Closer
The first few chapters read more like a collection of short stories that later in the book begin to crossover with each other. In a 1989 interview by Tim Guest of BOMB magazine, Guest described the book's school setting as "confusingly artificial" and as a world of "relentless blankness". Cooper elaborated on the "mechanical [...] back and forth" of student life that had the characters "trying to overcome the banality and terror of the world they live in by constructing some sort of mental world".
Closer contains the following literary devices: