Guide

Spin

A brilliant exegesis on language and meaning.

LA Times Book Review

The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone had attempted in a long time; it's the funniest, too, and does for Clinton's America what The Tin Drum did for post-war Germany.

Salon

There's a stainles steel sheen to Cooper's sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Joan Didion.

Daniel Reitz

Homosexual literary aesthetics take many forms -- trash kitsch (Robert Bodi, Joe Keenan), elegiac AIDS memoirs and/or novels (Paul Monette), boy-Wunderkinder (Dale Peck) and celeb auteurs (David Leavitt). There are the patriarchs (Edmund White), the philosophers (Michel Foucault), the academics (Martin Duberman), the comedians (Mark O'Donnell) and the classics (James Baldwin, Jean Genet, William Burroughs). There's the mass-market mainstream, dominated by Armistead Maupin, whose beloved, banal, wildly popular books hold sway over readers on gay beaches all over America. You can read him without once being called upon to summon a thought.

Then, there's Dennis Cooper, hip nihilist. In screaming opposition to Maupin's paunchy tomes, we have Cooper's lean, mean, lethal volumes published by Grove Press. Grove is historically a champion of the literary fringe and still going strong with the likes of Cooper and Kathy Acker. While Cooper shares some of Genet's obsessions -- notably the eroticism inherent in the fatal Molotov cocktail of boys with men -- as a writer Cooper is not in the same class. It's actually William Burroughs and his apocalyptic laconism whom Cooper most closely resembles. Cooper crafts his sentences carefully, tossing them off with a minimalist, soulless, L.A. efficiency; there's a stainless steel sheen to them that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion: crisp, brutal, quick.

There's not a lot to say about the plot in Guide, Cooper's new novel; in many ways, it's his usual territory. The narrator, who is named Dennis and is famous for writing Dennis Cooper-like novels, tells us on the first page he's just taken acid and is starting a novel about his friends, who seem to be composed largely of kiddie porn stars and drug addicts. Yet Cooper balances the brutality of his material with self-deprecating humor. There is a conversation in which Dennis is asked by Luke, his infatuation, "Does it bother you that I don't like your books?" Dennis replies that it doesn't and muses, "[Luke] doesn't understand why anyone would want to write about the subjects my novels recapitulate so automatically. Neither do I, so we're even."

You can read Guide and admire the fine sentences that sound like jaunty little jazz riffs around the grisly proceedings. Watching a porn movie sex scene between adolescent Chris and Don Haggarty, a resentful adult dwarf, our narrator says: ''The porn had this strange, silly, magical ... I don't know, charm. I guess it was mostly the fact that I was watching a dwarf, with all his fairy-tale baggage."

If you didn't like Cooper before, you won't like him now. "Like" is the wrong word, anyway -- you couldn't "like" Cooper's world; you'd have to be mentally unbalanced to respond emotionally. You can't read his probing, almost lyrical delineations of characters who indulge in mutilation during sex and view murder as the ultimate orgasm and take them at face value. This novel, like his others, is a sub-zero nihilist investigation. Cooper is the literary equivalent of the painter Francis Bacon, in the sense that he shares Bacon's clinical remove; unlike Bacon, whose vision was grand, epic, highly structured, Cooper's is loose, hallucinatory and grounded in pop culture.

He is also one of the few serious writers working in the literary tradition of subversion, and for my money, he is the worthy heir to the late, lamented Burroughs. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

At their best, Cooper's works (Try; Closer) explore sex as a simultaneous embrace of and flight from death. Populated by drugged-out adolescent boys living in anomic L.A., Cooper's books balance their lurid subject matter with affectless, economic prose. Guide covers the same territory. The narrator, "Dennis," a novelist and journalist, seduces and is seduced by burnt-out boys, one of whom wants to be killed during sex. But it lacks the intensity and drive of Cooper's best work. Its meandering plot incorporates the death of a 12-year-old boy who overdoses while starring in another porn film; the murder and mutilation of a young man by a dwarf; and the continuous buying and selling of sex between "Dennis" and these lost boys that beguile him. Though the novel is occasionally acute (the teenage rock band Silverchair is parodied as "Tinselstool"; the members' youth prompts the critics to be "weirdly kind" rather than dismissive of so derivative a band), much of it is stale and unfocused. Digressions detract from the story they purportedly illuminate. The narrator spends too much time listing the ephebic actors and singers he finds alluring and quoting rock lyrics from garage-grungers Guided by Voices and the British band Blur, among others. Cooper's best work is hypnotic and unsettling in its explorations of the underside of sexual desire. Guide, unfortunately, does not meet that high standard. (June)

Library Journal

Those familiar with Cooper's work (Wrong, LJ 5/15/92) know that his fiction makes use of some unsavory, at times shocking, subject matter. Necrophilia and child pornography may be taboo in Cooper's world, but they are practiced nonetheless. Against a backdrop of pop culture, this first-person narrative chronicles the exploits of a half-dozen teens viewing life through the heavy veil of drugs and apathy. Though the story is as compelling as it is perverse, Cooper purposefully overrides it with an innovative style and raw, truthful character studies. Deeply lonely, the characters don't trust their own feelings and experience life in spurts. Interaction with anything outside themselves is a contest without a prize. There is a real elegance to the choppy waves of prose, which allow this work to transcend the form of the novel while working within it. With Guide, Cooper claims his place, alongside Genet and Burroughs, as a master of his own disenfranchised generation. For all literary fiction collections.Douglas McClemont, New York

Paper

Brilliant and deeply unsettling... an emotional nakedness that leaves the reader shaken.

The Independent

A book of astonishing power. In Guide, [Cooper] has found a way to represent the transgressive abyss while also reflecting on it... He is not only a very good writer but an important one.

(London) Independent on Sunday

Guide confirms [Cooper] as the only living transgressive writer of any great importance in the U.S.

Kirkus Reviews

More transgressive meanderings from shock jock Cooper (Try, 1994, etc.), who seems—as far as the dance of death is concerned—to have all the steps down pat without the first clue of where he wants to go with them.

"Luke at Scott's. Mason's home jerking off to a picture of Smear's bassist, Alex. . . Robert, Tracy, and Chris are several miles across town shooting dope. . . Pam's directing a porn film. Goof is the star. He's twelve and a half. I'm home playing records and writing a novel about the aforementioned people, especially Luke. This is it." In its very first lines, the story is laid out pretty clearly. Like most of Cooper's previous works, this is an account of life among the addicts and prostitutes of the gay urban demimonde, this time in Los Angeles. The narrator is a novelist and magazine reporter who comes into contact with a clique of teenaged hustlers while working on an article about AIDS among the runaways and drifters of West Hollywood, but from his descriptions of his daily routines one could suppose that he had grown up in Covenant House himself: "All the beauty in my life is either sleeping, unconscious, or dead." And how: When he and his friends aren't shooting up or having sex on camera, they are usually fantasizing about killing or being killed. Goof, for example, ODs during a porn shoot. Then Drew gets knocked out cold when someone whacks him with a skateboard during a bit of rough sex. The narrator dreams of eviscerating people from time to time and seems to be obsessed with a very young streetwalker named Sniffles, who likes to be beaten up in bed. After a while he tracks Sniffles down to the AIDS hospice where he's dying. When he gets home, he finds that Drew may in fact be dead. He sits down to finish his novel.

As offensive in its aimlessness as it is in its perversity. Cooper should be ashamed of himself.