IN LATE 1920s New York, Sylvia Heller, a 13-year-old girl whose father had just died, escorted her stepmother to the hospital to receive the death certificate It was a long subway ride from their Coney Island home. They had to change at Times Square and take one of two IRT lines. My writing has always been moral, but that was the secret of the work. Guide exposes that.”Less surprising is the legendary lackadaisical style: Cooper’s well- crafted “careless teenage whine”. Were it not for the subject matter his characters could easily be speaking straight from soapland.

“The thing with all my books is that they’re really straightforward in a funny way, even though structurally they’re really complicated. It’s about the architecture that surrounds something I can’t really talk about. I have to use a pretty straightforward language to play off form that much, even though to me it’s all really confused.” What will he turn his pen towards once his oeuvre is complete? “Light comedies,” he smiles “That’s if I find myself with anything else to say. I sometimes think I only write to get this shit out of my head.”In life Dennis Cooper is reasonable and responsible. But he’s also a kid who wants to hang with his mates and whose commentary on life is ubiquitously accessorised with the drawling “whatever”.

He likes the roller-coasters at Disneyland for their controlled chaos and thinks that while Blur are “pretty cool”, Pavement are “definitely aiming higher”. At least half the time he’s happy with his recently celibate, intoxicant-free lifestyle. “Guide to me is like all my books, that’s really how I see it now Before Guide I was trying to hide everything. I wouldn’t explain anything because I wasn’t interested in explanation. It’s like trying to find the edge.”Cooper is more than happy that every three years he applies another book to his repertoire, even if some critics find his subject “repetitive” and “boring”. He knows there will be one more book before the cycle of his work is completed, something “more mysterious – like Closer”, but feels satisfied with the penultimate instalment.

But as with similar scenarios in his previous works, the Dennis character can’t quite get there For all the obvious desire there is a balancing incapacity “It’s the `almost’ thing that really interests me. It’s like that moment when you’re alive but you know you’re going to die. If you could actually have that and not die, then that would be pretty cool. What interests me in this book, in all my work, is trying to find that moment when you’re just about to cross from one thing to another. Actually I have all these young friends who I take care of, talk to and help with their problems, but I would never fuck them. I’m very protective about young people.”In Guide a teenage prig called Drew is tied and bound on the Dennis’s floor Arrogant, ignorant and vacant, he is an object to be abused. “Only they tend to be cuter than I was,” he laughs deprecatingly.

The desire to have sex with and slaughter these creations is matched by an empathy with their plight and a need to protect them. “That celibate paternalism has always been there, but different books bring out different aspects.”Although the sex that litters Cooper’s work is intergenerational, mostly instigated by adults who dope children into states of acquiescence before meticulous implementing their grotesque fantasies, in Guide the moral superiority of platonic love is voiced more unequivocally by the Dennis character as an alternative to the attempted realisation of the sadistic fantasy. “I’ve been in a platonic relationship going on three years now It’s not romantic, but it is really intense There can’t be any sex If there is, it’s not going to work. It is an obsessiveness which the author directs at bodily functions, narcotics, sub-grunge indie music and, of course, a certain type of boy. The scrawny, dark-haired, lost teenager recurs by turns as muse, sex-object and buddy. Cooper admits that he once had a slight obsession with someone from school who inspired the role, maintaining that it was both “within limits” and “not like a school-boy obsession”. His teenage characters tend to be fucked up and smart, and aesthetes just like Cooper.