Less than less than zero

Back when Bret Easton Ellis and I were starting out in life together---all right, when he was starting out; horse I was riding shied at the gate, sat down to think it over for a while, and decided to mosey on back to the stable, after throwing me into the first mud puddle we came to, so I guess I should say back when Ellis and his mount were streaking down the first furlong, heading into the turn at a speed few have achieved so early in the running before or since, and I was thinking that the nag I was on was just giving them a head start in order to make a race out of it; and I suppose technically we didn't start out together since that phrase implies there was a connection between us, old school ties, childhood friendship, or at least attendence at the same workshop, and the only connection was coincidental, we both began our careers as writers at about the same time, Bret, me, and five thousand other people.  Maybe I should start this post over...

Back when Bret Easton Ellis was a new star in the East and I wasn't even a street light in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I once said to a friend, "You know who I feel sorry for?  Bret Easton Ellis."

Ah, the arrogance of youth.

This was around the time Ellis was in the news not for anything he'd written recently but for what he might write someday.  He'd just received what was at the time a whopping big advance for his next novel, which in the articles sounded like a purely hypothetical supposition, his publisher and agent having agreed that since Ellis had written one bestselling novel that had tapped brilliantly into the prevailing zeitgeist he was bound to write a second bestselling novel that would tap brilliantly into the prevailing zeitgeist, a given being that the zeitgeist, unlike all previous zeitgeists, would not have morphed at all by the time Ellis got around to writing the book and the publisher got around to putting it in the bookstores.

"I feel sorry for him," I told my friend.

"You're outa your mind," my friend told me.

Actually, she probably said, "Oh, why is that?"  But I'm pretty good at reading between the lines, even when there's only one line.

"He'll never be able to live up to expectations," I confidentally asserted.

This wasn't premature Schadenfraude.  Wasn't jealousy, envy, or spite either, because I expected my turn would come soon enough.  It was a serious, professional judgment based on A.) what I knew of the literary world, where jealousy, envy, and spite did often rule with enough sway to destroy many promising young novelists' reputations upon publication of their second books; the sophomore jinx is a euphemism for character assasination, and B.) my having read Less Than Zero.

I wasn't a fool about everything back then.  Less Than Zero read like what it was, a very clever roman a clef by a too smart for his own good college kid.  It deserved to be published and its success wasn't surprising, given the times.  But there was nothing in it that shouted, here is a writer with a lifetime's worth of stories to tell.  The odds were strongly in favor of Ellis having just this one book in him.

How many nineteen year olds have accumulated a lifetimes' worth of stories anyway?   Lots of people are amazed at how young Dickens was when he wrote the Pickwick Papers, but they forget that he had been out in the working world, supporting himself as a law clerk and journalist, since he was 14 years old, not to mention what he learned about life and human nature while his father was in prison and he was working at the blacking factory.  These days we have 35 year old novelists who haven't seen as much of life as Dickens had seen by the time he was 20, and it shows in their books.

After reading Less Than Zero, I pegged Ellis as a one-hit wonder.  I explained all this to my friend and said, "I feel sorry for him because he will spend years trying to live up to his 'promise' and never be able to do it."

My friend had neither a literary nor a particularly intellectual turn of mind.  She reacted as if I was feeling sorry for somebody for winning the lottery.  "So what?" she said, thinking that if she had all the money Ellis suddenly had in his pocket she wouldn't care how many expectations she failed to live up to.

Ellis' next book was The Rules of Attraction and I felt I'd been proven right.

But then came American Psycho and after that Ellis had a whole different problem, which wasn't living up to expectations, it was living down that novel.

And I think he's managed to do that.

Most people have either decided that American Psycho was a good, if flawed book that was wildly misunderstood and viciously misrepresented by critics or that Ellis matters so little as a writer that it's not worth even remembering AP, nevermind getting upset over it.

I think that American Psycho is a failure more than it's a "bad" book.  It was totally misconceived as both a satire---all the laughs are undercut by the unnecessarily detailed descriptions of Patrick Bateman's crimes and trophies---and as a horror story---classic horror stories, like Dracula, The Invisible Man, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, are not about monsters but about human beings losing their souls; Bateman doesn't have a soul to begin with, so who cares?  He starts as a monster, and a not particularly interesting monster at that.  But I've kind of liked Ellis' other books.

My original judgment stands though.  Ellis did not have a lifetime's worth of stories in him and he hasn't accumulated many since.  On top of this he doesn't seem to trust that anybody would be interested in the stories he does have to tell.  There's a desperate gimcrackery about all of his books.  Ellis is always reaching for something outside his story to make it interesting.  All the reflexive name dropping and brand labeling are the obvious examples.   American Psycho was all gimmick, and it appears that his latest, Lunar Park, gets taken over by its gimmickry.

Maud Newton links to two reviews of Lunar Park, one head-shakingly negative by Gary Shteyngart, writing for Esquire, and the other "I knew it all along" nasty by Dana at Number One Hit Song.

All these years later, and here I am, still feeling sorry for Bret Easton Ellis.

Comments

[Campaspe]

I remember reading that Robert Benchley hated going into bookstores, because all the books spoke to him of writers leaning back at their desk and saying, "There! I've done it!" and it just depressed the hell out of him.

