SOURCE: Cunningham, Michael. “Oh for a Little Despair.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (3 July 1994): 3, 8.

In the following review, Cunningham offers a positive evaluation of Try.

If Jean Genet and Paul Bowles could have had a child together, he might have grown up to be a writer like Dennis Cooper. I've learned not to push Cooper's work on just anybody, but if a friend seems even halfway receptive I usually prepare him or her by saying something like, “Cooper is appalling, but so is the modern world.” I go on to remind him or her that Lolita was generally considered perverse to the point of dangerousness when it first appeared. As was Madame Bovary.

Try, Dennis Cooper's third novel, is the story of a ravaged, omnisexual 16-year-old named Ziggy and his hopeless romance with Calhoun, a straight heroin addict who, in his own words, “hates all emotion.” The book...