Book Review: Ugly Man

By S.P. MacIntyre Jul 17, 2009, 20:15 GMT

I say, “you may think you’re reading about a different world,” but then you must consider Angel Vidal Mendoza Sr., a Bakersfield man who is currently accused of being high on PCP and eating his son’s eyes and then trying to hack his own legs off with an axe. There are so many other horrifying examples of things like this… No, Dennis Cooper doesn’t write about a different world, a speculative world of the dark and grotesque: Dennis Cooper writes about the extreme edges of the extant.

When you first open Dennis Cooper’s new collection of stories, Ugly Man, and begin reading the first entry, “Jerk,” you may think that you’re reading about a different world: a world where underage gay sex is tossed in alongside a propensity for filming oneself torture people to death, a world where rape and murder and drugs and pedophilia are treated as commonplace things in a mundane existence—a world where chewing on someone’s hemorrhoids like bubblegum is just a different kind of handshake.  And yet these mundane things are elevated, in several of the stories of this collection, to the level of art, are treated as the subject of art, and compel us as readers to question what art and beauty actually happens to be.

I say, “you may think you’re reading about a different world,” but then you must consider Angel Vidal Mendoza Sr., a Bakersfield man who is currently accused of being high on PCP and eating his son’s eyes and then trying to hack his own legs off with an axe.  There are so many other horrifying examples of things like this…  No, Dennis Cooper doesn’t write about a different world, a speculative world of the dark and grotesque: Dennis Cooper writes about the extreme edges of the extant. 

There’s no better summary of this than a recent interview of Dennis Cooper in 3a.m. Magazine, where he said, “I’m just trying to get readers to confront and accept subjects and unusual literary forms that they tend to find disturbing and off-putting in a way that causes them to entertain the thinking and emotions behind violence and certain kinds of sex acts and things like that, and I guess I don’t see trying to do that as a dangerous act.”

And yet, at this edge, Cooper finds a way to take these stories, these transgressive tales, and make them funny.  There’s something funny and sad and meaningful in the way some of these stories play out, like “Santa Claus vs. Johnny Crawford,” an 81-word long story where Johnny discovers through his psychiatrist that his sexually abusive father is Santa Claus but then, perhaps, finds a way to justify this despite its being wrong (he does give gifts, after all).  Or the story, “Three Boys who thought Experimental Fiction was for Pussies,” which has three paragraphs that describe three men’s asses in detail and ends with the line, “’I wish your cock was eight feet long,’ he said.  ‘God, I wish that.’”  Funny, in a twisted way, and riddled with little pockets of absence and longing that sneak up on you amidst all the horror.

The stories are written in an experimental style, and none are written in quite the same way.  Some of the stories are extremely short prose pieces, while others are written as entirely dialogue exchanges, like “The Ash Gray Proclamation” or “Oliver Twink” (the latter formatted like a poem, the former like a play).  There’s even a list describing gay porn websites called “The Fifteen Worst Russian Gay Porn Web Sites.”  “The Anal-Retentive Line Editor,” is written as an editor’s loquacious responses to a gay porn manuscript—again, loaded with humor and absence and longing.  All of these stories though, no matter how they are styled, are written in a terse and stripped down language: every sentence reveals little details that accumulate into an overall sense of understanding without, individually, giving everything away.

This book is definitely not for everyone, though—as you probably could have guessed just from a description of some of the content.  There are a lot of people that would be gravely upset by this kind of writing, and to these people I say, “Don’t read the book.” 

Beyond this, though, there are only two real significant issues I had with the text: some of the stories rely far too heavily on pop-culture references and could potentially be near-impenetrable to someone without a decent knowledge of musicians and artists from the ‘70’s (but this is an audience issue, and I imagine DC is writing for the people who, if they don’t know, are at least willing to look for themselves); the other is that, after a while, I became numbed to the content—the rape and drugs and violence became almost boring by the end (perhaps an authorial intention).

I had a chance to see Dennis Cooper read at Skylight Books in Los Angeles recently.  He read several of the stories in the collection, including my two favorites: “Graduate Seminar” and “The Brainiacs.”  During the question and answer period, he gave advice for authors trekking out on their first book tour, “Don’t get too drunk or too stoned before you give a reading,” and partially described his writing process (summary: write a terrible first draft, revise hundreds of times after that). 

He signed my book and we had an incredibly awkward conversation about a t-shirt I was wearing that featured the classical elements (fire, water, aether, etc.).  The point of this tangent, though, is this: his voice is intimately connected with the words he writes.  If you can, try to find a recording of him reading his stories on YouTube.  I highly recommend it, even if you don’t buy the book.