Closer

Dennis Cooper’s dark literary novel Closer is about a group of gay men and their various sexual exploits, all of which lead them further and further from the kind of desire and vivacity they yearn for. The novel is existentialist in tone, with a central theme that life is merely suffering until death, with little reprieve; it is necessary to squeeze from that suffering the largest possible amount of pleasure. The men in this novel, all centered on the bizarrely passive and obedient protagonist George Miles, seek meaning in life, but ultimately, George finds pleasure only in the careful study of death.

George Miles, a young gay man, is both stunningly beautiful and deeply passive in nature. George's passivity and physique give him a mysterious quality, which makes him irresistible to his fellows— mostly teenagers who are searching for meaning in their own mundane lives. Set in the desolate Midwest, the novel follows a string of characters with whom George has sexual relationships; though George is the thread that holds the novel together, the focus is more on George's lovers, who use him to find love, meaning, entertainment, and trust.

Each chapter is titled with the name of the man on whom George is focusing his sexual attention in a given moment. First is John, an eighteen-year-old artist who creates human portraits. John is a punk, with dark tee shirts and died blue hair. When his punk look stops surprising his classmates, John decides to try art to recreate his identity. He enrolls in a life-drawing class, surprising his art teachers with his talent. His indifference for people, however, complicates his mission to draw the human form – he chooses to draw portraits that attempt to destroy the humanity of the subject, in a desperate search for what lies beneath that “humanity.”



Alex is another art aficionado, though Alex's interests aren't in making, but rather watching art. He loves splatter films – horror films that focus less on plot and character development and more on gore, with a particular focus on body mutilation and human fragility. Alex also loves pornography – sex and violence are the only pastimes through which he can find feeling or meaning in the world.

After Alex, Steve arrives on the scene. An entrepreneur of sorts, Steve uses his parents’ garage to open up a night club. He takes George to the wild nights in the nightclub, hoping for some kind of real and authentic feeling – George, through these encounters with Alex, Steve, and John, remains a shadow of a character. He is impossible to pin down, and ultimately, his lack of identity provides nothing to the men he sleeps with; he just reflects their ideologies back at them.

Things change, however, when George meets two older men, a couple, Tom and Philippe. Tom and Philippe, unlike the young men George has been seeing, have everything figured out. They are obsessed with the beauty of death – of watching a body bleed out, decay, turn to bone. These men, both in their forties, pick up George and bring him along on their wild forays into the heart of death, finding in him a possibility to realize their ultimate fantasy.



Dennis Cooper's novel follows these depraved characters as they seek meaning in a meaningless world; Cooper makes it clear that the men themselves aren't the problem, life is the problem. As the men file through their meaningless sexual encounters trying to find some semblance of feeling, the mundanity of what should be a meaningful experience allows Cooper to express what it means to constantly seek out and never achieve transcendence.

Dennis Cooper is an American author, critic, poet, and performance artist. He is best known for the George Miles Sequence, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000, of which Closer is the first, followed by Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. Cooper has also written more than a dozen other books, including many poetry books, a number of non-fiction collaborations, and a handful of novels published by Grove Press, Kiddiepunk, and Harper Perennial. Closer was included in Publishing Triangle's Best 100 Gay and Lesbian Novels.