A Review of Bret Easton Ellis' Latest Novel, Lunar Park

The Bret Easton Ellis book review will always be prefaced with a terrible pun of a title. On a lazy Tuesday, before reading his new novel Lunar Park (Knopf, 2005, $24.95), I wrote a few of my own: "Brat Park," "American Psycho, American Dad?," "The Rules of Distraction," "Not a Lot More Than Zero," and, my favorite, "Craporama!" So obvious, so unfounded: Ellis is an easy target for the bitter book reviewer (who, in his or her own mind, on constant rotation, is "I can write better than John does, but (sigh) John does."), but this book reviewer is going to take the high road. Sort of. I'm ambivalent. Cutting to the conclusive bone of the review is an odd (and perhaps even unwise) method of introduction, but when the marrow is so problematic, there's just no other way. You'll see.

As a voice for all that was wrong with the decade of little white envelopes, meaningless pansexuality, and credit cards used for all the wrong reasons; the decade when buying a Betamax was a smart investment; when Vanna White was an ingénue and Huey Lewis and the News tapes a day-of-release purchase, Bret Easton Ellis seemed to be above the punchline of American Psycho, until his own life started resembling all of the worst '80s' excesses: Drugs, media, self-involvement, exclusivity. But don't forget, American Psycho is a very structured and very good book; its ridiculously microwave-overfed violence may strike the parochial reader as too raw, but the NO EXIT denouement is as memorable as any of the last twenty years. More importantly, the novel understood and retaliated against two-faced Reaganomics and all other pisspoor administrative initiatives without once a hint of pedantry.

Very good, very productive, and then things get hazy and elliptical. After spending a good seven years on the useless Glamorama (as if Robert Altman hadn't already wasted three of his own with Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter)) and conducting drunken, ranting interviews with Irvine Welsh and just not writing, Bret Easton Ellis the concept and Ellis the writer were equally diminishing. A man whose myth, unlike, say Kafka's or even David Foster Wallace's, was becoming a bore. Forget the shock value of his books, forget the snapshots in gossip tats, forget the desperate pleas for attention; it's that cloying, unpoetic middle name alone that strikes the ear like so many of his worst offenses at overwriting.

But if the 1980s have taught celebrity anything - and that's what Ellis has become, of course, a celebrity - it is the old Renaissance tag of "Know Thyself" coupled with the Victorians' paranoia of self-surveillance (and just for good measure, throw in "Charity begins at home"), which is exactly why, for the most part, Lunar Park is reassuring. The attack, the conceit of exploiting his own self-made tragedy is as cunningly artful as Mary Hart walking into her beautician's with a picture of herself in People magazine from 1987.

Lunar Park introduces us to Bret Easton Ellis the first person central character; literally introduces: For the thirty-page first chapter entitled "The Beginnings," Ellis sweeps through his body of work and his biography, from Less Than Zero to Glamorama, from New England liberal arts school to backstage concert invitations from R.E.M, U2, and (ugh), Def Leppard, to three "fairly exclusive orgies," to countless interventions and rehab clinics; from a physically and verbally abusive alcoholic father to the man's death and the son's bereavement, to Ellis' own unwanted child Robby, to Ellis coping with fatherhood; from serious writer to seriously not writing. On the very first page, we are told that Lunar Park is going to be "a return to form," then "a return to…past simplicity," that it "was time to get back to the basics," and, a hundred pages in (in case you dozed off), "I had moved past the casual carnage that was so prevalent in the books I'd conceived in my twenties, past the severed heads and the soup made of blood." Gone are the settings of Wall Street or Parisian runways, in their place is suburbia, domesticated life - almost as foreign to him as haute couture is to the rest of us. But Lunar Park is not the novel that Meryl Streep's character in She-Devil wrote; this is no bored hausfrau from Love in the Rinse Cycle. This is a new enervated Ellis, a married man, a father, a creative writing professor, and, while not exactly sober, we see this almost-forty, near burnt-out fatality, trying. Trying to stay clean, trying to be a good father and husband (to the famous actress Jayne Dennis - Google her now), trying to overcome the overwhelming pall his father has gloomed against him, trying to write his follow-up to Glamorama whose title cannot be reprinted - even in a generous online forum such as this - a novel which is essentially Ellis by-numbers, Ellis trading on his own name. Reviewers be damned! With all this effort, the Bret Easton Ellis character is shockingly naked, impotent, funny, pathetic, charming, insecure, and - gasp! - sympathetic. Until the fourth act - the beginning of Chapter 23, "The Phone Call," when verisimilitude is kicked into the meat grinder, churning this processed junk of what seems to be a summer-release deadline - we so desperately want him to win.

