Dennis Cooper Critical Essay | Critical Review by Thomas R. Edwards

Critical Review by Thomas R. Edwards

SOURCE: Edwards, Thomas R. “Sad Young Men.” New York Review of Books (17 August 1989): 52-3.

In the following review, Edwards presents a favorable review of Closer.

Dennis Cooper's Closer shows young lives not beginning but on the verge of ending in California, here conceived as “the end of the world” in a sense that Moon Palace [by Paul Auster] doesn't suggest. Cooper, whose purposes are anything but “regional,” doesn't call it California, but the big roads are “freeways,” and one of the characters has clearly spent more time at Disneyland than anyone probably should. The center of the action is a high school in a well-to-do suburb; all the main characters are homosexual; the time seems to be around 1980, since a teen-ager is reported remembering that. The Doors were a popular group when he was “a little boy,” and AIDS seems unheard of.

Closer is a kind of...
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