SOURCE: Roberson, Matthew. Review of Guide, by Dennis Cooper. Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 1 (spring 1998): 230.

In the following review, Roberson comments on the metafictional aspects of Guide.

In Guide, the fourth book of his five-novel cycle, Dennis Cooper charts passage between a variety of seeming oppositions: desire and its fulfillment, reality and fiction, life and death, bodily knowledge and the language with which we express it. This middle-space seems to be Cooper's preferred subject because, as his character Chris puts it, it is only there that one can truly achieve a simultaneous understanding of both a thing and its opposite; “drugging himself in death's general direction,” so as to move between existence and its extinguishing, Chris believes that only in such a location can we hope to grasp briefly what might be “everything there is to know about human existence.”

Cooper's novel is itself a performance of this...