Bret Easton Ellis: Lunar Park

[Shade]

For Bret Easton Ellis, the king of narcissism and self-... er, loaving (or whatever the cross is between loving and loathing), it's no surprise that his new book should feature sex, violence, drugs, more drugs, mental breakdown, stupid beautiful people and modern manners (in a sense). What is a surprise is that it also features as its narrator a novelist called Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho etc., and - more surprisingly - that he's predominantly heterosexual, married and with a son. Add to that the fact that the first words of this mad near-masterpiece, Lunar Park, are -

"You do an awfully good impression of yourself."

This is the first line of Lunar Park and in its brevity and simplicity it was supposed to be a return to form, an echo, of the opening line from my debut novel Less than Zero.

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."

Since then the opening sentences of my novels - no matter how artfully composed - had become overly complicated and ornate, loaded down with a heavy, useless emphasis on minutiae.

My second novel, The Rules of Attraction, for example, began with...

etc. etc. - and you will become suddenly aware that this is a novel which takes self-regarding to a giddy new height. The opening chapter, the longest in the book, emphasises this with a brilliantly funny memoir-style resume of Ellis's life between writing Less than Zero and writing Lunar Park. This is where the book is at its funniest - self-regarding but self-mocking - as we visit a world where Ellis fights paternity suits with Keanu Reeves, is a member of the Brat Pack, and goes to script conferences for a Harrison Ford film called Much to My Chagrin. Ellis has always been a great comic writer, of course, from American Psycho's endless paeans to Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston, to the extraordinary first third of Glamorama, a sparkling and cynical 180-page comic novel trapped inside a much messier and nastier epic of terrorist fashionistas. And just as the humour is love-it-or-hate-it -

"I can't listen to this. You complain about Baxter Priestly's name and yet you know people named Huggy and Pidgeon and Na Na."

"Hey," I finally snap, "and you slept with Charlie Sheen. We all have our little faults."

"Don't you know smoking takes ten years off your life?"

"Oh yeah, my seventies. Don't want to miss those."

- so is the rest of it, the (deeply affectionate, you suspect, beneath the swingeing cynicism) satire on celebrity, modernity, shallow culture and quick-fix medication. Probably more people think Bret Easton Ellis's novels are part of the shallow culture than think they're a vicious response to it, and there are as many who hate the blank affectless prose so many of his narrators adopt as those who find a powerful current of beauty in it:

Bruce calls, stoned and sunburned, from Los Angeles and tells me that he's sorry. He tells me he's sorry for not being here, at campus with me. He tells me that I was right, that he should have flown to the workshop this summer, and he tells me that he's sorry he's not in New Hampshire and that he's sorry he hasn't called me in a week and I ask him what he's doing in Los Angeles and don't mention that it has been two months.

And so. What we have come to expect from Ellis - at least from his mature work, American Psycho and Glamorama (perhaps the story collection The Informers too, which although written before his first novel, was revised by him for publication between the two biggies mentioned above) - is spiky wit leading to, and from, psychotic violence. For all the unusual collisions in American Psycho (knife meets eyes, axe meets head, rat meets ... well, you know), there was nothing as repellent as that death scene in Glamorama, the effect of which on my stomach is the main thing stopping me from rereading the book. The violence is allegorical, symbolic, representative - of selfishness, emptiness, loneliness, greed - but no less horrific for that.

And so it comes as a surprise that Lunar Park, if less amusing than his earlier work (the jokes pretty much stop after the first 50 pages) is also much less horrible. In a way this is strange, since the book was originally conceived by Ellis - before American Psycho - as an homage to Stephen King and the horror comics of his youth, and the whole is a sort of The Shining via Evelyn Waugh. (I did say a sort of.) Ellis, living in suburban LA with his wife and son and step-daughter, finds the memory of his father haunting him, perhaps quite literally. The paint on the house starts to flake off, revealing the pink stucco of the house where he grew up; furniture rearranges itself to resemble his childhood rooms (Unconsoled-style). His stepdaughter's toy, a Furby-style artificially-intelligent bird called a Terby, seems to him to be hacking up pillows and clawing doors and leaving slime all over the place. The whole thing escalates, and comes to include characters from Ellis's previous novels, and a working knowledge of American Psycho begins to come in helpful (but is probably not essential).

