[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. The title-story features a sex killer who comes to feel: “After death, what's left. … Once you've killed someone, life's shit. It's a few rules and you've already broken the best.” This is radically unlike the more familiar tendency in late twentieth-century culture which stresses the blankness and inconsequentiality of the experience, and Cooper's work seems directed against the prevalent anaesthesia of a world which is too hip, too jaded or just too plain stupid to feel that something has gone badly astray. George Miles, the young protagonist of Cooper's most recent novel, Closer, is a case in point. George is a drug-gobbling cipher, an unusually beautiful but emotionally numb all-American kid whose inner life revolves around Disneyland rides. Cooper explores the link between vacuity and obscenity as George's “friends”—who include a phoney artist, a coprophile, and a snuff-movie enthusiast,—lust after his advert-like perfection. The porno-world that Cooper meatily dissects is one where real emotions are out of place; “they don't belong here, any more than a man's fist belongs in a boy's ass”. As the Cooper persona in one of the stories writes, it was only recently “I knew love's function, understood its context, put my reaction to it in quotes when it reared its ugly head. Now I'm holding it under this work like it's something I'm intent upon drowning.”