By Stu Hennigan.
“We are stories telling stories, nothing…..” – Fernando Pessoa
The 21st century has been a fallow time for aficionados of the former enfant terrible of American letters. In the twenty years following 1998’s Glamorama, his published output amounted to two new works of fiction and a book of non-fiction in which he confessed to having “thought that I might never write another novel,” calling it “a form that didn’t interest [him] anymore.” It was as if, almost by accident, he was fulfilling the mandate of the giant billboard that first appeared in Less Than Zero, broadcasting a mission statement for all the self-negating characters that fill his pages:
DISAPPEAR HERE
When The Shards was announced with the premise that it would see him return to his favourite stomping ground of early-80’s LA and tell the ‘real’ story of Less Than Zero, it would’ve been easy to think the final nail was about to be driven home; the fanfares heralding its arrival more like the imminent death rattle of a former powerhouse now shit out of steam and ideas.
Dude. This. Again? C’mon…….
Thankfully, Ellis hadn’t read the script. The book was, indisputably, his best since American Psycho and arguably the crowning achievement of a rollercoaster career. This March sees him turn 60, so now seems like a good time to revisit his backlist and consider how he might be viewed by posterity after forty years at the top: will he be condemned to perpetual infamy as the shock-merchant who wrote a book that scandalised the world, or is he destined to be remembered as something more?
***
Ellis has been a mythical figure from the outset after his debut Less Than Zero became a word-of-mouth hit in 1985. Simon and Schuster printed 5000 copies of the first edition that spring, “expecting to sell half that;” but by October it had made the New York Times bestseller lists, its writer hailed as the figurehead of a new ‘Literary Brat Pack’, which included his close friends Jay McInerney — who’d had similar success the year before with his coked-up New York classic Bright Lights, Big City — and the soon-to-be-luminary Donna Tartt. It’s a fragmentary work with “no real plot until the last quarter,” a hallucinatory joyride with a bunch of sophisticated, tranked out teenagers through the sordid glitz of upper-middle class LA, where “money, teenage sex and easy access to drugs open the door to a gleaming kind of nihilism,” all told in studiously minimal prose which owes no small debt to his idol Joan Didion.
He’s often perceived as a satirist, but there’s not much evidence of it here; LTZ has the unmistakable feel of Ellis doing what most young writers do, presenting their own lives in the guise of “fiction” while they figure out how to do the job properly. Considering he started on the project when he was sixteen this would make sense, so it’s not a surprise to read in White that it’s “a deeply personal novel,” and that “the narrator was always both me and not me.”
The book was notable for the quantity of references it contained to the pop culture of the time — MTV, Donkey Kong, Atari, Pacman and countless others, not to mention namechecks from the music scene of the time, from underground LA bands like X and Fear, to superstars like Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and Duran Duran; the book itself is named after an Elvis Costello song. Some of the references — how about Teenage Enema Nurses In Bondage by Killer Pussy, or Artificial Insemination by Elton Motello? — are so obscure they look like they’ve been invented, especially considering his later reputation for shock value, but every one turns out, on investigation, to be genuine.
Also included are a host of trademarked names, everything from brands of cigarettes and prescription drugs to car manufacturers, fast food outlets, sun cream, bubblegum, LA nightclubs, bars, cinemas. This technique works on multiple levels, not only giving the text a definitive sense of time and place, but also showing that in the Reaganomic climate of the early neo-liberal period and beyond, branding is everything.
This obsessive cultural cataloguing is a prominent feature of Ellis’s work. There are scores of trademarks mentioned even at this stage, but as his career developed the numbers racked up sharply. The furthest extent of this comes in American Psycho where every page has Bateman describing in minute detail which fashion houses designed the clothes of everyone present, which boutiques their accessories came from, the technical specs of every new-fangled gadget his evil eye lands on. The number of unique references in that book alone is north of a thousand (1).