It's not actually that frightening, the horror-stuff, though perhaps it's not meant to be (unlike the violence in his earlier work). The real horror is psychological: Ellis, damaged by his hatred of his father in childhood and then his father's sudden death - in real life as well as in Lunar Park - struggles to be a father to his son, Robby, who in turn also seems to have a link to all the horror going on around Ellis in the house. Boys are going missing in the neighbourhood - not found slaughtered or abused, just going missing. "They wanted to go." Ellis's drug and alcohol intake increases. The point of crisis cannot be far off.

Lunar Park is a page-turner, written with Ellis's usual spare flair, but the pleasure is all in the intensity of emotion and the relationships - and who'd have thought we'd ever hear that said of a Bret Easton Ellis novel? - rather than the borderline-hokey horror plot. Something - a residual edge of glibness? - keeps it down from full-on five-star status, but at the same time Ellis's fluent facility with his material and complete assurance and control pitches it well up to the standards we expect from him ("Look, being America's greatest writer under forty is a lot to live up to. It's so hard"). With, too, a new note or tone: in many places Lunar Park is powerfully moving. And the self-regarding is often self-lacerating, both seriously and in fun ("I had started the outline for Teenage Pussy over the summer and a lot had been accomplished despite the hours playing Tetris on my Gateway and constantly checking emails and rearranging the endless shelves of foreign editions that lined the walls of my office"). It'll win him no new admirers than his old stuff did, I expect, but will also upset far fewer stomachs. And I'll drink - and snort, and smoke, and whatever else you've got - to that.

 

[G4G]

For Bret Easton Ellis, the king of narcissism and self-... er, loaving (or whatever the cross is between loving and loathing), it's no surprise that his new book should feature sex, violence, drugs, more drugs, mental breakdown, stupid beautiful people and modern manners

yawn. however, i'll probably read it anyway!!! lol

 

[Dark Party]

Bret Easton Ellis

After reading Bret Easton Ellis’ fifth novel “Lunar Park,” a fascinating question emerges. Can Ellis write? Because “Lunar Park” is a mess – a sloppy, hideously constructed work. It is his worst book (and if you’ve had the misfortune to read his second novel “The Rules of Attraction” then you begin to understand how terrible “Lunar Park” is).

Take a gander at these two sophomoric passages of piss-poor writing:


“Yo?” I said, checking the incoming number.

“It’s me.” It was Jay but I could barely hear him.

“Where are you?” I whined. “Jesus, Jay, you are one lost bastard.”

“What do you mean, where am I?” he asked.

“You sound like you’re at some kind of party.” I paused. “Don’t tell me that many people showed up at your goddamn reading.”

“Well, open the door and you’ll see where I am” was his reply.

“Open which door?”

“The one you’re behind, moron.”

“Oh.” I turned to Aimee. “It’s the Jayster.”

“Why don’t you just let me out first,” Aimee suggested, hurrying toward the mirror to make sure everything was in place.


And this gem:


“Well, you should by now,” I said encouragingly, but also confused about why a girl so proud of having learned the alphabet should be reading “Lord of the Flies.”

“I know the alphabet,” she stated proudly, “A B C D E F –“

“Honey, Bret has a big headache. I’m gonna take your word on this one.”

“—G H I J K L M N –“

“You can identify the sounds letters make. Sweetie, that’s really excellent, Jayne?”

“—O P Q R S T U V –“

“Jayne, would you please give her a sugar-free doughnut or something?” I touched my head to indicate migraine approaching. “Really.”