Of course, he can't. Of course, he won't. There are just too many obstacles. Besides those listed above, there are also headlines of missing boys the same age as his son Robby, there are also American Psycho copycat killings, there's the graduate student he wants to sleep with, there's the mysterious twentysomething who seems to be everywhere, who looks awfully familiar, there's the flat screed of suburban life, the nights sleeping in the guest room, the parent-teacher meetings, the communication difficulties with his son, the wife's dog that despises him, the toy doll that seems to be alive, the furniture that is rearranging itself, the paint that is unnaturally chipping off the wall. The murders. The couple's counseling.

This is no autobiography, no roman à clef, no "hushed confessional" (blushing hagiography, perhaps…). No matter how indifferent Ellis poses during his recent press junket for Lunar Park, neither confirming nor denying the "facts" of the book (oh, how very White Stripes), no matter how many times the Ellis character reiterates in the novel that what follows is a "true story" or that "every word is true" or that "these events were inevitable" there are obvious contradictory clues. "I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels." Or when a detective questions him on copycat killings based on American Psycho: "You're not a fictional character, are you, Mr. Ellis?" Or, the famous actress (co-star to Keanu Reaves) Jayne Dennis character herself. Googled her yet? See the "official" website? How about the "unofficial" fansite? How metafictional, how cute. And how distracting.

William Gaddis' speech upon his acceptance of the National Book Award for his novel J R is helpful: "I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself."

That Ellis has gone through such pains in recent interviews (curtained stages for his cross-legged performances) denying the alternate universe of fiction distracts from his very important theme: Fathers and sons, living sons and dead fathers, authorial fathers and imagined sons. Lunar Park isn't so much a meditation as it is a yawping fusillade outside the charnel house whose slabbed inhabitants are not corporeal, but living, effective, stated beings. When this writer isn't trying to compromise his thesis with dimpled post-modernity, and finally writes naturally, there is talent on hand: "Mitchell was… a member of the investment community, while Mark Huntington was a golf course developer and Adam Gardner just another semi mobster whose supposed career in waste management was clouded with fuzz - just a group of regular dads, living in the soft dream light of wealth we had created, joined by our generically beautiful wives in trying to secure our perfect children's ascension in the world." This is Ellis as we never would have thought to know him: Soft, luxurious, satiric, honest, poetic. All in the space of one controlled sentence.

But then there's this Chapter 23. "The Phone Call."

I have no problem with novels whose desired effect is the mainstream rubbing shoulders with the literary. Big sales, subtle ideas. Big characters, nuanced pathologies. Big plots, fine details. These novels take a master's hand. James M. Cain was a master. Haruki Murakami is almost there. Dickens and Austen made a canon out of this coupling. Tom Wolfe once did it well, but is now kowtowing to The Daily Show's demographic. Conversely, the once-entertaining Martin Amis writes "colorful" prose with little in the way of forward-thrust or plot. Bret Easton Ellis? So close, until he allows his admitted childhood love of Stephen King and Robert Ludlum to run fantastic and become the catalyst of his final chapters. Quite simply, the latter part of the novel can be read as either a haunted house story or as theme-mongering (well, couple's counseling is a nightmare). There's also a problem with lazy prose (funny, too, since throughout the novel Ellis stresses the ubiquity of his "editor"). Six chapters open, "I woke up," or "As consciousness returned" or "I regained consciousness." Countless descriptions of weather conditions begin with the dummy It: "It was raining," "It was muggy," "It was a clear night." This is no return to form. This is spoiled writing.

Also, the theme of literary fathers and their imagined sons, authors and their doppelgangers borne via their fictions, is much better stated in Shusaku Endo's less narcissistic and more disciplined (and sadly obscure) novel, Scandal: "Over the space of years, [Suguro's wife] had accepted the fact that her husband was a novelist. She knew just how far she could enter into that life and where the boundaries were that she could not cross…. Nothing could come of telling her what he had been through. It was a complicated situation that she could do nothing about, a thorny problem that had been thrust upon him to deal with, not only as a writer but as a human being."

Is this hen-pecking? No. The final two-and-a-half pages are succulent, arguably the best sustained prose Ellis has ever written. But why does he make his audience suffer through such gaudy business to get there? For all his obvious narrative ability, Ellis could have destined Lunar Park as a great book, a book for study and academic investigation. For now, he is very much the Wilkie Collins of our day. A fast, entertaining, tricked-out talent, sure, with something to say, thematic force like a fist; a near criminal, yes; a master like Dickens… Well, we can't all fake being Bret Easton Ellis, can we?