Less Than Zero was optioned for film before publication, with the 1987 Hollywood adaptation grossing over three million dollars on its opening weekend and cementing its status as an era-defining icon, despite the fact that the movie was more akin to a kind of proto-Dawson’s Creek than the novel it bore so little resemblance to.
The same year saw the publication of The Rules Of Attraction. At heart it’s Less Than Zero on steroids, a pitch black comedic campus novel about a group of pampered students at a liberal arts college, centring on a social function called the Dress To Get Screwed Party and all the debauchery that implies.
Of the three narrators, by far the strongest voice is that of the Sean Bateman — whose older brother Patrick you may have heard of (he makes his first appearance in print towards the end when he pays Sean a visit) — a monstrous sociopath who’s every bit as convincingly drawn as his nutjob sibling. Patrick’s cameo is the first instance of the characteristic intertextual fluidity of Ellis’s oeuvre. Sean himself appears in American Psycho in one of the book’s funniest scenes, having blagged a table at the mythical Dorsia restaurant, which even Patrick with all his clout is unable to do; he also crops up in The Informers. Victor Johnson — boyfriend of Lauren Hynde, one of the other narrators here — is prominent in Glamorama, wherein it’s revealed Lauren died shortly after the end of this book. Sean’s French roommate Bertrand (“The Frog”) also appears, despising Victor and blaming him for Lauren’s death. These aren’t the only examples, but they’ll do for now. Keen-eyed readers may also recognise the “weird classics group [who are] probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals” as the protagonists of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which came out a few years later to worldwide acclaim.
Like the first book, Rules is saturated with culture. Literary names dropped include heavyweights like Gertude Stein, Strindberg, Beckett, Pinter and Sontag; but he’s equally at home with mega-sellers like Robert Ludlum, and cutting edge 80’s underground figures like Kathy Acker, and Crad Kilodney, the transgressive Canadian writer whose self-published 1980 novel Lightning Struck My Dick crops up in a conversation about contemporary literature. Barely a page goes by without mention of other films, bands and brand names, building a vivid picture of exactly what ‘the kids’ were down with at the time, and the milieu in which they moved.
There are various plots and subplots but none that are worth mentioning as they’re mostly a vehicle for Ellis to describe with relish the perma-stoned anhedonic ennui of lives in which money rarely has to be accounted for and feelings are only for the kind of losers who are dumb enough to have them. The book “received okay review and so-so sales” but he had enough cash in the bank — figuratively and literally, one would imagine — to move on to the next one.
***
For anyone who isn’t old enough to remember, American Psycho (1991) became headline news after Simon and Schuster got cold feet over the content and pulled it a couple of months before publication, leaving Ellis with the three hundred thousand dollar advance in his back pocket and the freedom to sell the manuscript to Knopf. It was too late, however, to recall the galleys, resulting in a New York Times Review of Books article entitled “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away With Murder?” while the National Organisation of Women claimed it was “the most misogynistic communication we have ever come across […] a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women.”
In a spookily prescient future echo of the cancel culture Ellis rails against in White, where “people [are] attacked […] for backing the ‘wrong’ candidate or having the ‘wrong’ opinion,” Norman Mailer blustered for thousands of words in his Vanity Fair review and still came out with a fence post lodged up his jacksie. “How one wishes he were without talent!” opined the arch-egotist. “One does not want to be caught defending American Psycho.” Harsh realm for a book that hadn’t even hit the shelves.
Henry Bean of the LA Times was the only reviewer to offer any objective critique, calling it “a hilarious, repulsive, boring, seductive, deadpan satire.” More to the point, “of the 18 people (not to mention assorted animals) tortured and murdered […], eight are women, nine are men, and one is a small boy; of the book’s 400 pages, fewer than 40 are devoted to these events.” What even he failed to notice was that much of the violence, like the scene in which Bateman mouthfucks a severed head with such a raging hard-on he’s able to carry it around his apartment dangling from the end of his cock, is so schlocky, so OTT, and so clearly a homage to the 80’s slasher flicks and Video Nasties Ellis grew up with it’s a wonder it was ever taken seriously in the first place.
