I Wished is a tightly wound yet nakedly inquisitive novel about a man seeking to understand how he came to understand his past in a way that has tended to motivate him his entire life. Dennis Cooper (The Marbled Swarm) is the author of numerous unsettling transgressive novels, including a series of five interconnected books about a man named George Miles. Here, he steps back to formulate a brooding metafictional analysis of how George became the fulcrum for Dennis's early work.
The question that hangs over I Wished is whether George in fact loved Dennis the way he remembers, or if it was all an elaborate wish, the type Dennis began obsessively composing after an ax blade split his skull at age 10. "If George didn't love Dennis, and there's no evidence he did, then I guess I never loved him. I loved something else that this is torn from." Cooper bends boundaries of fiction and nonfiction throughout, but ultimately gives this work firm footing in realms of fiction, calling upon Santa Claus to write a couple of pointed e-mails and conjuring a talking crater to interview George.
Bizarre as it sounds, I Wished is a poignant and haunting elegy to a figure that has loomed large in Cooper's imagination since dying by suicide at age 30. The phantasmagorical qualities make every page a thrilling revelation, even for readers unfamiliar with the George Miles cycle of books. It is a beautiful, maddening riddle about love and what is set adrift in its wake. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness