Lunar Park
by Bret Easton Ellis
Knopf, 320 pp., $24.95
“You do an awfully good impression of yourself,” opens Bret Easton Ellis’ first book in seven years. Ellis has always been skilled in the art of suspending reality to make his characters elaborately one-dimensional fuckups – ostensibly an extension of himself and the lifestyle he lived in the Eighties. Lunar Park begins with a sort of biographical retooling of his past novels and the mountains of coke and self-loathing the subsequent success brought upon him. Novels like 1985’s Less Than Zero and 1988’s Rules of Attraction centered on getting fucked, being fucked up, and saying fucked-up things. American Psycho lit the white powder keg with its gruesome and hilarious skewering of Eighties megalomania, and 1998’s Glamorama was a confusing meta-text about models and terrorists and terrorist models.Ellis has his critics, those who call him not a gentleman and a scholar, but a sensationalist and a pig. Lunar Park, however, unravels his American Gothic dream in such a way that the axe-wielding maniacs of his past seem quaint. Since his new novel is about Ellis’ new life – one that has him clean and sober and living in the suburbs with a celebrity wife and two kids – it’s already a scary scenario. He begins working on his latest novel (titled Teenage Pussy) and naturally he slips back into his old ways, hitting the bottle as things around him start coming apart. Random boys in the town are disappearing; his son hates him; Ellis sees a man dressed as Patrick Bateman – the serial killer in American Psycho – at a Halloween party; his daughter’s doll is coming to life; and his house is decaying from the outside in. His sanity starts to decay, as well, and through a bizarre sequence of genuinely creepy events, he’s being punished for being Bret Easton Ellis. And as in American Psycho, you’re not really sure if anything you just read actually happened. Essentially, Lunar Park is a modern-day roman à clef that actually ends up in a (very un-Ellis) point of emotional closure. It’s an intriguing car wreck of a read, a karmic money shot that finally allows Ellis to expel his demons and bear some semblance of empathy. And it turns out he does a pretty good impression.
This article appears in August 26 • 2005.