The point could be made that there were plenty more books in the American canon — Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit To Brooklyn, for example, which predated Psycho by nearly thirty years — that were far more realistic in their depictions of violence without drawing anywhere near the same amount of flak. Furthermore, in some genres, real misogynistic violence is par for the course. Check out some Richard Laymon, or Mendell W Johnson’s hideous torture porn novel Let’s Go Play At the Adams’ (1974) to see this in action and see how they compare. Could it be that the criticism Ellis received was purely because he was seen as a ‘literary’ writer?
The hypocrisy of the reaction to American Psycho is so glaring it’s barely worth mentioning, coming from a society where, as Maggie Nelson writes in The Red Book, the porn industry makes more money annually than all of professional sports combined. Note also that the American public has such an appetite for true crime stories that by the time Vincent Bugliosi died in 2015, Helter Skelter had sold seven million copies and had been through a 25th anniversary reissue to mark the quarter century — not since publication, but the day of the Manson murders themselves.
Bean’s take has proven to be correct: Psycho is now widely recognised, in Irvine Welsh’s words as “a black comedy, a satire on our dislocating culture of excess.” The sex scenes remain infinitely more shocking than the murders — especially considering they were published by a huge press long before the current desensitized age where the internet and Smartphones allow twenty four seven instant access to any kind of porn imaginable — although Bateman’s narration is so dispassionate it’s hard to imagine anyone getting their rocks off from reading it. Though it predates social media by a decade and a half, thinking about Bateman’s obsessions with clothes, tech specs, labels, health, skincare routines, the pathological gym workouts, the self-improvement lists — which are borrowed from Benjamin Franklin via Jay Gatsby (2) — it’s not too much of a stretch to say he’s a prototype of toxic masculinity. Rewrite the novel for the 21st century and he’d be an Instagram influencer. Like Andrew Tate (3).
***
It took nearly seven years for Ellis to write the follow-up, during which time Knopf issued a stock-gap collection of short stories, The Informers (1994), to keep the cash registers ticking over. Ellis claimed they were written around the same time as LTZ and they definitely have that feel, aside from a couple featuring vampires and the murder of a young boy which are so gleefully sanguinary it’s difficult to believe they came from that period. It’s a solid set, especially the epistolary Letters From LA, in which a preppy young miss writes a series of missives to her friend Sean (him again) on the East Coast. With each subsequent letter we see her wide-eyed excitement at her new life degrade into an Ellisian standard gobbling-downers-and-fucking-strangers-for-the-sake-of-something-to-do narrative as LA — always The Great Corruptor — gets its claws in. But generally The Informers feels ephemeral after the seismic shockwaves of Psycho and isn’t much more than a footnote, despite being filmed in 2008.
***
When Glamorama appeared, it didn’t seem like the years Ellis had spent on it had been put to good use. An allusive international thriller about fashion models who turn to terrorism as a protest against capitalism, it’s a self-indulgent, bloated monster in which he falls foul of every excess he’d ever railed against — like when a passable rock band gets a megabucks deal, fucks off to the studio with a boatload of sniff and comes out with a triple disc concept album. The New York Times pegged it as “another artefact of the culture it pretends to satirise,”, recalling Norman Mailer’s comment in his Psycho review that it’s “hard to tell what Mr Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp her purports to condemn.”
This paradox is an interesting one, and central to how Ellis’s work is viewed. A criticism often levelled at him, coming as he does from an affluent family where hanging out with the children of movie producers in Sherman Oaks and Studio City as a kid was the norm, is how he can consider himself fit to eviscerate the privilege he so clearly embodies? He finally addressed this in 2010 in an episode related in White, where he ““grudgingly admitted that on so many levels Patrick Bateman was me,” and that “We felt disgusted by the society that had created us […] and we were infuriated by the idea that there was nowhere else to go.” It’s a valid response, but not one that will satisfy all of his critics.
