Shut Up And Listen 231

It was January when I learned that Bret Easton Ellis had a new novel coming out. It was, like, one in the morning and I was online looking up information on the movie adaptation of his novel Glamorama, which I was almost finished reading. During this search, I came across a website or blog or something that had news on Ellis' next novel, Lunar Park, which was scheduled to come out later in the year. There wasn't a lot of information, but apparently it was going to be about Ellis himself, his family, and something that goes horribly wrong. I was obviously psyched and so the waiting began.

At some point, I found out via Amazon that the novel would be published on August sixteenth, which also happens to be my youngest sister's birthday (her name is Brett, which I found coincidental in a funny kind of way). So, I began the wait. I'd go back and check from time to time, hoping the release date had been pushed up. I read the description given. I read a couple of the advanced reviews also placed on the site. I was really looking forward to this. There aren't too many authors I'm willing to buy in hardcover, but Bret Easton Ellis is one of them.

I've only been reading his work since January of 2004. Every once in a while, I'd stop in at the bookstore that's on campus and just peruse the fiction shelves and buy something that looked interesting. I'm actually pretty good at judging a book by its cover. On this day, I picked up two items: Ghost World by Daniel Clowes and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. I'd seen the movie and heard a lot of good things, so I figured I may as well pick it up, fuck the books I had to read for classes. I didn't exactly devour the book, but I read it solidly for the next week or two, before classes began, on the bus, during breaks, and at home. I recognised certain scenes from the movie, I recognised changes, and when I was done, I decided I preferred the book. As I said to a friend the other day, "it's more tedious and repetitive," which is kind of the point (also, as a writer, I know how fucking mind-numbingly boring it must have been to write some of those chapters, like the one that just tells you what's in the main character, Patrick Bateman's apartment). It was more ambiguous, epic, subtle, and outlandish.

Next, I bought The Rules of Attraction with a gift certificate to a local bookstore that I had gotten for my birthday. I had also seen the movie, so it suffered from the endless comparisons and visualisations of young actors as the characters. This book impressed me a little bit more, mostly because it was much more different from the movie than American Psycho had been, so it had more surprises. (Around this time, I also bought this reading guide for American Psycho with another gift certificate online. It's a pretty decent read. It gives a brief bio of the author, discusses the book in detail, discusses the book's reception, discusses the film adaptation, and then poses questions. Altogether, a nice little addition to the novel for academics or fans. I don't agree with everything the author of it says, but it does get you thinking about certain things and introduces various concepts you may not have considered before. It's called Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho: A Reader's Guide by Julian Murphet. It's part of a series of reader's guides that discuss novels adapted into films and I plan to pick up the one on High Fidelity at some point, as well.)

After this, I picked up Ellis' first novel, Less Than Zero. I went into this one completely blank except for what was said in the reader's guide for American Psycho. Apparently, a movie was made of this, but I've heard mostly bad things, so I haven't seen it yet. Ellis wrote this one when he was around my age, maybe a little younger, still in college and it's my favourite of his novels. It's the most simple of the bunch and probably the most pure. While others have jumped on it and called it a statement about his generation, that just seems to be something added in later. To me, it was a young guy trying to come to grips with the shitty world he was living in and doing it by writing a novel about it. By fictionalising what he was going through, he was able to deal with it on some level. I could relate to that idea. I wrote a story or two around this time in a similarly flattened prose where I tried to do the same thing, but they are dreadful (which is to be expected, I suppose).

This past Christmas, I received Glamorama for Christmas and soon got into it. It's the largest of his novels and his most recent (until Lunar Park came out). It's also his most ambitious and most plot-driven. While his first three novels were more a sequence of events, this had a narrative thrust (although, it also meandered in the same way his previous works had). Also, while Less Than Zero was about a young man returning home from college on Christmas break, The Rules of Attraction was about college students, and American Psycho was about a possibly homicidal stockbroker, this one took a grander and more epic story, looking at models who also happened to be terrorists. It was also in this novel that he began to further approach writing metafiction. Some scenes were fictions within the fictions, the narration was unreliable, and the line "it's what you don't know that matters most" became not just something of importance to the main character, but the only guide to really understanding what was happening. I rather enjoyed it.

(Between American Psycho and Glamorama, Ellis also released a collection of short stories entitled The Informers, but I've yet to obtain a copy. For some reason, none of the local bookstores ever seem to stock it and I have avoided ordering items online because I didn't have a credit card myself. I'll probably order it sometime this fall.)

But, there was then the gap between Glamorama and Lunar Park, and so, I had to wait. In that time, I decided that I would do a review of it for my university's paper, The Gazette, which gave me even more justification for buying it as soon as it came out. A month before its release, I was practically counting down to when it would be released. I was really looking forward to it coming out. And then Tuesday August 16 came and . . .

I couldn't buy it because neither the campus bookstore, nor any of the bookstores near me had a copy. What the fuck? I guess I'd been spoiled by CDs, DVDs and comics where if it is scheduled to come out that day, stores have it. I was bummed out and annoyed. I ranted, I raved, and, well, no one really cared except for me. It really baffled me how one of the more infamous and well-known novelists around today's first novel in, like, seven years wasn't in stock anywhere on the day it was supposed to have come out (and come out that day it did, I checked). I cursed the book industry.

