Ellis, Bret Easton (1964—)

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Ellis, Bret Easton (1964—)

Born and raised in Los Angeles, writer Bret Easton Ellis belongs with novelists Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz to New York's literary "brat pack," writers who achieved early success with their portraits of lonely types isolated in sparkling 1980s New York. Ellis has published four books: the novels Less Than Zero (1985), The Rules of Attraction (1987), and American Psycho (1991), and the short story collection The Informers (1994). A rumored fourth novel on the world of fashion's top models remained unpublished in the late 1990s.

Published when Ellis was twenty-one years old, Less Than Zero narrates the sorry lives of a group of Los Angeles young people. No longer teenagers, these people epitomize what would later be known as "Generation X" in Douglas Coupland's popular phrase. The lives of the main character, Clay, and those of his well-to-do friends revolve around sex and drugs, in which they try to find the essence of a world that eludes them. Similar empty people populate the short stories of The Informers. Outstanding among them is the satirical "The End of the Summer," in which the Californians of Less Than Zero appear as happy vampires.

An ebb in Ellis's popularity came in 1987 when both the film adaptation of Less Than Zero and his novel about a triangular relationship, The Rules of Attraction, failed. But in 1991 he became a social phenomenon thanks to the publication of his outstanding American Psycho, the first-person narration of the exploits of serial killer Pat Bateman, a Manhattan yuppie. The extreme graphic violence and nihilism of the novel became controversial even before its publication. Following complaints by people working on the manuscript, Simon & Schuster withdrew the book from publication, losing a $300,000 advance. The excerpts published by Time and Sky contributed to the controversy. The book was finally published as a Vintage paperback, becoming a best-selling novel in the United States and abroad. Its publication was greeted with a barrage of criticism, especially from feminists, and lukewarm reviews that missed much of the book's originality to focus only on its nastier passages. Ellis himself confessed in an interview with Leslie White in 1994 that the controversy felt "like a joke, a huge postmodernist irony—the book was so badly misread."

David Skal complains in The Monster Show that "although the whole incident [involving Ellis's novel] was endlessly discussed in terms of taste, misogyny, and political correctness, a subtext of class snobbery predominated." Skal argues that what really irritated feminists and moral guardians alike is the fact that Bateman is upper-class and that Ellis's book is literature unlike the books by, for instance, Stephen King. This is possibly correct, yet American Psycho's status as a literary text is still ambiguous. The book has sold remarkably well in many countries, creating a cult reflected in the many Internet websites devoted to its discussion, but critics and academics show an equivocal attitude toward it. Arguably, the book is commendable if only because it questions in depth the meaning of the word literature, together with the meaning of other relevant words such as homophobia, racism, misogyny, and classism.

American Psycho is essentially a radical indictment of the American culture of the Reagan era, a very bleak portrait of a time and place obsessed by money. Bateman's insanity is, nonetheless, close to the existentialism of characters such as the anonymous protagonist of Albert Camus's novel The Outsider (1946). In his lucidity Bateman is also a brother of the infamous Hannibal Lecter of the film Silence of the Lambs (also 1991) and of Mickey Knox in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994). Bateman's diary narrates his frivolous life and that of the yuppie crowd that surrounds him. Bateman engages in a series of increasingly grisly murders of homosexuals, women, and male business colleagues which he describes with a stark, functional prose. This is hard to read because of its realism, but it may not be, after all, the true essence of the book. Perhaps a more remarkable peculiarity of Bateman's style is that his descriptions of characters and places abound with information about designer objects seemingly taken straight from catalogues. The violent passages that were published in isolation missed much of the irony of the book: characters mistake each other all the time because they all wear the same expensive clothes, Bateman's appraisals of pop idols such as Whitney Houston makes them appear trivial and boring, and restaurant surrealistic scenes are enriched by funny dialogue with plenty of non sequiturs showing the abysmal depth of the yuppies' ignorance.

It is undeniably true that many of the scenes in the book may offend the sensibilities of the average reader. But the fact that Bateman is addicted to Valium and Halcion suggests that, perhaps—hopefully, for some readers—the bloodbaths are just a product of his imagination, which is why nobody suspects him. Of course, this point is irrelevant to the question of what Ellis's intention was when writing such a remarkable book. Yet it is hard to see why so few reviewers have seen Ellis's fierce attack against yuppiedom. American Psycho shows no mercy at all with a society that allows people like Bateman a room at the top. The reading is, nonetheless, complicated by Ellis's risky choice of Bateman as both his mouthpiece and his target. The deep morality of the book is thus purposely blurred in a literary game of mirrors, but readers should not make the mistake of identifying character and author. Ellis does challenge the reader to face Bateman's cruelty for the sake of reaping the reward of the final message of the book: "Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged," Bateman says at the end of the novel. So does Ellis. After reading American Psycho, the reader can only sympathize with this view of life at the end of the twentieth century.

—Sara Martin