The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Guide by Dennis CooperMatthew Roberson
Dennis Cooper. Guide. Grove/Atlantic, 1997. 176 pp. $22.00.
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 general idea. It is narrated by Dennis, who is self-consciously “writing a novel” about his friends; of Guide, he says, “This is it.” Like Cooper, a writer for Spin magazine, and like Cooper, the author of a Spin article on homeless teens (which is included, and is significantly similar yet different from Cooper’s), Dennis is both Cooper and a self-consciously fictional projection. This metafictional turn nicely illustrates Guide as a medium between the “real” world and the kinds of fiction we use to describe it. The novel’s characters are effective mediums for the music lyrics, movie plots, and pervasive, seemingly communal fantasies of sex and violence that flood the Los Angeles setting. Absorbing and enacting and reshaping this pop culture, they come alive in often disturbing but always strikingly contemporary ways, functionaries of the fin-de-millennium hyperreal.
Guide is not for the (even remotely) squeamish. Although Dennis refuses to indulge his own murderous homosexual fantasies, his friends/characters/creations are not so restricted. It is not without reason that Cooper has been called a postmodern disciple of Sade and Genet. [Matthew Roberson]