Dennis Cooper’s hallucinatory blankness seems immune to context. When you read the best of his work, it clears your mind of everything else as completely as a dose of anesthesia or a brick to the head. Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper doesn't give you a good sense of what his books are like. The prose is dry and full of academic t-crossing, and it rarely deals with the emotional intensity that draws readers to the author. But the valuable idea behind Wrong is that, despite its visceral impact, the context of a number of subcultures is essential to understanding Cooper’s work.
