Actually, I say, I really enjoyed the new novel. Bret Easton Ellis, grisly satirist and reviled author of
American Psycho, says I sound surprised. I am, but only because the criticism of
Lunar Park in the US has been so vicious. In two gnaws at his supposedly rotten apple,
New York Times reviewers called it, respectively, “an extended whine” and “a lurching ride to nowhere”.
The Boston Globe’s Steve Almond wondered if it was the worst novel he had ever read, “desperate and cynical and poorly written”.
“They don’t like me,” Ellis agrees, although he points out that Lunar Park has been praised too, which is more than was the case with American Psycho. “And maybe the criticism comes from a very pure place, that they don’t like my books and what I am writing about. And that,” he says patiently, as if to a truculent and not particularly bright child, “is to-tal-ly OK.”
Ellis is no longer the enfant terrible of American letters, but only because he is 41 and his hair has receded and his jowls have distended in a vaguely Nixonian manner. He still, however, lives in the minimalist Greenwich Village pad he bought when he was 23. He acknowledges, as I look around, that it is more “a dorm room for a frat boy” than a home for a grown-up. Books do furnish a room, though, and, in their various editions and translations, his, loaded on the shelves above his bed, dominate the living space. In a not dissimilar way, the books written by the narrator of Lunar Park, a writer confusingly also named Bret Easton Ellis, lower heavily over him too. The faux Bret, now a family man half-reformed from his druggy past, is stalked by his previous creations, including Clay, the author’s value-free alter-ego from Less Than Zero, Ellis’s first novel written 20 years ago, and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, Wall Street trader and dismemberer of tramps (of both the vagrant and bimbo variety).
People who dislike Ellis’s work have their reasons — its misogyny, decadence and sadism — but he wonders if some of the criticism this time is because he has written a genre novel. Yet this homage to Stephen King uses its hackneyed haunted house premise imaginatively, as a way of exploring the secrets that lurk beneath domesticity. On a hunch, I ask if his parents’ home in Sherman Oakes, Los Angeles, had scared him.
“It was a very scary house. And when I decided to write a haunted house book I took two or three years to make the connection. I mean, if I wan- ted to do a Stephen-King homage, why not write about high-school vampires? I am still scared of that house. It is still associated with a lot of bad memories — some good memories too — but definitely a haunted place.”
What he was scared of was his father, Robert, an alcoholic property developer who walked out in his son’s early teens. Until he was 18 and could hit back, Bret was beaten. “He pushed me to the floor, pummelled a bit, punched. It was not a continual thing. It was just something that would happen every so often. I assumed that was how fathers were.”
Does it account for the violence in his books? “Probably the trail leads to that.”
In 1992, the year after American Psycho was eventually published (the original publishers pulled out, sensing the outrage it would provoke, particularly from women), Robert Ellis died, leaving debts of $10 million and instructions that Bret dispose of his ashes in Mexico. Instead, Bret abandoned them in a safe deposit box. “I was very angry for all those years and very frustrated and still mad with him. But writing the book I became less mad and I realised, ultimately, that I had no choice but to forgive him — and I hate saying it because it sounds so sappy.”
Lunar Park ends with the fictionalised Bret scattering his fictional father’s ashes. It is a lyrical, emotional scene, unlike anything he has written before, and it reads like an account of a real event. In fact, Ellis disposed of his father only after he had finished writing this spring. “Scattering the ashes was not an emotional experience for me at all. It was just closure,” he explains. “The emotional experience was writing the book.”
The trademark of Ellis’s prose is its affectless, ironic detachment even as it describes the most appalling events. The first 30 pages of Lunar Park show it off at its best in a parodic biography of a Bret Easton Ellis who has plumbed drug and celebrity hell. By the book’s end, however, something like compassion nouri- shes the writing, an awareness of death not as a slasher-movie outcome but as life’s central, inescapable sadness. This perception did not come out of nowhere. Early in 2004, Ellis’s boyfriend, Michael Wade Kaplan, died suddenly of a heart attack in his artist’s studio the day after his 30th birthday party. They had known each other for eight years and, although it was not an exclusive relationship, had been lovers for six of them.
“It was drug-related. He was a very careful guy and it was just the wrong amounts at the wrong time. I was in LA, where I was spending January after the holidays. I was going to do the rewrite of Lunar Park there but after Mike died I couldn’t do much of anything. I stayed in a room and did not move for a couple of weeks.”
Does his death explain the book’s melancholy? “After Mike died, yeah, I guess I did some rewriting and my mourning got folded into the text perhaps in a way it wasn’t there before.”
The variation in the book’s tone means it may not stay in the mind in the way American Psycho did through its diagnosis of Eighties capitalism as psychotic (when Bateman confesses to “murders and executions” his friends think he says “mergers and acquisitions”). But Lunar Park’s promise is great enough to suggest that his best work may now be ahead rather of than behind him and that it will be nothing like Psycho. “Under no circumstances could I write that now. Nor would I want to. I am not that person now,” he promises. “When I was writing the first four novels the impetus was anger at the world. They came from a place of disgust and rage. This book did not come from that same place.”
