The Marbled Swarm - Dennis Cooper (2011)

It's not often that I read other reviews of a book before I attempt to write my own.  I used to think that was "cheating" when I wrote film reviews for Washington Square News Weekend at NYU.  It was "cheating" because it was almost like I was afraid to say how I felt about something--or more specifically, afraid that I would praise a film that would be dismissed as a cinematic disaster, or pan a film that would show up on every critic's year-end top 10 list.

We are reaching an important point on Flying Houses.  Recently I applied for a Press Pass for the Pitchfork Festival.  If I get one, it will be the most audacious experience in our history, as I will try to bring in a cameraman and film interviews with the likes of St. Vincent and Beck.  But I won't find out until June and dreams tend not to come true.  Moreover, April 1st will mark our sixth birthday here, and I will post as I have the past couple of years an "MD&A."  After more than 270 posts, one would think I would have the courage to state how I felt about a book without consulting other reviews.  But The Marbled Swarm is one of the more troubling books I have read.  I both liked it, and didn't like it.  It's probably easiest for me to list all of the other books by Dennis Cooper that I have reviewed here and state that I liked it less than all of them.

That's my knee-jerk reaction before even checking all of the others.  But between Closer, Ugly Man,  and Try, I certainly rank it below Closer and Try, and probably beneath Ugly Man too, though maybe I would say it's on par with that.  More importantly from the Ugly Man review, I list and rank all of his books that I've read (six others, three or four of which I would re-read), and from this list I would not put it any higher than #7.

It will be fun to try to explain what this book is about.  First, to continue with the comparison theme, I will say it is most similar to Period in that it is extremely experimental.  I would also say it is better than Period, but maybe I wouldn't stand by that statement if I re-read that book.  But the plot:

The narrator (who is nameless, I am pretty sure) is rich--apparently he is a 22-year-old billionaire (though it doesn't really seem like he is that rich) whose parents were famous French actors.  Well, at least his father, Pierre Clementi, was (I'd need to re-read to check on his mother).  He wants to buy a chateau.  He meets the owners--the father, the mother, and their 14-year-old son Serge--and decides he wants to buy it.  They had another son--16-year-old Claude--who died (Maybe, I think?  For some reason I'm not concerned about spoilers in this review).  Basically, Serge is "interested" in the narrator, and the father seems to think he is a nuisance so he says he will "include him" in the price of the house.  The narrator puts Serge in the trunk of his car and is driven back to Paris (he has a driver, Azmir, of course).  Serge is then raped, murdered, and eaten (Maybe?).  The narrator then starts reminiscing about his younger brother, Alfonse, who was very into Manga and was also eventually raped, murdered, and eaten.  By the narrator and a couple cohorts.  One of those cohorts has a son named Didier who is eventually groomed to look exactly like Alfonse.  Finally, there is the issue of the narrator's father, who apparently dies at some point after Alfonse (though this is confusing, too), and has another property in his will that nobody really knows about in a remote part of France.  There is another story about this house and the people that stayed in it/the reasons why his father built it, that seems to coalesce with the chateau from the beginning of the novel as well as the lofts in which the narrator, Alfonse, and their father reside at in Paris.  Then, the novel ends, and the ending I have to admit is one of the more beautiful endings that Cooper has written.

Why is the ending beautiful?  Because, as may be clear from my plot summary, this book is fucking bonkers and basically impossible to "get."  The most obvious "themes" are younger/older brothers (and this is not the first time Cooper has touched incest--see My Loose Thread), rape/murder/cannibalism (the first two are in nearly every single one of his novels; the last is something new, but seems more "out there" for some reason, and just there to shock), and most conspicuously, secret passageways.  But the ending ties things together as best as it possibly could.

This book is not totally inscrutable.  Cooper does pull back the curtain a couple of times and acknowledges that  he knows that he is not presenting anything close to a linear narrative.  Even so, it is very hard to tell what happened, and I'm not really sure what the whole point of it is:

"The play was set in a chateau whose history of on-site murders, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena required a lengthy spoken foreword, which Claude's father had recited through the speakers for what would have felt like months were not the bloodthirsty details of this story so custom-made for mordant teenagers.
To cite the most agentive of these details, the couple's older son had either killed himself, been murdered, died by tragic accident, or faked his death within the previous few months.
The anguished man and wife had put the crime scene on the market, and the young Parisian, struck by certain parallels between their son's obituary in Le Monde and the clueless death of his own brother years before, found himself inspired to visit the chateau and then acquire it." (171)

