SOURCE: Review of Wrong, by Dennis Cooper. Times Literary Supplement (27 May 1994): 21.

In the following review, the critic discusses Cooper's portrayal of the emotionally bereft in Wrong and Closer.

Talking of recent fiction, the narrator of one of Dennis Cooper's short stories in Wrong observes that “The sharpest new writers tend to appropriate either the language or sheen of pornography …”. This is certainly true of Cooper's own work, which is not only arrestingly well written but graphically obscene. Where Cooper parts company with the pornographic imagination is in the traumatized humanity of his writing, and in his attempt to explore the buried emotion under the shiny surface. As the title of Wrong suggests, Cooper is something of a moralist—in the most urgent and least puritanical sense of the word—and his explorations of the further fringes of homosexual life carry a sense of lost emotional and moral bearings...