[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:

It's strange what goes on in your head when you're attracted to someone—I mean, so turned on that your thoughts are just a twisted narration to his day-to-day life, and then by some fluke or fated twist or whatever you get the chance to fuck him whenever you want, and you start to realize that his sublimity's just your own imaginative garbage, period, and that all you're going to get out of him is a new set of needs, body odors, opinions, emotions, et cetera, all of which you completely recognize from your other relationships, and you start thinking, So why am I prioritizing him again?

With Guide, Cooper has provided a handbook to his complex concerns while shattering what too many have come to think of as his only hallmarks. He is often mistaken as the postmodern disciple of Sade and Genet (from whom, unquestionably, he has learned), but the daring of Guide is how clearly he shows his interests in extremity to be a way of getting at the precariousness of living through language stripped down to its most vulnerable, tender and sweet.

Vulnerable, tender and sweet—Dennis Cooper? Yes. (The narrator admits, “my favorite cup … changes color according to the temperature of its contents,” and describes a guy's antics when coming this way: “He yells—I mean, loudly—like his dick is a band that has just started playing his favorite song.”) By breaking the structure of the novel into journal-like sequences and by having the narrator, “Dennis,” pay attention to those people and things (music foremost among them: lines from songs by Guided by Voices, early Donovan, Blur and others float through the novel) that try “in various ways to attract [him] back into the real,” Cooper allows his own pleasure and sadness to shine through. Dennis both is and is not Cooper, but there are clues as to why this shouldn't be read as a roman à clef. Band members' real names are used (Alex James of Blur, Daniel James of Silverchair), while the bands' names slip to Smear and Tinsel-tool. The distance between things keeps everything lively by showing how fantasy (fairy tales, porn, drugs) can map real life and how real life can mess up fantasies.

One of Cooper's goals is to make his novel a safe haven for what and whom he cares for; when Luke, a guy whose looks more than satisfy all of Dennis's requirements for distraction, moves in, Dennis finds that their relationship may be better than his fantasies, and it may provide him with a definition of love. At the beginning of almost every chapter there is a brief paragraph giving the lowdown on what has happened and what is happening; by providing the basic coordinates of the narrative, it lets the reader focus on the miraculously precise yet austerely casual language that, aside from Dennis's complicated emotions, is the only thing holding the safe haven together.

Pam's fucked. Sue, too, for the moment. They're in a holding cell. Chris, Robert, Tracy, and Goof are abstractions at this point. You can basically forget them. Their bodies are gross to one degree or another. Drew is at Mason's. The latter has come on the former's face several times. Luke's getting stoned with some friends at his soon-to-be former apartment. Scott's at my place. We're sober. It feels kind of nice.

Forgoing the plot, one can relax into the book's meditations on drugs, sex, music. Ponder how Cooper shirks almost every responsibility of narrative and description (notice his use of “whatever” and how Dennis announces early on, “The details don't matter”) and yet moves forward and holds on to what may matter more—the blurring that occurs when life is transmuted into words in order to get back into the real. Cooper's accuracy, even when the writing fades away to something pale and doubting, amazes. About David, whom Dennis met while writing an article for Spin (for which Cooper is a contributing editor) on homeless teens, many of whom hustle themselves for money (Guide's chapter “The Spin Article” is like but is not the article Cooper published in Spin using the same material):

Word has it that David allowed himself to be kept by some rich older man. Then he got really, really sick. I mean, way too gaunt to turn anyone on anymore and … here the story gets blurry … he went somewhere else … blurriness … death. I don't know what to do with that story. It's not exactly fact, and it's not quite a fairy tale, either. Me, I plan to believe what I want to believe. Here's how it starts: Once upon a time, David had a bizarre energy that made excellent copy, and a physical beauty that made one hang on his thoughts, and a violent temper that undercut one's attraction to him, and an AIDS diagnosis that gave his life great symbolism. That's as far as I've gotten.

Somewhat cold, coming close to giving up, indifferent and/or resigned, the language is also hauntingly direct and tender.

Dennis is no easier on himself. Soon after revealing that his “imagination's a freezer compartment for violent thoughts,” he admits:

I'll say this once. I'm extremely fucked up. It doesn't show, but I am. Over the years I've developed a sociable, generous side, which I train on the people I know. It makes them feel grateful, which makes me feel purposeful. But secretly, I'm so confused about everyone and everything. Sometimes these moods will just come out of nowhere and lay me out. I'll curl up in bed for long periods of time, catatonic and near-suicidal. Or I'll space into a murderous sexual fantasy wherein some cute young acquaintance or stranger is dismembered in intricate detail, simply because he's too painfully delicious, i.e., through no fault of his own.

All of which means what? Gertrude Stein wrote a long time ago—who was paying attention?—that “if every one were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.” Of all of Cooper's work, this novel is the most irritating and stimulating: It is a beauty. His stunning prose borrows stylistics from the most vacuous genres available (self-help manuals, New Age tomes, substance-abuse rehabilitation pamphlets, porn). At times I shook my head in disbelief because of the risks he was taking to get everything in and hold it together. He admits the real (and necessary) possibility of failure; he allows his prose to get L.A. hazy; he trusts his admiration for certain bands enough so that to explicate not only something about himself but also something about the experience of reading, writing and being he keeps the lyrics just as they are—part of the drift of living. “Guided by Voices: I can't tell you anything / you don't already know.” Those lyrics are vitally true and Cooper believes them, but he also, with this novel, refutes them.