Dennis Cooper’s fictional world is a treacherous slope of time-shifting narratives and secret mental passageways, designed to seduce and then ensnare readers. Groping around his existential darkness is oddly pleasurable for those of us fascinated by writing that explores intense eroticism and violent acts of cruelty exposing the extremes of human nature.
In his new novel The Marbled Swarm, Cooper leads us through a labyrinth of memory and cannibalism, lighting the way with some of the most gorgeous prose of his estimable career. Sloppily labeled a “cult writer” after a productive career that includes many kinds of novels (including the highly praised The George Miles Cycle), along with poetry, and nonfiction, Cooper gives us an intriguing and fresh direction in this concise new work. We may be feeling the influence of his new residency in France, where acclaim for his writing made him the first American to win the literary prize the Prix Sade, for his 1996 paean to online sex chat rooms, The Sluts.
Swarm presents us with the narration of a wealthy aristocrat seducing a family into selling him their crumbling Chateau Etage, tucked away in the French countryside. Cooper turns the classic gothic premise, used by everyone from Wilkie Collins to Jennifer Egan, on its head, chaperoning an orgy of Dickensian characters, each whispering naughty secrets in his ear.
Without revealing too much of a complicated plot, an elder son of the chateau’s resident family has mysteriously died, and his subsequent ghostly reappearance leads the new owner and the reader into a maze of secret passageways and peepholes throughout the house. Hiding behind walls, the new owner obsessively watches Serge, the family’s nubile younger son. Serge pants for experience and escape, and seems willing to do anything to get it.
The gothic setting and shenanigans perfectly set up Cooper’s sharp, macabre humor:
“Still, even a mild summer day is no preservative, and dead boys aren’t exactly a wheel of brie, however much they might smell the same eventually.”
Cooper’s atmosphere feels timeless, despite the odd reference to modern-day technologies like Facebook and iPhones. Cooper relishes pulling the rug from under the reader, forcing a stumble around another dark angle, into an unexpected connecting narrative. Voyeurism telescopes into a son’s desperate hero worship of his aristocrat father, a yearning for acceptance that raises the book from snuff-film script into coming-of-age memoir.
Cooper unites disparate story strands through an evocative Parisian setting and the use of a secret seductive language the father teaches his son as a means of entrepreneurial advantage. The father-son code, termed “The Marbled Swarm,” represents the safety and acceptance a father tries to instill in his son, even though the son later manipulates their shorthand for his own grislier desires. Isolation and parental mistakes are hardly new themes for Cooper, but here he shades and morphs them, allowing only oracular glimmers to show through the lush wordplay:
“As much as I would love to overrule some chums who’ve called my voice a kind of fancy drainage ditch through which my brilliant father’s voice forever sloshes and evaporates, to ask myself to replicate his words verbatim would be like asking you to travel to Miami on the broken champagne bottle that baptized the ship that could have sailed you there in style.”
Cooper’s narrator also explores the latest twists in the evolution of modern sexuality, refusing to be defined or contained by a lifestyle label:
“Now, were I gay or, if you insist, entirely gay, I would have … well, you tell me. I’m not gay enough to know.”