Lunar Park

Down Elsinore Lane

The pitch is this: a Bret Easton Ellis -- who might or might not be the "real" Bret Easton Ellis -- is writing a book about being Bret Easton Ellis. There will be paragraphs in this book which seem entirely biographical, others which seem realistic but are indisputably made up, and yet others which are so outrageously fictional that they present as a horror novel, a perceptual gothic reminiscent of Stephen King or Mark Z. Danielewski. Our contribution as readers will be to get entertainingly or usefully lost on the shifting interfaces between these kinds of writing. Our task will be to surf the imbrications, bump over the chop, wave our arms as we try to keep our balance. From a distance, people will not know if we are delighted, or drowning, or both; even we, at times, will not know if we are delighted, or drowning, or both. Either way -- and this is the important part -- we will have bought, and possibly even read part of, Lunar Park, the new novel by Bret Easton Ellis.

So here's the pitch: in 1985, Bret Easton Ellis, barely out of college, publishes his controversial first novel, Less Than Zero, becomes instantly the "touchstone" of his generation, and is projectile-vomited into the glitterati life. He learns that notoriety pays, in a currency which is not so much money as the psychic space money can create; the space in which to develop and enjoy that irresistible contemporary character trait, narcissism. Bret becomes friend to the stars. He earns millions. He spends millions. He lives his life in public, and funds it over the next several years with three other deliberately provocative novels, including the widely execrated American Psycho, which details the adventures of an upmarket New York serial killer. So far, so autobiographical: this is the tour of his own self-involvement we expect from Ellis. But now something strange happens. Worn down by drugs, drink, adulation and the demands of celebrity, Bret is ambushed by a sense that if he continues to live this way, it will be too late to have an actual life.

As a result he decides to clean up and do the one thing we know he can't: become ordinary. To this end he leaves New York for a part-time job as a creative writing teacher, marries an old lover -- one of whose children is his son -- and goes to ground in the "anonymous suburbia of the North East". "I had canceled my subscription to I Want That!", he tells us, "and for a while I was okay." Not for long. He finds the children difficult -- "Children had voices, they wanted to explain themselves, they wanted to tell you where everything was -- and I could easily do without witnessing these specialised skills". He finds the pace boring. He isn't much good at anything practical. Within four months he has found a new drug dealer and is sexually harassing one of his students. He doesn't get on with his wife, he doesn't get on with the help; he doesn't even get on with the family dog which, he believes, is, like everyone else, fully aware of his inadequacy as a grown-up human being. Worse, he has begun to suspect that his stepdaughter's favourite toy, an animatronic bird called Terby, is alive. Bret's house is haunted.

What proceeds from this can be imagined as a remake of Poltergeist in which the fictional Bret plays Johnny Depp playing Bret Easton Ellis, a comedy of double vision in which the confessional novel struggles with, undercuts, self consciously parodies, but never somehow defeats, the novel of gothic horror; while the novel of gothic horror shoddily mimics and turns to metaphor the issues of the confessional novel. One moment we are in a world in which the wall sconces brighten and dim mysteriously as Bret passes, in which he is stalked by a character from one of his books and a dead crow turns up in his swimming pool; the next, he is making careful descriptions of Frette sheets and "Hermes Chaine d'Ancre china cups filled with steamy, milky espresso", and we are in a deadly parody of parent-teacher evenings and couple-counselling. Stuffed into his own text, not just as character and author but also character-as-author and a separate disembodied entity known simply as "the writer", all of them commenting madly on one another, Bret Easton Ellis chases himself endlessly down these divergent rabbit holes. By the end of it, no one else in the story -- not his wife, not his children, not the local police, not even his old friend, the author Jay McInerney -- has any faith in Bret-the-character. Why should they? For one thing, he is taking so many drugs that he sounds like Hunter S. Thompson: "I couldn't take showers because I was frightened of what might come out of the showerhead". For another, he can spend a morning wearing a bedsheet and brandishing a revolver.

