believe Sade,” Cooper states bluntly. “The information about life was there, the horror and power abuse. The idea that the body is this package, there's no spirit or anything, it's just this machine and if you take apart the machine then you'll understand it, but you'll never understand it even then. Life's so hopeless. Frisk was a confrontation,” he adds. “Frisk seduced you into believing something was true, and then left you with your own pleasure or whatever you got out of that experience.”

Although Cooper has avoided the denunciation one might expect from the political right (as Edmund White observed, “This is the very stuff of Jesse Helms' worst nightmares”), he has been the target of much criticism from gay-rights activists. During the book tour for Frisk, says Cooper, “People would come up to me and say: you have no right to do this.” The most shattering attack followed a reading at A Different Light in San Francisco, where Cooper was approached by two men who handed him a pamphlet headlined “Dennis Cooper must die.” It consisted of drawings and quotes from the savage reviews in area gay papers. “I freaked out,” Cooper recalls. The pamphlet had been produced by a faction of Queer Nation, which had conducted a literal-minded reading of his work and deemed it politically dangerous. “The idea was that fiction was real, and that by killing them in my fiction I had really tried to kill them. It didn't make a lot of sense.” Cooper eventually found a mutual friend who put him in touch with the director of the group, and the death threat was officially lifted.

Nevertheless, he is still dogged by criticism that his work is sadistic and politically irresponsible. “My response is that for better or worse, gay identity doesn't interest me. It never has. Everybody in my work, until the new book, has been gay. It's a hermetic world, it's a closed system. And they're not interested in their sexual identity. It's one of the few things that isn't a problem for them. They're totally happy about being gay. I'm totally happy with being gay. If anything, being gay should allow a massive amount of freedom in terms of the imagination. So I feel like that's just pure policing.”

Cooper contends that such literal interpretations often fail to grasp the experimental ideas and complex aesthetic effects he seeks to achieve in his books. “I always want them to come from a place that's not conventional and then only get conventional when they absolutely have to make a point or to keep the eye moving down the page.” In Try, however, Cooper avails himself of more traditional narrative techniques, and as a result, Ziggy is one of the most nuanced and sympathetic case studies in child abuse in recent fiction. Cooper acknowledges that when he wrote the novel, he was breaking off a long-term relationship and, like Ziggy, was trying to care for a friend who was addicted to heroin. “It was a really deep fucked-up period in my life. The book was kind of to ground myself in the real world.” He adds, “Ziggy's the first character I've ever done who is trying to understand what's happening to him. And he hasn't gotten very far, but he's trying, and that's like a big step.”

Although pleased with the security he's found at Grove, Cooper is wary of attracting too much attention with his new book. “It's tricky. I like the margins. I've always admired artists who've made an incredibly narrow, obsessive body of work. I feel like I'm mining this stuff that's really like a psychosis for me. It's really personal, and I'm gonna keep doing it until I'm bored with it.”