Howling at the Moon
From literary wild-child to haunted son, Bret Easton Ellis has travelled some distance since his clinical dissections of the American ID first scandalized the book world. His new novel, Lunar Park, is perhaps his most entertaining and personal yet.
Peter Murphy, 25 Jan 2006
Bret Easton Ellis, former enfant terrible of American letters, now all grown up and immaculately turned out, is standing to the right of the lectern in a Trinity College lecture hall as one of the dons delivers a lofty introduction that encapsulates the novelist’s career entire – from the numb young Americans critique of Less Than Zero to the ‘80s Wall Street slasher satire American Psycho, right up to the new book Lunar Park, equal parts self lacerating skit, Stephen King homage and a Hamlet-like meditation on the sins of his father.
Ellis, however, shows no signs of succumbing to notions of literary respectability. Responding to a dare by his publicist Cormac Kinsella, he reads the portion of Lunar Park which inventories the industrial quantities of drugs the narrator (“Bret Easton Ellis”) ingested through a variety of orifices on a book tour, swiftly followed by the outline of a notional novel entitled Teenage Pussy.
There goes a guest chair in Aosdána.
Two days later, at 10 o’clock in the morning in a suite in the Merrion Hotel, Ellis seems markedly different from his self-assured public persona.
Dressed down in sweats and hotel issue slippers, a baby faced 40-something, he seems remarkably fragile.
The writer’s best friend and sometime lover Michael Wade Kaplan died of a heart attack at age 30 early last year, and perhaps as a result, Lunar Park is his most human and humane book, a sort of fake phantasmagorical autobiography and speculative riff on what his life might have turned out like had he moved to the ’burbs and started a family.
It’s also a haunted house yarn populated with demons, gargoyles and a creepy kid’s toy called a Terby. But more than anything, despite its unruly, inconstant and untidy nature, it’s his best and most readable book.
Mind you, it has divided the critics. I have friends whose opinion I take very seriously that consider it a load of cobblers. Lunar Park bears out the old definition of a novel as a long piece of prose that has something wrong with it. But to this reader, it’s his best-plotted and paced story, with a denouement to make a grown man blub. And if someone had told me a year ago I’d be weeping like a big girl’s blouse at the end of an Ellis book, I’d have thought they were nuts.
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