SOURCE: Young, Elizabeth. “On the Buttocks.” New Statesman (20 November 2000): 52.

In the following review, Young discusses Cooper's series of five novels, offering a positive evaluation of Period. Young acknowledges the base and sordid elements, but lauds the “grace and elegance” and “ethical torment” within the works.

When Dennis Cooper began his quintuplet of novels in 1989, of which Period is the last, he was no more than a minor poet on the Los Angeles avant-garde gay scene. But as the novels appeared with relentless regularity, and Cooper became more widely known, critics competed to garnish his work with ever more elaborate encomia: the novelist Edmund White wrote that Cooper was “reciting Aeschylus with a mouthful of bubblegum”; Bret Easton Ellis called him the “last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction”; the New York Times opined that “this is high-risk literature. It takes enormous courage for a writer to explore the...