Glamorama plays with identity in much the same way as Psycho. Characters are persistently mistaken for each other, and the nature of reality is questioned with incessant references to “the script” as if they’re making a movie, although every character is starring in a different one (4). The pop culture references are still at the forefront too, exaggerated to the point that dialogue sometimes comes in the form of direct quotations from song lyrics, which is an interesting technique but gets tired quickly. The New York Times was dismissive: “Ellis’s satirical message is, essentially, a one-liner, and hardly an original one at that — celebrity culture is vapid, yes, and?” In this case, even his staunchest defenders may have found it difficult to argue.
In retrospect, Glamorama serves as a time capsule, dropping references to “Madonna’s sex book”, “It Girls” and the vogue of “the new male waif — underfed, wild-haired, major rehab victim…” which appeared post-Nirvana. The film crew that follows the characters around is a reference to early-MTV show The Real World — which is named — and foreshadows the explosion of ‘reality TV’ that was about to detonate on TV networks globally. We also see the hypocrisy of celebrities championing of the fashionable causes of the day with nods to Rock the Vote and Don’t Bungle the Jungle; one character is told, “You do fur ads and donate to Greenpeace” recalling the anti-fur campaigns that led to supermodels being drenched with buckets of pigs’ blood. It’s peopled with hundreds if not thousands (5) of Hollywood actors, agents, musicians, TV stars, producers, the great, the good and the never quite got there, drifting in and out on and endless, vacuous showreel that reads like a who’s who of the 90s demi-monde. It’s still a slog in places, but it’ll bring back a tsunami of memories for anyone who was around at the time.
***
2005’s Lunar Park was a nervous breakdown slash midlife crisis masquerading as a novel. Wrapping faux-memoir around a haunted house story worthy of Stephen King, it’s the metafictional ravings of the protagonist, “Bret Easton Ellis”, a writer attempting to come to terms with his own legend, surrounded by people who may or may not be reifications of characters from his previous novels while a guy dressed as Patrick Bateman hovers spectrally in the background. The opening line “You do an awfully good impression of yourself,” (6) sets the scene for what follows as he scatters the narrative with what looks like a loose autobiography and talks about publishers asking him to write his life story at the same time as saying “I could never be as honest in a memoir as I could in fiction.” He’s double-dealing, of course; “Bret” is a narrator every bit as unreliable as Bateman and you get the impression he’s enjoying himself.
It was almost inevitable he’d become a character in his fiction at some point, in the same way he became a character in his own life via his carefully crafted image — a slick surface sheen with a blank gaze that would’ve made Warhol weak at the knees — and refusal to discuss his personal life in interviews. It’s a brilliant move, simultaneously subverting, confirming and adding to his own mythos while showing he’s not afraid to send himself up either. In doing so, he makes it impossible to be sure which bits of “memoir” (if any) are true, but that doesn’t matter, because since when has memoir been objective? Maybe Joan can explain:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live […] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
These lines from The White Album are quoted so often that they’ve become a trope in themselves, although clearly they could be applicable here. What’s quoted far less often, is the end of the same paragraph:
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I ever told myself.
This is a far more accurate representation of what we see in Lunar Park. Like his characters, all of whom are performing their own stories, all of the time, he’s spent too long in “a world without boundaries” — not only physical, sexual, ethical and moral, but spatial and temporal ones too — and realised he’s lost not just his way, but himself, completely.
