Bret's heart

In Lunar Park, a Brat Pack writer dips a toe into middle age

By Paul Reidinger

The novels of Bret Easton Ellis do not carry subtitles, but if they did, his 1999 effort, Glamorama, could easily have been described as A Novel of Xanax, and his latest, Lunar Park, A Novel of Xanax and Klonopin. Surely these antianxiety drugs cannot have been so frequently mentioned anywhere else in print outside the prim pages of the New England Journal of Medicine, and by this sign, this constant, obsessive recurrence, we come to suppose that Ellis is among the most anxiety-ridden and drug-dependent of American authors.

Drugs, of course, have been a drenching presence in Ellis's fiction from the beginning. Usage in the early, collegiate novels -- Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction -- was mainly recreational, but Ellis is past 40 now (the protagonist and narrator of Lunar Park, a writer named Bret Easton Ellis, considers himself to be 'early in middle age'), and the pharmaceutical portfolio has been weighted more heavily toward instantaneous therapy. Hence the Xanax and Klonopin, popping up every two or three pages in lieu of nail-biting or the chewing of Chiclets, though there is still some recreative presence, mainly involving Ketel One vodka along with smatterings of coke and weed.

I dwell on the matter of psychotropic chemicals at this length because the novel proceeds through a hallucinatory haze that hangs like horror-flick fog over its suburban setting. There, somewhere in upstate New York, we find Ellis the character working as a creative-writing teacher at a small liberal-arts college. The town, as Ellis knows it, consists of fresh plantings of McMansions with a dark gloss of Hamlet (Elsinore Lane, the Fortinbras Mall), while the college, like all colleges, rings with the siren calls of youth's perilous beauty.

For the satirist, such material, the very stuff of smug, empty, upper-middle-class America, is the literary equivalent of fish in a barrel waiting to be shot, and Ellis has never quite gotten credit for being a sharpshooter in this vein. This has to do in part, one suspects, with a general resentment and envy of his youthful successes and excesses. But there are more serious reasons too; like Evelyn Waugh, Ellis seems to be at least half infatuated with the people and practices he means to scorn, and -- unlike Waugh, more like Stephen King -- he has a taste for horror writing that does not neatly square with his true gift for scathing comedies of manners.

This is the paradox, or skewing, that made American Psycho (1991) such an interesting disaster, and it recurs in Lunar Park. All the keenly observed detail that makes McMansion life so ludicrously vivid -- the Prada loafers, the Paul Smith trousers, the Tank watch, the Range Rover -- undoes the suspense when the story turns to shadowy intruders and killer dolls with blood-caked fangs. The force of fear is at its strongest when interstitial; what we don't or can't or aren't permitted to see is what frightens us far more profoundly than the most dreadful things even the most gifted writer can show us, for what we are not shown we imagine, and the private horrors each of us carries in our skulls, waiting like undead spirits to be installed in dark, empty corners of a narrative, are far more potent than any combination of words on a page. We might call this a literary form of jujitsu: the drawing on readers' fearful energies to enhance their pleasure in being terrified.

Ellis seemed to have reached this understanding -- of the value of restraint and omission -- in Glamorama, an amusingly dark, breathlessly shallow epic of shopping, glamor, status consumption, and intrigue whose low ceiling of ominousness never quite caved in. That book was devoid of the sort of violence and horror that seems ever cheaper and more plastic the more graphically it is described. What is most disappointing about Lunar Park 's regression on this score is that the novel, when not bogged down in its Nightmare on Elm Street moments, does elegantly address itself to adult themes, themes of human connectedness and of the human heart: the small hostilities of marriage and the tribulations of child-rearing at the start, but also, further on, to fathers and sons and their sons, the generational passing on of miseries and misunderstandings, and the incomplete closure of death.

Readers who know Ellis as a tousled-haired Brat Packer, a clubland wunderkind who ran with models and movie stars at the end of Ronald Reagan's twinkly reign, might be surprised to find him handling this sort of material and handling it well, but it was evident that the man, even when very young, was an unusually gifted writer -- certainly far superior to his friend and fellow Brat Packer, the one-hit wonder Jay McInerney, who makes a brief and embarrassing appearance in Lunar Park as "the Jayster" and whose own literary career, after a sequence of stunningly bad novels, has become the equivalent of an old pickup truck propped on blocks in the woods, rusting away. While the Jayster now indulges a pretentious oenophilia, Ellis continues to be one of the great living stylists of a certain sort of American English, an affectless, slangy patois of monied people with tony educations and empty heads; he is no intellectual or philosopher-king, but he plainly is intelligent and has read a great deal and is literary without seeming to be so. He also has that courage or recklessness or indifference to consequences that makes it possible to write the things that must be written -- the true, the uncomfortable, unbearable things -- for writing to be worth reading.

Not all the horror passages in Lunar Park are tedious or overwrought. The de-haunting of the Ellis McMansion, in particular, with its team of exorcists as coolly professional as a Terminix team, is bizarrely funny. And while Ellis continues to serve what appears to be a life sentence in the cell block of first-person narrators, it is easier than in his earlier fiction to see the narcissism here as pitiable, even sympathetic, instead of blithe or arrogant: The self-absorption is a means of walling off that vulnerable and overwhelmed self from unmanageable trouble. It is a desperate defense mechanism of a man beset by monsters -- of disconnection, alienation, unresolved and unresolvable family conflicts, the afflictions of celebrity and self-awareness -- far nastier than anything even the most fancifully perverse novelist could dream up and unsoothable by Xanax or Klonopin or even both.

Paul Reidinger is the editor of Lit.

Lunar Park