Books like Try

We (my wife & I) have a gay friend down the street who has told us many sex-related stories over the years; so many, in fact, that I’ve been able to notice trends and shifts in his activities. One of these shifts is an increasing focus away from bar hookups and toward on-line hookups, usually involving going to a website when “in need” and finding another “in need” who is nearby and able to meet up immediately. I am amazed how often and how easily this happens. (Has anyone ever studied the impact this has had on gay bars?) And now that he has Skype his hookups can be conducted without even leaving the comfort of his chair, with other men all over the world – two men masturbating “face to face” via the internet. He has told me that even many of his physical hookups often involve mutual masturbation, and his theory is that these men spend so much time masturbating alone, or “face to face” on-line, that it becomes the only way they can get off. During masturbation one isn’t fucking one’s hand, but rather one is fucking an image in one’s head. A favorite author of mine, John Cowper Powys, scrawled over many a page in defense of masturbation. His reasoning was that it exercises and develops the imagination, that it helps one to see as more and more real the images one conjures and creates in one’s head. Though many of my friend’s hookups might not see it this way, I see them as people who might’ve developed their imaginations too much, to the point where the ass in their head is realer than the ass in front of them.In this way much of literature is like masturbation. The point of much literature being to create mental images in readers’ heads that for the moment become as real as the world they physically live in. Sometimes this imaging ability becomes what I call visionary. By visionary I mean an intensely imagined scene that is as if directly transcribed from the inner visual to the outer verbal. Dennis Cooper is such a visionary writer, and it’s probably no coincidence that masturbation plays a major role in his fictions; for not only are his characters, even while engaged in the most intimately physical sex, often existing in separate imaginary worlds with a vast gulf of incomprehension between, but the scenes and characters themselves have a vividness and power that can only come from something intensely imagined: pure inner objects of sexual desire. This gives his books the quality of mind movies, of inner worlds transcribed, which contrasts harshly with the inner voids of many of his characters, but which jibes well with the conversational concision of his prose. Even with their scenes of horrible violence and abuse his books are a joy to read.Try is by far the most conventional of the three of his I’ve read so far. The structure itself is fairly straightforward, alternating sections jumping from scene to scene which are occurring simultaneously; but even the subject matter is more conventional (if a boy having sex with his two adoptive fathers and lard ass necrophilia can ever be called conventional), with talk of love and sincere non-sexual attractions between characters. There’s even a hetero sex scene! It’s as if through all the sickness of the world of desires his characters find themselves in, some are trying to find “normality”, or rather stability; and Cooper, being the excellent stylist he is, has constructed a relatively conventional book to reflect the flirtings of his characters with conventional urges – for love, for home, for deep friendship. But there remains the gulf between the world of his characters' heads and the world of the world outside. A gulf his characters never manage to cross.In the end, masturbation probably can not help bring people together but it can help bring wonderful books into the world.