***
It’s hard to believe it took five years to write 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms, his second novel to be named after a Costello song. It was pitched as a sequel to Less Than Zero and it is, of a fashion, picking up some of the same characters thirty years on and throwing them into a chaotically impenetrable sex ‘n’ death plot that the Coen Brothers would be proud of; but the washed-up, Pat Hobby-esque screenwriter who unreliably (how else?) narrates through a haze of tequila and Xanax is so clearly a portrait of Ellis himself it’s impossible not to see it as a coda to the mental collapse fictionalised in Lunar Park (7). The prose is as good as ever — the one thing that remained consistent throughout, even amid the corpulent verbosity of Glamorama — but for all that it’s enjoyable as a pacy, pulpy homage to Chandler and Ellroy, he’s cruising in second gear and not even bothering to hide it.
White, his first work of non-fiction, appeared in 2018. It’s a book-length essay in which he makes some salient points about online cancel culture and the dogmatism that’s become endemic in the liberal left, intercut with some perceptive film criticism and an autobiographical element that feels far more authentic than the sideshow stage tricks of Lunar Park. In a way that you could argue proves his point, the book was mauled by many who might once have been his champions, and lauded by publications who’d likely as not have portrayed him as the devil incarnate when he was in his controversial pomp. The Daily Mail praised its “sharp social commentary” while The Times called it “a splenetic analysis of the culture of today.” Rachel Cooke in The Observer was less than impressed, saying it was “Best described as a provocation,” before noting ominously, “it’s much more than that if you take the trouble to read it” and warning readers it was “up to [them] to choose to what degree [they] are prepared to allow [themselves] to be riled.” The Wall Street Journal suspected “Ellis will lose friends over this book” — and they weren’t wrong.
***
It was welcome relief when The Shards reminded everyone what a terrific writer he can be. He revisits the metafictional vibe of Lunar Park by placing “Bret” centre stage again, this time attempting to deal with some mythical trauma from his youth. The plot hinges around the playground politics of a group of friends — the same group, you’d suspect, depicted in Less Than Zero — over the course of a few months in 1981 against a backdrop of home invasions and ritual murders committed by a serial killer called The Trawler. This is not a new motif. Ellis’ LA novels are peppered with references to witchcraft, werewolves, shadowy cults hovering on the periphery but never quite glimpsed. These occult allusions serve as stand-ins for the Great Monster of late-20th century California who’s ever-present by virtue of his conspicuous absence: Charles Manson. Ellis was born in 1964 and will have been six years old when the Tate-LaBianca murders happened, so he must have been aware of them growing up, especially living as close as he did to the crime scene, even if he didn’t remember the event itself. As ever, Didion is instructive. In The White Album she recounts that in the run-up to the killings,
there were odd things going around town. There were rumours. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable […] Black Masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.
In The Shards Ellis acknowledges, finally, to himself as much as anyone else, “the damage inflicted on the psyche of the city” by the murders (8). It’s the wellspring of so much of the fear and loathing — of which he is the greatest chronicler since Hunter S. Thompson, bar none — that leaves his characters anxious, edgy, eating tranquillisers like sweets.
There are two crucial differences between The Shards and Less Than Zero, both of which are what you’d assume he meant by saying he’d tell the “real” story. Firstly, it explores in detail “Bret”’s formative yearnings for members of the opposite sex as something far more deep-rooted and complex than his first protagonist Clay’s almost offhand bisexual experiences; it’s also the first time that he’s written queer sex scenes that are anywhere near as explicit as his heterosexual ones. Ellis was guarded for decades in public when the subject of his sexuality was raised; although he has been out for a long time, these passages still come across as being something of a release and are far more erotic than the graphic yet numb boy on girl(s) couplings of his earlier work.
Secondly, The Shards recasts the über-cool crew of Less Than Zero in a new light and shows they were in fact children, however much their behaviour may have pretended otherwise. He writes about classrooms, homework, school uniforms, teachers — things that would have been mortifying to include for a teenager writing a novel about how they saw themselves and the world around them. He also recognises that over and above everything else, they were “spoiled fucking robots, protected in their mansions and given everything they want,” something he’d never previously put into print explicitly.
