[In the following excerpt, Gardner provides a negative review of Try.]

Thirty years ago the art of fiction began to undergo a change similar to one that had already befallen the theatrical arts. Though theater had once been the best loved form of mass entertainment, it yielded that title to film and then turned inward, catering to an elite taste that saw theater as art rather than diversion. As a result, these two factors, which had formerly been united, increasingly went their separate ways. Fiction also used to fulfill the Horatian injunction to delight as well as to edify. But in recent years it too has split, not into different media, as theater and film have done, but into different forms of fiction. On the one hand Stephen King and Jackie Collins are widely read for their entertainment value. On the other, novelists like Thomas Pynchon and William Gass intentionally and provocatively suppress the element of pleasure, as if it were incompatible with serious fiction. …

Fortunately, most contemporary fiction of the artistic kind is somewhat more rewarding. Often its vanguardism consists less in the sorts of formal difficulty that were characteristic of Gass and Pynchon than in the freshness of the authors' identities. Amy Tan, for example, writes about being a Chinese-American woman, Bharati Mukherjee about being an Indian woman in Iowa, Dale Peck about being homosexual, and Ernest J. Gaines about being black. Such literature falls within the modern liberal tradition of embracing difference and being open to other experiences. But both of these undertakings imply a core of shared values, so that, even as this literature asserts the difference between author and reader, it usually has the reassuring subtext of a common humanity that unites us all.

Despite the primacy of this kind of “nice” literature, there is another kind of literature that increasingly exhibits, and sometimes even advocates, very different values. Such fiction is often termed “transgressive,” and there are correlative developments in film and the visual arts. Like the humanistic literature of Amy Tan, it is seen as being somehow liberal or leftist because it seeks the distinction of radical “otherness” and because it aspires to threaten the status quo that writers like Amy Tan and Bharati Mukherjee seek only to correct. The two strains converge from different angles of assault on a center allegedly dominated by a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, right-handed patriarchy.

The roots of transgressive literature, of literature that violently attacks the center of a culture, are ancient, reaching all the way from Euripides's Bacchae, through Marlowe and Webster and the Marquis de Sade, to Huysmans and Celine. This literature of self-defined immorality, anguish, and degradation is constantly waxing and waning in our culture, as, for its part, is the humanistic strain. Thus the ages of Fielding, George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, and Saul Bellow were in a general way humanistic, whereas those of Byron and Wilde and the Surrealists tended in the other direction. At the present time—and this is perhaps a unique occurrence—the two strains exist side by side, as different faces of the same coin. Four recent and critically celebrated novels—Susanna Moore's In the Cut, A. M. Homes's The End of Alice, Dennis Cooper's Try, and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho—exemplify this development, each from a different angle.

What unites all these novels, aside from their almost unimaginable gruesomeness, is the peculiar relation in which they stand to the straitlaced center of society. …

In contrast to the sexual awakening of the narrator which is the main theme of In the Cut, we see in The End of Alice by A. M. Homes, another woman writer, and in Dennis Cooper's Try, sexual license presented not as a dilemma but as an accepted fact. The protagonist of the former novel is a 56-year-old man who has spent the past 23 years in prison and whose affected utterances recall Hannibal Lector minus the cannibalism. The plot is fairly simple: this murderous pedophile recounts his past adventures in a correspondence with a young woman who sees him as a role model, except that she is interested in young boys whereas he is interested in young girls. Many graphic scenes of child molestation, sodomy, and murder, follow. “All three boys,” the female correspondent recalls, in a fairly typical passage, “were at that age of supreme softness where muscles waiting to grow are coated in a medium-thick layer of flesh, highly squeezable. They were at the point where if someone were to take such a child, to roast or bake him, he would be most flavorful.”

If anything, Dennis Cooper's Try manifests an even greater level of sexualized violence, but this time from the perspective of male homosexuality. The protagonist, Ziggy, is a victim of child abuse at the hands of the gay couple who adopted him. Though child abuse is very much in the news these days and is always reprehended in the strongest terms, Cooper's take on the problem is one of ambivalence, when not verging on enthusiastic endorsement. Try is an extended fantasy of unbridled sexual license in which those whom society sees as the victims are willingly acquiescent if not entirely complicit in their own sexual exploitation. In this voided world, there is no family structure to speak of. Parents are absent, or else they are ersatz, like Ziggy's. Likewise, school is only a place for trysting and for the purchase of drugs. Crimes go shockingly unpunished. When, in a subplot, Uncle Ken sodomizes the corpse of a 13-year-old who overdoses on the drugs Ken supplied, he simply disposes of the body and that's that. There would be little point in attempting to cite a passage, as it would not get past the judicious editors of this publication.

These two novels are intended for two groups of readers, pedophiles on the one hand, and “normal” people on the other. This loaded term “normal” is used advisedly for the simple reason that the authors themselves implicitly draw the same distinction. One senses that their gaze is always steadily fixed on the reader, as though asking, “Are you revolted yet? Are you shocked?” If this work were marketed as pornography, the term being used not in reproach but simply for purposes of description, we should be forced to acknowledge its usefulness to those whose fantasy life comprises the sodomizing of children, necrophilia, and coprophilia. What is entirely unpalatable is the squeamishness of Try's reviewers, squeamish not in the sense of opposing so off-color a work, but in the sense of being too timid to call it by its name. The reviewer for the New York Times states that “Dennis Cooper has written a love story, all the more poignant because it is so brutally crushed.” The reviewer for Spin calls it “Painfully poignant … beneath the queasy surface, no novelist empathizes more with the pathos of put-upon youth.” Of course opinions may differ. But suffice it to say that I found no trace of poignancy at any level.

What is it then about the three books I have discussed that has granted them absolution from the censure that ordinarily would accompany such unbridled lubricity? The answer is clear. Sexual aggressiveness is traditionally defined in our society as the province of the straight white male. To the extent that each of these books attacks this center, it appears to acquire a contemporary relevance which exempts it from the moral scrutiny that a straight white male would receive. Furthermore, in its implicit threat to the patriarchy, and all that this threat implies of traditional liberal egalitarianism, it seems to take the moral high-ground. Susanna Moore and A. M. Homes display women who are as sexually predaceous as any man. Dennis Cooper displays homosexuals and even child molesters as spirited crusaders against a hypocritical middle class. It is in this light that they gain their relevance for those who read “quality literature,” and it is this that makes them morphologically identical to Amy Tan and Bharati Mukherjee, however different their content. …

One crucial difference between these authors and the authors of ordinary novels, such as Stephen King and Jackie Collins, is that, whereas the latter are content to preserve the traditional protocols of fiction, these newcomers would have us believe, as they themselves believe, that they have penetrated to an all-important and long-hidden truth about human society. And in a general way we, their readers, do believe them. We believe them because in our relativistic age, we have lost the spiritual resources to confront that potent error which they lack either the intellectual honesty or the intellectual power to oppose: the error of supposing that, because everything indeed is not right with the world, everything must accordingly be wrong with the world; the error of supposing that, because we are plainly not a race of angels, we must perforce be a race of beasts. But in the end, they are still fiction writers after all, and this morbid fascination of theirs, this confidence that the center cannot hold, that all of morality is a sham, is the supreme fiction.