The next day, I checked online again, as Chapters has a feature on their website where you can select up to three stores in your area and it will tell you if the book you're looking for is in stock, and, if so, how many copies they have. None of the Chapters or Coles (a chain owned by the same company) in the city had a copy of the book. Although, the Chapters I usually shop at did have a copy of the audio book on CD as read by James van Der Beek (he played Sean Bateman in The Rules of Attraction), which baffled me more and caused me to curse the idiocy of the manager of that store, threatening his family, friends and anyone who had ever met him.

The following day, I checked again and the Coles at Westmount mall had two copies. I was at work, and usually after working, I would go and hang out with some people at the Gazette offices, but that day, I left early and headed for the mall. Had to wait half an hour for the bus because of the summer schedule (during the rest of the year, that bus came every fifteen minutes and in the summer, it apparently comes, like, once an hour or so I was told). Sloan was playing in my discman. At the mall, a girl opened the door for me and then I opened the next door for her and we smiled at one another in a goofy kind of way. She had red hair, but looked to be around seventeen or so, so I didn't even make an effort to flirt (yeah, like the age thing was what prevented me . . .). I walked quickly and directly to the bookstore, checked the new releases and the book wasn't there, walked over to fiction and there they were: two copies of the book. It did exist. I grabbed one, paid for it (the cashier commented about how she'd just been reading about it) and left. I then went and bought Loaded by the Velvet Underground, checked a couple of lottery tickets I'd purchased a while ago (I lost on one and won four dollars on the other, which allowed me to buy two more tickets), walked out of the mall, stepped right onto the bus that had just pulled up, walked the back, sat down, opened my bag, took my copy of Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis out, removed the dust jacket, opened it, and began reading.

The next thing I knew I was nearing my stop, so I put the book away, got off, went and bought a bottle of cherry coke, caught another bus home, hung out with my sisters for fifteen minutes, went up to my room, put Loaded on the stereo, sat down on my bed and resumed reading. I read on and off, stopping to watch some TV at times, to eat, to go online, and then finished it at just after two in the morning. Here are my thoughts on the novel:

Lunar Park is a paradox of a novel. It is full of contradictions. It is both autobiography and fiction. It is the perfect book for Ellis fans and it is the perfect book for someone who has never read a single word of his. Ellis fans will love it and Ellis fans will hate it. It is his most "mainstream" work yet and it is also his most experimental and obtuse work yet. It is his most tame work yet, but it's also his most extreme work yet. It will make you both love and hate Ellis as a person.

The book is told as if the events in it are entirely factual. Bret Easton Ellis is the main character. The first chapter tells you his life so far. It tells you about Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, and Glamorama. It tells you about his rise to fame. It tells you about his father. About the drugs, the booze, the excess, the women, the men, the parties, the money, and the fuck-ups. It tells you about how he dated famous actress Jayne Dennis at one point. About his hitting rock bottom. And, most importantly, it tells you about his father and his son.

But, don't believe any of that shit, because there are fictitious bits galore in that chapter. It's highly unreliable. Certain stuff is obviously true, but other stuff could very well be bullshit. For a new Ellis reader, this isn't obvious, but to someone who knows at least a little about him, some shit stands out. Like how the fictitious Camden still takes the place of his real college in his novels even when he's talking about himself. This is all setting up where the character of Bret Easton Ellis is when the actual story begins.

The rest of the novel details twelve days in the life of Ellis, his new wife (Jayne Dennis), her two children (one of them his), and how their unstable family is broken apart by paranormal activities, child abductions, and serial killers, or is it the booze and the drugs that Bret isn't taking any longer supposedly? The novel combines seemingly real bits (the home life) with absurdly fictional events (the doll that seems to be coming to life and tells Jayne's daughter things). It is also the most plot-oriented novel Ellis has produced yet. Every single scene in this book drives the plot forward. It's almost like a film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel in that respect. There are drugs, sex and violence, but they are tame compared to what's come before in Ellis novels. There's nothing superficially glamorous about them this time.

The strange thing about the novel is that it begins as a story about a man trying to put his life back together and build a family, and then it transforms into a horror novel. This is possibly where Ellis fans may be lost. Much of what happens is predictable and clichéd, and most readers will make certain connections before Bret himself does (which may be the author's intent). Ellis himself has said this is where the novel began, as a sort of homage to old horror comics and writers like Stephen King. Ellis does a good job at it, too. There were a few moments where I was creeped out.

The stuff I dug the most were the more metafictional bits. Like Bret working on his next novel entitled Teenage Pussy (the original title of Holy Shit was rejected by the publisher in favour of the more marketable one), which is an all-out sex book. A pornographic thriller is how it's described by Bret in the novel. In a way, the inclusion of this specific book seems to be there just to appease the Ellis crowd. Instead of outright giving them what they want, he just sums up some scenes and gives brief descriptions. It's probably the funniest part of the novel and obviously self-deprecating in the best way. The way he opens the novel is also quite interesting (he discusses the opening sentence of each of his four novels and how each was bigger and more complex than the last, and Lunar Park is supposed to be a return to the original simplicity of Less Than Zero).

Ultimately, the core of the novel is the two father/son relationships that Bret participates in. It almost has that Field of Dreams quality to it, but not quite.

I could say more, but I'll save some of that for that review for The Gazette. I should also point you to www.eastonellis.com as it has a lot of cool stuff like audio readings from the book, excerpts and information on his previous novels. It also tells you everything you need to know about Bret Easton Ellis.

Both of them.