For all the smoke and mirrors about serial killers and the nods — some sly, some not — to the horror films Ellis so clearly adores, The Shards is essentially a desperately sad story about a kid growing up queer and trying to deal with it on his own. In revising Less Than Zero’s portrait of the artist as a young man, it’s also an implicit admission that he became trapped by the false image he created and so became “a man who stayed a child.” This is the trauma Ellis has spent his career since Lunar Park trying to process; the rest is just noise.
The Shards feels like the book he’s wanted to write from the beginning, but only now does he have the wisdom, life experience, and — strange word to use for a man turning sixty — maturity to do it. This essay began with the proposal to take stock of his life’s work; The Shards sees him doing that himself, reassembling the pieces and reconciling his life in fiction with his own personal history. It’s also a love letter to his home city, painstakingly recreated with his usual scrupulous attention to the psychogeographic and cultural landscape. Some passages read like a street atlas; others like a work of narrative social history. There are even more brands than ever, the film references are myriad, the music so important that subliminal messages left by the killer on band posters become part of the plot.
Didion (who else?) once wrote “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image…”. The Shards is Ellis staking his claim to 80’s LA, daring the competition to take if off him; on this form, it’d be a brave person to try. You’d think now he’s wrung everything he possibly can from this particular tempo-spatial locale, and maybe The Shards is his way of letting it go forever, but whatever the case, it’ll be fascinating to see where he goes next.
Which brings us to the question of his legacy. Even at thirty years’ distance, it’s inevitable that his name instantly evokes American Psycho, even for those familiar with his other work. The argument could surely be made that Bateman’s excesses were a game changer for what mainstream writers could get away with. One of the little-known footnotes to the Psycho saga is that when Poppy Z Brite’s Exquisite Corpse was being rejected in consternation by publishers everywhere, it was ultimately picked up by Simon and Schuster, still sore from having their fingers burned in 1991.
It’s interesting to consider that a writer’s influence could be so pervasive it almost goes unnoticed after a time, but it could be the case with Ellis because so much of what he pioneered in terms of voice and style became standard for a whole generation of writers that followed. Would Fight Club, the other canonical takedown of fin de siècle consumerism have been possible without Ellis? Palanhiuk may be writing about a different social strata, but the laconic, jaded cynicism of the narrator has Ellis’ name all over it.
How about AM Homes’ harrowing and infinitely disturbing The End Of Alice, in which a convicted paedophile relates from his prison cell his twisted version of what he imagines was a love affair with the twelve year old girl he raped and murdered? Don’t think so.
In the UK, Benjamin Myers’ early pulp-fiction homage The Book Of Fuck (2005) takes plenty of its hard-bitten stylistic cues from the early Ellis; Johnny Glyn’s side-splittingly brutal The Seven Days of Peter Crumb (2007) is like Bateman on the rampage in Yorkshire; you can trace an ancestral line back from Alison Rumfit’s outrageous Tell Me I’m Worthless (2020) — a novel that genuinely deserves the label ‘trangressive’ in a time when the word has become almost meaningless — to Ellis too. It’s conceivable that in ten or fifteen years he’ll be “discovered” anew, in the same way as someone like Dennis Cooper, or the Great Denis Johnson; it wouldn’t be undeserved.
Few can dream of publishing a text that achieves anything like American Psycho’s level of notoriety. Bateman has come to life away from the page and become and American archetype like, say, Willy Loman, Philip Marlowe, or Jeff Albertson, the comic book guy from The Simpsons. In 2021 the Financial Times published an article, ‘Dressed To Kill: American Psycho’s Style Legacy Thirty Years On’, one of the greatest cases of life imitating art imitating life you could ever wish to see. Even so, it would be grossly unfair if this were to be Ellis’ sole bequest. Outside of Psycho he’s never been an especially transgressive writer, and it would be wrong for him to be remembered as such.
His work may not appear quite so fresh to millennials who’ve grown up reading books written under his influence, but he’s one of the exceptionally small number of writers who can claim to have a style and voice that’s truly their own, where all it takes is a paragraph to know that no one else could have written it.