I think I've made most of the points I wanted to make about this book, but it is worth noting that in my search for reviews, I came across an interview that Cooper did for The Paris Review in 2011.  You may find it here.  I highly recommend it, as I do most interviews in The Paris Review, which is probably the most important literary journal apart from The New Yorker (though I find The New Yorker to be pretentious most of the time, and really consider an interview in The Paris Review one of the highest honors a writer can receive).  In it, Cooper had this to say about this novel:

"With The Marbled Swarm, I was trying to write a novel the way a sound technician mixes a song or piece of music into its final form. I’ve been studying recorded music and trying to transpose its principles into my fiction ­going all the way back to my first novel,Closer, where one thing I did was try to simulate the sonic effect of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album with my prose. In The Marbled Swarm I found a voice that let me do that. I thought about each element of the novel, whether it was a narrative thread or character or reference point or an ongoing motif or tone or rhythm. The idea was that they would all always be there, but they would be emphasized or de-emphasized at different points, mixed into the foreground, middle ground, or background, being moved around constantly so the reader’s attention would be directed all over the place. My idea was that it would give the writing a three-dimensional quality, as the reader is carried along by the musical surface of the novel, but he or she would also be chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose."

This novel certainly creates that sort of feeling.  Cooper also says in the interview that he wants to write one more novel, and then be done with them, so that he can finish with an even ten.  That makes me sad, but he has been pretty prolific over the past 25 years, and the world of literature is richer for the contributions he has made.  I'm sure some people would take issue with that statement, but one of the factors that makes his work more interesting than 90% of his contemporaries is its divisiveness.  While this is not my favorite book by him by a good stretch, it was still a worthwhile read, and the ending was very nice:

"I've failed the marbled swarm as I semi-understand its rules and premise, and, although you'll never know the difference, barring errors that weren't meant as an insidious direction, there is nowhere deeper or more intricately stifled by my story than this hotel room, and I'm out of means to keep you waiting for the secret that involved my sleight of hand unless you think a very frightened thirteen-year-old boy who looks vaguely like Pierre Clementi seems magical or promising enough." (194)

I also loved the references to Isabelle Adjani.

Closer - Dennis Cooper

We follow up one re-read with another in what will not be a continuing trend (our next item is the much-anticipated Imperial Bedrooms, referenced quite a long time ago on Flying Houses, here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/05/informers-bret-easton-ellis.html?) with Closer, what could be considered Dennis Cooper's breakout novel, published in 1989. This preceded Frisk, and later Try. They form a trilogy which can be considered his strongest work.

In the same way Ziggy is the central figure of Try, George Miles is at the center of Closer. However, the story is not as narrowly-focused, which distracts, but also allows the work to delve into a few experimental episodes that coalesce and form its own unique symmetry. There are eight relatively short chapters in 131 pages with seven narrators, or protagonists in what could be considered short stories, all of which link. This is definitely a novel, though.

John, where the novel starts, draws portraits of his classmates, and gets involved physically with them. He meets George Miles, who takes several tabs of acid every day and smokes grass in between and keeps a shrine to Disneyland in his bedroom. Sex ensues, thoughts of violence ensue, and then they end up meeting a punk who goes with them into a purportedly haunted house and then later the punk describes his predicament:

"'Hurt me,' he yelled in a hoarse voice. 'Fuck me up and I'll never forget you. I really fucking love violence. I want to tell all my friends what we did so they'll hate me or call me a fag or whatever, but fuck them. I'm not a poser like they are. I want to do everything so when I die they'll say I lived and tell bad jokes about me but who cares. I like getting crazy and you seem okay. Anyway, why not?'" (10)

The second chapter is narrated by David, who believes he is a pop star, or fantasizes about it often enough to become his fractured reality. The novel shifts its tone and voice drastically in this chapter and becomes a bit humorous, while still very dark. David is paranoid and talkative, the chapter is breezy, and it serves as a nice transition between the 1st and 3rd chapters.

The 3rd chapter is George's first chapter, and in it he describes getting asked to leave school one day, hitchhiking, getting picked up by a carpenter, more sex, going to a school dance, smoking a joint with his teacher, who is a closet case, and then later meeting Philippe. The segments with Philippe are the point at which Closer tips the obscenity scales at 10. Philippe has a particularly gross fetish that is four letters long and starts with the letter s. That is all I will say about that. But it does become an important plot point.

