Smash hit

Ellis has always said that he based Bateman on his father, a man obsessed with clothes, restaurants and status and unaware that none of them made him happy. The irony was that the son inherited many of these paternal values. The book’s disgust and rage werealso aimed at their author.

“I think self-loathing is an underrated virtue,” he says, quotably. “I was very confused about the world and what was expected of me. Add a little dollop of celebrity to that mix and you’ve got something like a newly blind person walking down a hallway and trying to figure out which door to go through. I was drinking a lot. I was doing drugs. It was a black period for a long time but I also had a lot of fun.”

Because boys and girls were throwing themselves at him? “The only perks of being well known are you get the nice tables in restaurants and you can get laid a little more often.”

Fame, he thinks, had a toxic side-effect: it prevented him from growing up. I mention that critics still call his writing sophomoric. “And I feel they are not entirely wrong. I think when you become famous something is flash-frozen in a way and you stay at that age for a long time. I dealt with a lot of things in my twenties and thirties as a 21-year-old man. But I think life ultimately forces you to move on. You face things that mature you.”

Having a family forces maturity on most people. In this respect, the Lunar Park Bret, who is married and has a son, has an advantage over his creator. I wonder if there is a part of Ellis that wishes he had a family. “Yes, there is. But I don’t think it is going to happen. The windows of opportunities that I had in order for that to happen closed abruptly, maybe permanently.” Because he came out as gay? “No, I am talking about when I was with women and that (having children) was a possibility. The whole gay man thing is very interesting. When I hear that question being asked I think, ‘Are they talking about me? Am I the gay man?’ ” He does not think of himself as a gay? “Look, I think in the populus at large — and this is why I really don’t like to talk about it — most people are wired to react solely to one sex or the other sex. I am not saying I am not more one way or the other, but there are people who have a lot of confusion and doubt and are, depending on their mood, very pliable. Believe me, I have discussed this quite often. It has been a big part of my therapy over the years.”

It seems to me awkward, to say the least, that a man can reach 40 and not have sorted this out. Nevertheless, he insists, he grew up eventually. A “midlife crisis” befell him a year ago as he realised he was moving to “fully-fledged” adulthood. He changed. Became more compassionate, nicer? “Yes, but it is tricky. I had to cut out a lot of people to achieve that. I am less patient now with pointless people and pointless friendships.”

He doesn’t, surely, mean the Jayester, I say, using his nickname for his “toxic twin”, Jay McInerney, who achieved fame at the same time as Ellis for portraying a similarly dissolute youth in Bright Lights, Big City. He pauses. They had dinner the other night. Was McInerney not too thrilled with his fictional cameo in Lunar Park? “We have to have some more talks about it. He hid from me that he was very upset about this book. I had to find out from his girlfriend.”

Did that upset him? “It did. It made me think Jay takes himself too seriously and that pissed me off because Jay does take himself too seriously. And I told him this. And he is very insecure. And I told him that. And this is on the record. So I got angry with him.”

Was Jay angry because he was portrayed taking drugs? “Well, he didn’t like those asides the Bret character lays on the Jay character about being lost in celebrity and being a social climber and being Jerry Lewis. But he said, ‘I’ve two kids. I don’t need them reading this book and seeing their dad scoring coke off the hood of a Porsche and skinny dipping in a pool.’ And I said, ‘Is that the worst you have ever done? What are they going to think when they read Bright Lights, Big City?’ ”

They will probably think their father knew whereof what he wrote, this, after all, being what we assume about Ellis. I, for instance, am nervous that Ellis will read the clothes I am wearing and dismiss the inadequacy of their labels, for Patrick Bateman can distinguish a Paul Smith suit from an Armani at 100 paces. But Ellis — dressed this afternoon in Ozwald Boateng trousers and a shirt from Barneys — claims that he hates shopping and bought a new wardrobe recently only when he realised his suits were frayed. My mind flashes to a passage in Lunar Park in which Bret inherits his late father’s suits and discovers their crotches stained with blood from a botched penile augmentation. Assure me, I say, that that detail was made up. “No,” he says. “That one’s true.” I blanch. “Sorry,” he says, “you wanted to know.”

And this, I realise, is the difference between Ellis’s fiction and reality. Life is as gruesome as anything a young man could invent, but, minus the callous, cool prose, sadder. Ellis’s slasher critics should thank him for sugaring the pill and appreciate that in his early middle age he is becoming less minded to do so.

Lunar Park, Picador, £16.99 . Bret Easton Ellis will be appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday, October 8, 6.30-7.30pm, £8