Taken as a whole, his backlist provides not only a comprehensive, coherent, incisive, critique of late-20th century capitalism, but it also serves as a hugely important cultural archive of American society over the last forty years that’s every bit as valuable as the one Warhol left for the decades that preceded it; his deconstruction of the cult of celebrity and the commodification of the self anticipates the current world of influencers and social media by decades and remains achingly relevant (9).
In Careless People, her excellent book on the writing of Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell quotes one far-sighted reviewer who said of Fitzgerald’s early work, ‘If any scholar of the future shall seek to learn the habits and conditions of this age and its people […] in Tales of the Jazz Age he will find an invaluable source for his researches.’ This can undeniably be applied to Ellis, whose brand of modernism does for the latter 20th century what Fitzgerald’s did for the early part.
A few years back, Ellis got into a spat over Tweets relating to film director Kathryn Bigelow. Detailing the incident in White, his explanation of how he intended the comments that provoked the row to be taken is as succinct a precis of his life’s work as anyone else has managed so far:
Partly sincere and partly performance art […] meant to be surprising, playful and provocative, real and fake, easy to read and hard to decipher, and, most importantly, not to be taken too seriously.
Notes
(1) I’m working on a book about Ellis and know this for a fact, because I’ve counted them.
(2) See also Rules Of Attraction’s list of “Things I Will Never Do,” which is a direct lift from Didion’s Play It As It Lays.
(3) Speaking of toxic masculinity, Ellis was way ahead of the game, again, when he decided to make Bateman’s hero one Donald J Trump, who’s mentioned over forty times in the book and was such a master manipulator of both image and media he became famous enough to get voted into the White House. With his Old Family Money and obvious social connections, how easy is it to imagine a modern-day Bateman doing the same?
(4) The filmmaking and acting metaphors that would henceforth figure heavily in his work (culminating in The Shards, which is by far his most ‘cinematic’ work on many levels and is saturated with them) are comparable, again, to Didion, who used them with a regularity that verges on the predictable at times.
(5) I haven’t finished counting yet but I’m up to nearly 200 and I’ve only analysed 40 pages!
(6) See this snippet of conversation from Didion’s Play It As It Lays: “’And question number three: who am I impersonating?’ ‘Yourself,’ Helene suggested.”
(7) He later admitted to both these things in White.
(8) Manson is one of a number of infamous murders referenced in American Psycho. In the LA novels it’s as if to speak his name would invoke a hex, but Wall Street is safe, far away from the big bad wolf, so much so that he’s called by his familiar name “Charlie”.
(9) Warhol is another figure, like Manson, whose absence brings him to mind in books so saturated with cultural references. Bateman’s nightmares about plane crashes, needles, electric chairs are all images that figure in Warhol’s Deaths and Disasters series, for one, and that’s before we start on paralleling their respective consumerist and celebrity critiques. Also note that American Psycho begins on April 1st 1987, not just April Fool’s Day, but the day on which a public memorial service was held in New York for the recently deceased icon of American art, a fact which Ellis explicitly states in White. And, like Manson, he’s finally mentioned by name in The Shards. None of this can be coincidental.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet and musician from the north of England. His book Ghost Signs (Bluemoose) was shortlisted for two national literary prizes, including Best Political Book By A Non-Parliamentarian at the Parliamentary Book Awards in 2023. His short fiction, essays, poetry and criticism have been featured by Prospect, 3:AM Magazine, Lunate, Lune Journal, Broken Sleep Books, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Massive Overheads, Visual Verse and Expat Lit. He is currently trying to place a novel with the working title of Keshed, and is in the early stages of researching and writing Disappear Here: Bret Easton Ellis’ America, a social and cultural history of America from 1970 to the present day as seen through the lens of Ellis’s novels. The book will be published by Ortac Press in late 2025.
