SOURCE: Hainley, Bruce. “Body English.” Nation (16 June 1997): 34-5.

In the following review, Hainley offers a positive assessment of Guide.

This is the problem: how to convey the realness of the world, of the guy so beautiful he “white[s] out” vision, when language is often recalcitrant to the point of shutdown, when the only fact that has a sort of truth—even when you are deep in the middle of exploring the terrain of that mystery called someone else's body—is basic human aloneness: the strange opacity of the other, whose distance from you is similar to the distance (that close, that far away) between things and the words for those things. In his work, Dennis Cooper returns again and again to such conundrums—distances—especially when they inhabit a particular type of fine young man who thwarts and also weirdly reiterates the fascinations and lapses of cognition...