“And I know what a rhombus is!” Sarah shouted gleefully.


One wonders if Ellis was buying the adverbs by the bushel.

This is just bad writing. It is ponderous, choppy, and bloated with excessive baggage. But even worse, these passages are parts of longer scenes that neither reveal character nor propel the plot. They’re just there – doing nothing. But their greatest sin may be that they’re not even interesting. Unfortunately, “Lunar Park” is teaming with passages like these.

“Lunar Park” is the work of a desperate writer. It’s a fictionalized autobiography about Bret Easton Ellis. But this Ellis married a famous actress after having an illegitimate son with her. They have moved to the Connecticut suburbs with her step-daughter and try to live happily ever after. But this is Bret Easton Ellis – so his character is a drug addled, self-centered asshole without a single redeeming feature.

The self-parody is amusing for the first 40 pages and there’s hope that Ellis might finally have pulled off his first successful book since “Less Than Zero.”

But alas.

The novel descends – quite rapidly – into a ridiculously awful horror novel. The plot is so convoluted and slap-dash that it would be too tedious to outline here. Suffice to say it includes the ghost of Ellis’ estranged father, a possessed stuff bird (who at one point crawls into a pet dog’s ass), several missing boys, and Ellis’ Patrick Bateman character (from his most notorious novel “American Psycho”) come to life.

If this sounds interesting – don’t be fooled, because the plot matters little. None of it comes together in any coherent conclusion and no explanation is offered for any of the bizarre occurrences.

It’s been clear for sometime now that Ellis – once the literary darling of New York – has more in common with Stephen King than with Norman Mailer. “Lunar Park” and “American Psycho” are both horror novels. But unlike King – who, ironically, is despised by the literati – Ellis struggles with character. King is a master of placing regular people in extraordinary situations. His characters feel real and readers relate to them.

Ellis’ characters, on the other hand, are all vapid, self-obsessed yuppies. It’s like being stuck in a room full of martini-fueled Wall Street stockbrokers who are all Yankee fans.

I have a theory about Ellis. He was a one book author. “Less Than Zero,” published while he was still a college student in 1985, became a best-seller for its flat style of writing and realistic portrayal of nihilistic college students. He was dubbed the voice of Generation X.

That’s a lot of fame and pressure on a 21-year-old writer. He’s been struggling to keep up ever since.

Like most young people thrust into the spotlight at a young age – he fell to drinking and drugging. He published “The Rules of Attraction” in 1987 and it pushed boundaries by portraying his characters as sexual ambiguous and self-destructive. But the novel was horrible – and ultimately pointless.

In an act of desperation, Ellis wrote “American Psycho” in 1991. The novel was an intimate look at psychopathic serial killer and featured graphic murders – many of them of young women. The original publisher dropped it in protest – but the controversy only fueled sales. But the book was ultimately a carnival sideshow attraction – borderline pornography. You get the feeling that only reason it was written was to save Ellis’ sagging literary career and garner him attention.

His two other books “The Informers,” a short story collection published in 1994, and “Glamorama” (1998) barely caused ripples. And it should be noted that most of the short stories in “The Informers” were written by Ellis when he was still in college.

So what’s a poor, attention-whore of a writer to do? Well, why not return to graphic murders and mayhem? It worked so well with “American Psycho.” Enter “Lunar Park” in 2005. As I mentioned already – it even features the main character, Patrick Bateman, from “American Psycho.”

But I suppose we shouldn’t blame Ellis. He’s just trying to hawk badly written books. We should blame his enablers in the literati. The New York Times called “Lunar Park” “Addictive…Sublime…Exquisite…” and made it a notable book of the year. The New Yorker called it “A rhapsody of grief and reconciliation.”

One wonders what novel they were reading. If you really want to read Ellis – go buy “Less Than Zero” and read that again. It’s not a bad book.

Everything since?

Less than good.