God Jr.

Lenora Todaro

In God Jr., Cooper manages to find a language for yearning for transcendence amid human disconnection. The narrator indirectly leads the reader around to the question of whether our fates are predetermined or we have the will to break free from our programming, so to speak. If one believes Cooper is a subversive writer, one assumes the latter. But the scars on his broken spirits tell another tale.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Try making up a world where having killed someone you love isn't important." Cooper (Closer, etc.) does just that-and it works, for a while. Pot-smoking, 40-something L.A. depressive Jim rammed his Lexus into a telephone pole, sending his son, Tommy, flying through the windshield and leaving himself crippled. He has subsequently lied about the cause of Tommy's death (Tommy lived long enough to wander from the scene) and begun working at a children's custom clothing company run by an all-handicapped crew. Upping his pot intake and drifting further from his wife, Bette, Jim has been obsessively constructing a monument to Tommy in his yard that has drawn media (and litigious) attention. Cooper's genius has always been for dialogue: the clipped marriage and workplace exchanges feature searing ironies and delicate nuances that are arresting. In the lyrical but muddled passages that dominate the book's second half, Jim loses himself in a video game of Tommy's, communicating mystically with the video game's flora and fauna while searching for a meaning to Tommy's life and death. Cooper leaves Jim and Bette stranded in their grief, and the various forms of sage-like solace he proffers fail to add up to much, either for Jim or for us. Agent, Ira Silverberg at Donadio and Olson. (Aug.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Jim, an avid dope smoker, is wheelchair-bound (as far as anyone knows) owing to a car accident that killed his son, Tommy, who also smoked a lot of dope, played video games, and drew pictures of a stronghold possibly plagiarized from one of those games. Jim, in a gesture of tribute, guilt, or madness, starts building a monument in his yard based on Tommy's drawings that overflows onto the yard of crusty beer-guzzling neighbor Fred. Expect the best yard-fancy in a novel since Anna Murdoch's Coming to Terms. Though the plot line suggests a Christopher Moore-style madcap, the book is actually laid-back and spare, two Cooper (Wrong) signatures, and the problems that arise from Jim's architectural obsession (especially as publicity about the project increases) are certainly real enough. While this small book isn't for everyone, it could grab a cult following. Recommended accordingly. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/05.]-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

And now for something different from the master of homosexual punk sadomasochism. A teenaged boy does die in Cooper's latest (after My Loose Thread, 2001, etc.), but this time he isn't tortured, murdered or flayed. As this novel's terse episodes gradually disclose, 17-year-old Tommy Baxter perished in the car crash that left his father Jim disabled, grief-stricken and guilty (for the two had gotten "stoned together" shortly before the accident). We learn this in early scenes set at Jim's place of employment (which makes outre children's costumes), then in scenes at the Baxter home, where Jim and his stunned wife Bette grow increasingly estranged and Jim is having an outdoor "monument" built for Tommy. The "building" under construction copies a mysterious house in a video game (itself copied from a Nintendo original) that Tommy had designed-with which Jim now occupies himself, imagining that he's entering into the computerized landscape where his son's mind had lived and where Tommy had exercised a control acknowledged by its digitally formed creatures (". . . the consensus here," one of the creatures informs Jim, "is that Tommy bear was God"). Cooper assembles this sorrowful story quite skillfully, showing Jim's destroyed relationship with Bette, gathering the comments of friends and experts (a video analyst, a psychic) on both Tommy's fantasies and Jim's absorption in them, and high-lighting the "false world" of the video game: a quest whose object draws Jim ever closer to its revelatory center. The ingenuity of the narrative, though it's slightly forced, is indeed compelling. Still, the best things here are Jim's disclosures of his piercing, unending grief over the loss of the son heloved-and grew close to-too late ("I never thought there was much of me in him. I guess since he died there's been a ton of him in me"). A refreshing departure from the obsessive redundancy of its predecessors. Probably Cooper's best yet.