This section contains 1,739 words (approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Indiana, Gary. “Monster Mash.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (8 June 1997): 14.
In the following review, Indiana offers a positive evaluation of Guide.
Since his writing first appeared in chapbooks in the late '70s, Dennis Cooper has been a uniquely disturbing presence in American literature, a major voice shunted to cult status by mainstream squeamishness, flawlessly fluent in the lingua franca of youthful alienation and its coolest, least affected recording angel. His early poems and short prose were memorably hailed by Edmund White as sounding like “Aeschylus with a mouthful of bubble gum.” When Cooper's first full-length novel, Closer, appeared in 1989, Lynne Tillman wrote that the book “translates the moments and feelings for which we don't really have a vocabulary.”
Cooper's work claims the bleakest regions of American affluence with the sureness of Faulkner staking out Yoknapatawpha County. Widely imitated by writers such as Brett Easton Ellis and...
This section contains 1,739 words (approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page) |