| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| jimmy |
Posted - 09/21/2005 : 14:37:02
Does anyone else like Bret Easton Ellis? I just finished "Lunar Park" and it's really good. It's short and it's a lot like a Stephen King book(writing style is sililar in places, some incidents are the same as "The Dark Half", and there's a "Shining" reference.)
Like Glamarama, this one has a plot too. And if you've read some of his other books and were bothered by all the endless names and details and incidents that don't seem to matter, this book is very straightforward and sticks to the story.
(I also just re-read "Less Than Zero" - I think everything else he wrote is better than it, but I was surprised by how good he was even then.) |
| 9 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Carl |
Posted - 11/12/2005 : 22:52:43
Here's and interview from last week's UK & Ireland Sunday Times Culture magazine:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-1855279_1,00.html
Culture
The Sunday Times November 06, 2005
Literature: Psycho therapy
Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel has helped exorcise the demons that have haunted him since he wrote his most infamous book, says Brian Lavery
It’s hard to imagine a more gruesome father-son therapy session than the one in Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis’s fifth novel. For years, Ellis reigned as the most notorious writer in contemporary English literature thanks to American Psycho, the sadistic gore-fest published in 1991, which he still blames on his estranged and abusive father.
Robert Martin Ellis may have died a year after he served as the inspiration for Patrick Bateman, American Psycho’s yuppie serial killer, but there’s little question that his father’s ghost pushed the novelist to new depths over the subsequent decade.
“It did start to seem unbearably childish to me, to keep having this anger at my father when I was 39, and even when I was 40 and finishing up this book,” Ellis says. He is sitting in a Dublin hotel, wearing tracksuit bottoms and not looking much like the one-time enfant terrible whose prose redefined modern standards for graphic sex and violence. “It just seemed like it was time to get over it. And I did feel peace at the end, I did feel something lift off me and I did forgive him. I’m not talking to him any more, and he’s not haunting me and following me around.”
Haunting is precisely what Robert Ellis does in Lunar Park. The novel is narrated by a character called Bret Easton Ellis, who bears remarkable similarities to the writer: his family history, his home town and the authorship of all the books published under his name. Reality and fiction are quickly blurred, and supernatural events start occurring as soon as the fictional Ellis throws an ostentatious Hallowe’en party at the palatial suburban home.
Unexplained e-mails, sent nightly from the bank in California where Robert Ellis’s ashes lie in a safe-deposit box, arrive at the hour of his death. Meanwhile, an evil toy bird comes to life, little boys go missing, dark shapes fly overhead, always just out of sight. When people in nearby towns are murdered according to the plot of American Psycho, the fictional Ellis suspects the gate-crasher who showed up as Bateman might not have been wearing a costume after all. His suspicions are themselves suspect, however, since his temporary sobriety has been abandoned for bottles of Ketel One vodka before lunch.
Memories of the peak of the real Ellis’s career are probably just as blurry. Most critical attention has focused on the autobiographical elements in the first chapter of Lunar Park. Those rollicking 30 pages race through the period from 1985, when a 21-year-old Ellis wrote his first novel as a college assignment and shot to national fame, to the 16-month book tour for Glamorama, which became an intercontinental drug binge that included, at least on paper, snorting 40 bags of heroin in a week.
Along with pills and powder, the trail is littered with A-list celebrities, sex orgies and impromptu $50,000 parties, designer suits and fine champagne, and the wreck of a Ferrari that Ellis borrowed — and crashed — in the Hamptons while driving naked.
The reader, though, is left to judge whether any of it really happened. The latest book’s marketing, with websites devoted to fictional characters such as Ellis’s wife, also focuses on hazy ambiguities and stretched truths.
Ellis dismisses the issue. Both he and his semi-fictional namesake share a belief, he says, that explaining oneself comes more naturally in fiction; that an imaginary history offers a better indication of identity and true self than the facts. And by summing up the freewheeling era in which his lack of self-control met his publisher’s limitless expense account, Ellis is ready to move on.
“I had been living my life at 21 for about 20 years. The moment when a person becomes famous, they’re frozen in time, in a way; you’re always that age. It was kind of a fancy idea, and I had heard celebrities say it before, and doubted it,” he says. “I now believe it to be very true.”
He adds: “Maybe I’m excusing my behaviour, that I acted as a 21-year-old man when I was 28, or 32, or 37 or whatever. But a series of events, and getting older, have pushed me into (accepting that) I can’t be that person any more.”
In the past year, responsibility came crashing into Ellis’s life — his real one — with a vengeance: his best friend and lover died, his mother fell seriously ill and he looked after his sister as she went into rehab. Writing Lunar Park was a therapeutic exercise that, he says, represented a posthumous reckoning, if not reconciliation, with his father, and helped prepare him for those tragedies and a new phase in his life.
Since its violence and apparent misogyny caused a huge outcry in the United States, American Psycho was another ghost that Ellis, both the character and the writer, needed to exorcise.