Great point about American Psycho and Bateman's soul. I didn't read the book simply because I didn't want those images stuck in my head. Some of the horror in Less Than Zero was bad enough. I might give this latest a try, though.

[Chris Quinones]

Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote an amazing review of American Psycho some years ago that unfortunately isn't on line, but it does appear in her book Making Book, which is worth reading on general principle.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

I love American Psycho, and it's because I didn't read it as either a satire or a horror novel. I read it in high school, and had certainly never heard the term glitterati or read a decent review of it; I probably heard about it from Rolling Stone, for heaven's sake. Anyway, when I read it, it seemed to me to be a metaphor for corporate life. The unnecessarily detailed gore was boring, and I likened it to what I imagined to be the flesh and bones of mergers and acquisitions. I've held onto that first impression, and so I still like the book. (Corporate life didn't dissuade me, either.) And I adored the film, which seemed to reflect my interpretation. Plus, Christian Bale...don't get me started.

Anyway, I feel sorry for Bret Easton Ellis, too, but only because he seems like kind of a mardy dick.

[MoXmas]

I don't remember if I first heard of LESS THAN ZERO when the movie came out or not, but I know it had absolutely no impact on my life in an "Eastern College".

AMERICAN PSYCHO, though, that book had lots of resonance. I had been having a weird Industrial-Midwest-to-Urban-East-Coast transition, and one of the results was writing splatterpunk short stories (and not getting them published by places like CEMETARY DANCE), and running around Central Park at 2AM. Not even drunk, more's the pity.

Anyway, I picked up AmPSY, figuring I would relate to it all too well. And frankly, I was bored. To someone who had been reading Haldeman, or Skipp and Spector, or any of Karl Edward Wagner's Horror anthologies from DAW, it seemed like bloodless gruel.

More, it seemed like Ellis has decided he wanted to write Stephen King bestsellers, while writing like Raymond Carver. Though at the time, I thought of it more like: Stephen King with an MFA, but without the narrrative talent.

I am always a little surprised that Jay McInerney hasn't gotten the same kind of ongoing coverage as Ellis, but I guess when the annoying main character from your breakthrough novel is played by Michael J Fox in the movie version, it kills you deader than when that annoying main character is played by Andrew McCarthy.

[MoXmas]

Oh, and, based on reviews of LUNAR PARK, it sounds like Ellis is once again taking tropes that Stephen King has covered extensively. Like your own fictional characters coming to life and murderin'. (DARK HALF)

[sfmike]

I remember my late friend Lee Brenneman in Los Angeles reading "Less Than Zero" and commenting, "This book was deliberately meant to shock, and you know what, I was shocked." I read it, too, and was fairly horrified because I'd met some of those kids growing up in Southern California as a middle-class boy in a rich persons' town, and though some of it seemed farfetched "and deliberately meant to shock," a lot of it rang true.

Still, it never made me want to ever read another book by him, and when "American Psycho" came out, the misogyny and gore sounded horrible, but all the brand names sounded even worse. I heard the movie, made by a woman, was interesting though, so Shakespeare's Sister may be right.

[Kevin Wolf]

I read Less Than Zero so long ago perhaps I'm being unfair, but its impact on me was negligible. I was sorta jealous of some of the characters - the money, etc - but of course they waste everything they have (as I very vaguely recall it).

I'm in the same group as a few above: I never wanted to read another one of his books. I did rent the DVD of American Psycho and found it to be inconsequential satire of easy targets.

[burritoboy]

Gary Shteyngart, on the other hand, might actually be the real deal. I really liked his The Russian Debutante's Handbook, though the real test, as Lance has noted here, is what he does with his second book, not his first.

[Lance]

Chris, Thanks for the heads up on Teresa's book.

bb,

I agree about Shteyngart. The Russian Debutante's Handbook left me breathless. I couldn't keep up with the wild runaway energies of his imagination.

Kevin, You and Shakespeare's Sister obviously have different responses to Christian Bale.

MoX, I always thought McInnerney was the better writer. But I think Ellis is the more disciplined one, and that counts for a lot.

This week's New Yorker has a very positive short review of Lunar Park. The New Republic's Sacha Zimmerman is less enthusiastic.

Good call on the King, um, homages(?).

[Shakespeare's Sister]

I always thought McInnerney was the better writer. But I think Ellis is the more disciplined one

Of their peers, Donna Tartt is arguably both a better writer and more disciplined than either of them. (And I like both of them.)

[Exiled in NJ]

What I wrote two years ago about another writer holds true for Ellis and others:

"I wring from my conscious an awareness of the Great Ross Macdonald Scare of 1969. It was the beginning of the era when the media began to devour its own. It worked this way:
1.An author is semi-discovered;
2.His next book is praised to the skies and his face appears on the cover of Time or Newsweek;
3.Doubts creep in with his next publication;
4.Finally, in Step 4, the sucker is consigned back to the gutter to await his rehabilitation at death.

It’s a neat trick, turning one story into four.

[blue girl]

I have never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis -- but, the movie American Psycho? I loved it -- and Christian Bale? Ditto.