My Loose Thread

Holden Caulfield Goes to Columbine

Since the sixties censorship trial that once and for all legitimized William Burroughs's hallucinatory, heroin-induced Naked Lunch, flaunting convention has itself become conventional. Today, droves of aspiring young artists, mistaking the merely outlandish with the truly innovative, attempt to distinguish themselves by out-transgressing their peers. Voilá, one urine-drenched Jesus.

In the end, though, every writer is judged not on the subject matter of their books, whether shocking or commonplace, but on how provocatively they have explored what it was like to be a human being during a particular place and time. By this standard, there is every indication that "excoriating, hallucinatory, viciously funny" Dennis Cooper will one day be remembered as one of this era's greatest visionaries. As Burroughs himself said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer."

He is also the closest thing Burroughs, and his own literary ancestor, Jean Genet, have to a genuine heir. There are the obvious similarities: Genet was obsessed with beautiful homosexual criminals, Burroughs channeled the ravings of decrepit homosexual junkies, and Cooper is repeatedly drawn to violent, drug-addicted, homosexual teenagers. However, their greatest similarity lies in the beauty of their prose and the depth of their vision, not the proclivities of their characters. Michael Cunningham dubbed such writers "ghoulish geniuses," which seems about right.

And Cooper's latest novel, My Loose Thread, is as horrifying as any he has written. Larry is a disturbed teenager with a violent disposition, whose life begins to unravel (hence the title) after the death of his best friend Rand. Larry had struck his friend violently after he found some naked pictures of his younger brother in Rand's room (which upset Larry in part because he was himself involved in a sexual relationship with his brother). Despite the fact that Rand's death was not caused by a blow to the head, Larry, irrationally, believes that he is responsible.

After Rand's death, Larry begins to lose his already tenuous hold on reality. He can't keep tabs on his own actions. As his therapist tells him, "I'm not sure you know what you've done, and what you haven't done....You blame yourself for things you haven't done, and deny responsibility for things you have done." He can't decided whether he is gay or not (he thinks not) or if he has gone insane (he thinks he has). And Larry's response to his confusion is to lash out with violent rage.

At one point, he beats a Vietnamese student unconscious and then watches as his neo-Nazi friend Gilman to rapes him. He also helps his friend Pete kill one of their classmates in order to retrieve his notebook for Gilman. Ostensibly, Gilman wants the notebook because he is concerned that "the boy," as he's called, wrote about their relationship. The reader is led to believe their relationship was sexual, but it is never quite clear.

In fact, in this novel nothing is ever quite clear. After all, Larry, who can't be sure whether he murdered the boy or whether Pete did it after he beat him unconscious, is a most unreliable narrator. The only thing certain is that Larry is in deep trouble, and that he is a danger to those around him. Larry's girlfriend makes it plain enough: "You're psychotic."

What is truly remarkable about this novel is how much compassion Cooper is able to cultivate in his readers. Even at his most deranged and violent, Larry is at least as sympathetic as he is abhorrent. Oddly enough, Larry reminded me of no one so much as that prototypical confused, melancholy outcast, Holden Caulfield. Larry longs to understand himself, to know how to act in the world — he longs to care without being consumed — but for whatever reason he just doesn't have it in him. And the consequences are disastrous.

To say that My Loose Thread reads like Holden Caulfield Goes to Columbine may sound flip, but it's also suggestive of the spirit of this book. Teen angst has come a long way since J. D. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye in the fifties. Reportedly, Kip Kinkel was the original inspiration for this novel, which reminds us that the nightmarish universe that Larry lives in can be all all too real — and makes this terrifying vision by one of our most daring — and humane — writers not only topical, but very important, indeed.

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