SOURCE: Mannes-Abbott, Guy. “Far Out.” New Statesman and Society (30 September 1994): 56.

In the following review, Mannes-Abbott offers a positive assessment of Try.

Dennis Cooper's urgent and uncompromising fiction reduces the critical mainstream to bemusement, and draws polemical support from admirers who recognise its rhythms. This is true of all cultish writing, but Cooper deserves more than cultishness because his work is genuinely innovative and draws from wide cultural sources to develop its confrontational poise.

Baudelaire wrote of three pursuits “worthy of respect” in My Heart Laid Bare: “to know, to kill and to create”, and these are Cooper's parameters too. Books like Wrong, Closer and Frisk are full of violent sex but for Cooper, though “sex is the ultimate intimacy … it's not enough.” In all his writing, sex contains transcendent possibilities in the form of a metaphysics of desire punctuated by death. Divinity takes the form of a kiss...