[In the following review, Mannes-Abbott offers a positive assessment of Try.]

Dennis Cooper's urgent and uncompromising fiction reduces the critical mainstream to bemusement, and draws polemical support from admirers who recognise its rhythms. This is true of all cultish writing, but Cooper deserves more than cultishness because his work is genuinely innovative and draws from wide cultural sources to develop its confrontational poise.

Baudelaire wrote of three pursuits “worthy of respect” in My Heart Laid Bare: “to know, to kill and to create”, and these are Cooper's parameters too. Books like Wrong, Closer and Frisk are full of violent sex but for Cooper, though “sex is the ultimate intimacy … it's not enough.” In all his writing, sex contains transcendent possibilities in the form of a metaphysics of desire punctuated by death. Divinity takes the form of a kiss, the rectum is a source of profundity and, in Frisk, he has the character Dennis write about “killing cute guys” as “some kind of ultimate truth.”

Cooper's antecedents are clear; from Nietzsche and Sade through Bataille, Burroughs and contemporary cultural theory. He knows exactly what he is doing in his fiction, the boundaries he crosses and those he balances on, and his direct, taut prose rarely snags on itself. But it is the audacity of the writing, perfectly mirrored in its subject, that propels Cooper towards the rank of high stylist.

Try has Cooper's familiar ingredients but in different proportions. Less extreme, it is also more complex and accomplished. It is about teenage Ziggy and his relationships with his estranged adoptive fathers, his snuff movie-making “Uncle” Ken, his experiments with Nicole and his love for heterosexual novelist and heroin-using Calhoun. Ziggy lives with his “main dad” who has beaten and raped him since he was eight, and the novel follows what happens when his “other dad” Roger, a music journalist, arrives in LA after Ziggy agrees to have sex with him, “which is probably this huge mistake”. The soundtrack is Husker Du and Slayer, but the book's rhythm is taken from Céline's triple dot device: tick, tick, tick, pump, pump, pump, tick, tick, tick.

Try gradually accumulates tangential fragments until they form a tightly assembled whole with the fragility of a burnt book. A pivotal scene involves Ken filming his abuse of a drugged boy who later ODs, Ziggy interviewing both for his magazine for the sexually abused (Slayer), Impressionism and a violent necrophiliac. The whole thing is a “revelation” and “cool” for Ziggy, who leaves early with the Slayer tape. Ken says “I had a great time. I did.” The scene is grotesquely funny, clever and unsettling, and exemplifies Cooper's gambit.

His writing represents and does not analyse desire; the only flaw here is the overtly ridiculous voice of Roger, who is too articulate about his fantasies. But Cooper's triumph in Try is to be able to write about extreme experience and even recover a redemptive vocabulary without relying on ironic strategies or the easy collapse into satire.