“The fact that I will never write another novel that has that impact, will never create another character as iconic as Patrick Bateman has become, will never write another novel as popular, certainly in terms of sales — yeah, there was a bit of resentment, and I think that’s why that metaphor is in the book (Lunar Park). This thing you’ve created really gets out of control, and here he’s actually manifested himself,” he says. “It came from the learning phase in a writer’s life when you realise you can’t control your fiction once it goes out into the world.”
In Lunar Park, the barrage of horror metaphors continues and Ellis leaves a handful of them intentionally vague, which might disappoint horror fans who are accustomed to neater outcomes. “Explanations are boring,” he says, repeating a line from Lunar Park. “I certainly like a bit of ambiguity and mystery when I’m reading. More often than not I feel quite betrayed and cheated when a book begins to resolve itself.”
Ellis’s previous plots haven’t needed much explaining. He is foremost a social satirist, whose early books tackled the excess and emptiness of the Reagan era. In Lunar Park, his eye turns towards the neuroses of post-millennium, post-September 11 America.
Domestic suicide bombings are commonplace background news; security guards patrol school grounds, even on parent-teacher night; and dinner conversations revolve around what antidepressants are best for family pets (not to mention children).
“A lot of the things that society values, I don’t,” Ellis says. “A lot of the things that especially these suburban parents find worthwhile, I don’t.” As the celebrity novelist in Lunar Park tries not to slip back into drug abuse, he writes: “The tiredness and the cliché of suburbia would dampen whatever enthusiasm I had for my new life as a man trying to form himself into the responsible adult he probably would never become.”
The fictional Ellis seeks adult maturity in his relationship with his disaffected son, who rejects him much as the real Ellis rejected his own deadbeat father. Maturity was a long way from the writer’s mind, though, when the idea for Lunar Park as “a very impersonal genre exercise” first took hold.
That was back in 1990, when he hoped to follow in the footsteps of one of his favourite writers, Stephen King, the man who made horror hip again by adding irreverence and pop culture to hidebound gothic fantasies.
Ellis claims to have read Salem’s Lot, King’s 1975 vampire classic, a dozen times. When it came to Lunar Park, “the first impetus was to write a Stephen King book. To write a book that took me back to the pleasures I got from reading him as a boy and an adolescent”, he says.
“What King brought to the horror genre was rock’n’roll. That changed it all. It was always so stiff before him, and he really radicalised it, really changed the form.”
When he finally got around to writing his King homage, Ellis had something to prove. King had stated his dislike for American Psycho on two occasions years apart, which caused Ellis to shy away from the opportunity to meet his idol at parties in New York. King reiterated his opinion in his magazine column last September, calling American Psycho “that boringly bloodthirsty book”.
But King had a change of heart when it came to Lunar Park: “A strange triumph,” he wrote. “Here is a book that progresses from darkness and banality to light and epiphany with surprising strength and sureness.”
With typical sarcasm, Ellis says that he cried when he read those words of approval. While the tears may be fictional, there’s no doubt that his latest writing has coincided with a very real sense of stability in his life.
“I never really connected my happiness to the success of any of the novels,” he says. “Your happiness can be connected to the completion of the novel, and you’re happy about the book itself once it’s finished. But everything else, I don’t know how that can really give you a sense of happiness. It’s got to be more tactile than just literary success.” |
| jimmy |
Posted - 11/12/2005 : 08:43:22
I didn't buy it; picked it up at the library. But I read it and then went right back to the beginning and read it again- it wasn't confusing or anything, just really good. and since it takes place from Oct.30 through the first week in November, it makes it a good falltime/ Halloween book to read.
I had planned to drive down to New Haven to see him speak at the end of September but I ended up getting a job. |
| cassandra is |
Posted - 10/26/2005 : 03:34:56
so, is there anyone that has finished it yet? I'm a bit sceptical about Lunar Park, even if I will buy it soon
pas de bras pas de chocolat |
| Daisy Girl |
Posted - 09/25/2005 : 19:39:20
I've only read less than zero. it's cool to hear that his other stuff is good too.
"I ain't goin to be what I ain't" |
| vilainde |
Posted - 09/22/2005 : 00:47:56
Yeah, I never ever buy books but I'll get the new Ellis. Thanks for the tip, I didn't know it was already released. Oh and I think Less Than Zero is better than The Informers.
Denis
"We brush our teeth with tequila." - Guitar Wolf |
| floop |
Posted - 09/21/2005 : 16:52:04
GLAMOURAMA is one of my favorite recent books. i'll be reading this as soon as i get through all my other books |
| TRANSMARINE |
Posted - 09/21/2005 : 15:09:13
I am half way through it. Ellis is my favorite contemporary author. So far, it's out of control, and I love it.
I was alone...in my BIG BED
-bRIAN |
| Sir Rockabye |
Posted - 09/21/2005 : 14:53:01
I too almost got it, but opted for the new Tom Robbins instead. I'll pick it up next time I have some money.
You run all kinds of red lights except the ones on the street.
When you run out of exits you can always count sheep. |
| speedy_m |
Posted - 09/21/2005 : 14:38:14
I almost bought this but I got "The Names" by DeLillo instead. I've been meaning to read some BEE for a while now.
and you are ill prepared to fight
living in a world of soft and white
in air conditioned battle zones
I pity you!
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