Oh for a Little Despair : TRY, <i> By Dennis Cooper (Grove Atlantic: $20; 288 pp.)</i>

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 traces their impossible love through a world so fried bydrugs and brutality that a feeling as concrete as despair would be a relief. “Try” is a true original, full of perversely moving moments and a bleaker-than-bleak, strangely comic vision. It may be some kind of screwed-up American classic.

In his grungy L.A. loft, Calhoun floats above emotions on an icy little cloud of heroin. Ziggy, stuck in the suburbs, crackles with emotions so electric and unpredictable he can scarcely stand upright. As a “hyper-active, hard-to-place two- year-old” he was adopted by Roger and Brice, two gay men making a “stab at heterosexual-style bliss.” The bliss thinned out quickly, Roger moved to New York, and Brice started molesting Ziggy the year Ziggy turned 8. Now Roger has decided it’s his turn with Ziggy. He flies back to Los Angeles from New York with sedatives and a pair of skin-tight Lycra bikini shorts for his adopted son.

Ziggy copes as best he can by fixating on Calhoun, by sleeping with a kind and pretty rich girl named Nicole, and by insisting that every new atrocity practiced on him is good material for his homemade magazine, “I Apologize: A Magazine for the Sexually Abused.” To sidestep the avalanches of terror and self-hatred that periodically overwhelm him, he writes up his tales of abuse--sometimes as they’re happening--with avid detachment. He’s like a journalist blandly reporting his own murder.

Calhoun, roughly equally damaged, depends on Ziggy’s devotion but will not, can not, respond. For Calhoun, an actual emotion would be too ragged and harsh. It’s better to shoot up and drift away. He’s ostensibly writing a novel, which appears only as a spectral presence on his laptop, “that glimmering rectangular blueness, that spooky night light.” The laptop is always turned on but never, ever, used.

Dennis Cooper has been charting this bleached, nervous terrain for almost a decade and a half now. His novels, stories and poetry work and rework a few essentials--the word themes is probably too mild. The word obsessions may even be too mild.

In Cooper’s fictional world, love and torture are so closely related as to be nearly indistinguishable. Emotional connection is too difficult, so Cooper’s characters invade their loved ones’ bodies in search of the fundamental human essence that’s getting blocked on every other channel. Cooper’s lust objects tend to be young boys, and I mean young boys. By age 10 or so, they’re viable. By 16 or 17, they’re over the hill.

“Try” is Cooper’s least horrifying novel, and it may also be his best. In his last novel, “Frisk,” a character fantasized about torturing a little boy in such salacious detail that I remember thinking, as I read it: “This is a fascinating book, and when I’m finished reading it, I don’t want it in the house.” Cooper is a scary guy, and reading him doesn’t feel particularly safe. One moment you feel as if you’re in the company of a significant artist who doesn’t flinch over the numbed violence of our lives right now. The next moment you feel like a kid who’s hitched a ride with John Wayne Gacy.

In “Try,” Cooper lightens up a little without sacrificing any of his edge, though anyone who reads “Try” without knowing the larger body of Cooper’s work may be hard pressed to imagine that it involves a “lightening up” of any kind. In Cooperland, when a 13-year-old overdoses, the man he’s been sleeping with doesn’t call the hospital; he calls the gentleman who’ll pay top dollar for a few hours alone with the corpse. At least in “Try” he closes the bedroom door.

Cooper’s fiction bridges a gap between the behavior chronicled in Literature with a capital L and the behavior chronicled in the juicier newspapers, the ones that keep us informed about serial murders and fetishes that end in death. Cooper is important because he aims his flashlight beam toward the darkest places; he’s frightening because he admits to having an appetite for whatever he finds there.

Cooper’s voice is full of a zoned-out adolescent poetry, at once brimming with emotion and reticent about showing any emotion at all. He’s Mr. Cool--grand passions are for geeks. The most he’ll allow his characters is scraps of intimacy and a vaguely apologetic devotion to highly diluted beauty.

There are times when Cooper’s vision feels as grimly, impenetrably romantic as an adolescent’s, and subject to adolescent limitations. Even as a fan I’ve found myself growing impatient with a world so resolutely centered on the young, white and miserable. It can feel like a cramped little universe, more generously filled with morbid curiosities than actual truths. It can be hard to remember that this is the same planet and species that produced Tolstoy, Dickens, Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison.

With “Try,” however, Cooper expands his range. Women (well, girls) appear for the first time as sympathetic characters and as objects of desire. Love exists beyond the worship of the flesh, and some kind of grubby, compromised redemption might even be possible. The limitations imposed on the characters in “Try” are not wholly different from the limitations of the culture in general, in that soaring emotions aren’t all that easy to maintain in the face of assorted addictions, endless violence and a sorrow so large it doesn’t really have a name. After reading “Try” you might feel, at least for a while, that almost every other contemporary American novel is a little forced and melodramatic, full of wishful thinking rather than hard human facts.

Cooper is an important and highly idiosyncratic writer, with a nose for some of the least presentable living odors. In “Try” he has produced a harrowing, intricately accomplished work of art. It should be read. It might even endure, if that doesn’t sound too geeky.