The next two chapters are 1st and 3rd person alternately with Cliff and Alex, who are more of the same, basically--they are friends, and they watch old scary movies together, sometimes they smoke pot together, they talk about George Miles, and how obsessed they are with him (as does everyone), and then there is always more sex. Cliff watches Philippe perform his act with George, and then later tells Alex about it, who wants to recreate it for a project in his film class. Later an accident happens.

George's second chapter comes next, and it has the probable climax of the novel in his encounter with Tom, who attempts to kill him, because that is what he understood their meeting to mean.

Philippe is the next chapter, and in it he describes the root of his perversion in relatively original prose, such as the interior-dialogue he has with himself as he tries to sleep:

"'What are you feeling, Philippe?' Tired. 'Then you should sleep.' But I am too tense; I keep thinking. 'What kind of thinking?' Well, everything. 'Of Georges?' Some. He represents something I have desired for a long time. 'How long?' Since before I came to America.
'Why did you come?' I came because in my own country I felt afraid. 'Of what?' Everything, but mainly of myself. I was beginning to want what I could not have. 'Can you be more clear?' No. When I try, my beliefs or desires come out beautiful. They are beautiful to me, but I cannot understand them in that form.
'You wanted to kill someone?' That is too simple. I thought about killing someone, though I did not know who. My ideas about death are very beautiful, so I wanted to think about killing a beautiful person. 'A boy?' Yes. 'And you could not find him there?' I could not find myself there. I was known as what I am not.
'Who are you?' I am trying to find this out. It is hard. I am driven to do certain things, and I believe they are helping me, because they seem strong. 'Why Georges?' He makes me feel something. I do not know this answer. 'He has been hurt?' Yes. 'By someone you know?' Yes." (109-110)

The novel's final chapter is narrated by Steve, who starts a nightclub called the Forefront in his parent's four-car garage. Later he meets George, and then an accident occurs, and the novel ends, in fairly effective order.

If there's anything to criticize about this book, it would be its subject matter, but that is a discussion I don't care to offer. I think it's unfair. More to the point: this novel meanders. Sometimes the meandering is great, and Cooper will find some new way to say something simple, in a sentence that the reader feels they might have read before, but with a word or two exchanging positions in order that changes the meaning. Other times, when a new narrator enters the picture, the reader can feel that they're losing the story, or missing the point. My first time reading it, I didn't like it as much.

The second time, I must admit it seems much longer than its 131 pages, but is consistent all the way through, and offers many quotable passages, as deranged as they may be. One of my favorites is more innocent though--it is George's declaration to change his life, in his diary:

"'I'm going to use this to make myself change, like a starting point. I think that's the best thing to do. I won't buy any more drugs. I'll try not to do what I always do. I never do anything other than school and Philippe.
'Tomorrow I'll clean up my room and make it look like a normal place. I think I'll burn all my Disneyland stuff so I can't change my mind. Nobody else was ever interested in the stuff anyway and all my feelings for it are destroyed by the drugs now.
'I called Cliff tonight, just to talk. He doesn't care anymore. He kept saying how cute David was. I guess they're in love. He said that David is sort of obsessed or whatever with me. I don't know why, but it pisses him off. I hung up.
'It's strange I'm not sad about Mom. I guess it took such a long time I felt everything I could feel already. I wish I hadn't been there, but I'm glad the last person she looked at was me. She really loved me once. Likewise, I guess.
'I think I'm afraid of stuff. Maybe that's it. I was afraid Mom would die, but now she has and it's okay. I can't let it stop me from doing things. I'm going to keep that in mind from now on. I mean it." (97)

Closer envisions an alternate reality of sex and violence that many will find shocking, and while it does not reach the heights of Try, it is nearly as good as Frisk, and a decent enough introduction to Cooper's work. It's definitely above-average, but something about it does seem longer--and there is something else worth noting: compared to the rest of the work in Cooper's oeuvre, it seems bland in some way. Like, there is no defining factor that makes it memorable.

For me, this isn't exactly true, but I could see how others might regard it in this light. The final chapter in particular, and the idea of the Forefront, stuck enough in my mind to imagine a parallel setting in my second novel. All of Cooper's work in general influenced my writing it, but several details reminded me of specific scenes, or even phraseology that I would later use, that were pleasures to re-discover. Though it is not a pleasurable read! Reading any of Cooper's books is not a pleasant experience, but it can also be cathartic in ways few other books can match.