The question is, can we place any faith in Bret-the-author? Why should we show any interest in what he shows us? Most of the action of Lunar Park takes place at 307 Elsinore Lane. Bret, it's clear from the start, is being haunted by his father. At the same time he finds himself haunting his own son, forwarding the mistakes, spoiling the next life along. "Sons would always be in peril. Fathers would always be condemned." Fathers exist as the expression of their culture, Ellis maintains, and sums up his like this: "careless, abusive, alcoholic, vain, angry, paranoid", a man who remained "locked in a kind of demented fury" all his life, a man who, most tellingly, "made the bulk of his money from highly speculative real estate deals, most of them during the Reagan years, and the freedom this money bought him made him increasingly unstable". It is the same kind of freedom that made Bret unstable in his turn, placing him in the best position to observe the consequences; so that when you ask, What use is Bret Easton Ellis? Ellis's answer must be: He is the canary in the coalmine. His fiction is a measure of the vacuousness of America since Reagan, fiscal freedom as the soft dark bottomless hole into which the American character has tunnelled itself over the past quarter century. The evidence of this is all around us, Bret believes: when his son is not imagining himself as a professional video-game player, when his six-year-old stepdaughter is not dressed in "tiny white hotpants" and popping M&Ms in imitation of her mother taking pills, they need help. When they aren't consuming they don't know what to do with themselves. Instead of personalities, they have personality disorders.

They are already on the road of Bret's generation, style over substance, imitation over life, celebrity over everything. The whole cast of Lunar Park is drugged into tranquillity by copious doses of Xanax, Ritalin, Paxil. Even the golden retriever is medicated. In the evening they eat chicken Kiev, "but with a Jamaican touch", potatoes au gratin "but with Manchego cheese". "None of us really knew each other .... We were simply a group of survivors in a nameless world."

This seems worth saying. Occasionally it is said very well. In fact there is a lot in Ellis's theatre of vanity to enjoy, even to admire: some good drug comedy; some structural deftness; acute observation; entertaining chains of reference in which parody becomes in itself a parodiable form; patches of intense writing. But the author's defensive recursions, the constant reminders that he might be joking, undercut the content at every turn; so that when we reach the final chapter, with its long lyrical gnawing at the bones of the father-and-son relationship, we are briefly charmed but not convinced. It seems like another manipulation. Nick Flynn's recent memoir of his father, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, took risks. Flynn's was a genuine self-exposure, signalling itself firmly as autobiographical, offering up its author and his life to be known, accepting the consequences of that. The best Ellis can offer is a game of panic, a play for sympathy; after which he will pass the hat.

So what's the pitch, then? Well, under an epigraph from Thomas McGuane, "The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too", Bret Easton Ellis presents us with his most recent excuses for having booked a seat at his own show. He promises to do better, in terms of becoming real. He promises to win the war with the celebrity author in himself. But the promise is so gleeful with irony, so performed, such a complete failure of nerve, that 300 pages later, as perhaps he intends, we remain unsure whether he has taken his self- description to heart, or whether it is simply, as he says in his justification of American Psycho, "about style". The problem is still how to believe anything any of the Brets tells us. Bret-the-character's new novel turns out to be Teenage Pussy, a pornographic thriller. "The book was all about the hard sell (the million dollar advance guaranteed that) but it was also going to . . . put every other book written by my generation to shame." Clearly, both Bret and "Bret" have similar plans for their new project, a joke which allows "Bret" to have his cake and eat it while Bret eats it too. Are you going to laugh at this carefully constructed hall of mirrors or are you going to walk away from it like Bret's wife, with a barely repressed sigh of contempt, and set about getting the children to school on time? Well, this being a confessional, the text welcomes that response also: no matter what you do, one of the Brets will be having his cake and eating it; yours as well, probably.

The semi-true memoir of a writer "haunted by his past" is not a novel but a scheme. It's a pitch: the novel as component of its own media package, content streamed and themed not to the business of writing and reading but of selling and buying. This is a celebrity novel in which the celebrity -that which is being celebrated -is not the author himself, but the author's adventure of self-mediation. Is Bret Easton Ellis trapped in the process somewhere? Or has the process become his only subject matter? We hope for the former but fear the latter. Or maybe it's the other way round. One way or another, by the end of the novel we don't believe in any Bret Easton Ellis, real or otherwise.

M. John Harrison's most recent novel, Light, appeared in 2002.

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