Essay · Literature & Ideas
The Novelist Who Refused to Flinch
Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel at twenty-one and his most notorious at twenty-six, and spent the following three decades being misread by people who wanted him to be either a moralist or a monster, when he was in fact something rarer and more uncomfortable: a diagnostician, working without anaesthetic, on a culture that preferred not to be diagnosed.
The prose is the first thing. Flat, enumerative, obsessively attentive to brand names and surfaces and the names of songs playing in the background of scenes in which terrible things are happening or nothing is happening or, most characteristically, both simultaneously. A character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel will describe a business card — its font, its weight, its colour, the precise quality of the card stock — with the same care and the same emotional neutrality that he brings to describing a murder, and the effect of this equivalence is not stylistic carelessness but the novel’s central argument: that in the world Ellis is describing, the business card and the murder are accorded the same weight, that the culture of surfaces has produced human beings for whom the surface is the only available register of value, and that this is not a personal failing of the characters but a systemic condition of the society they inhabit and that produced them.
This argument is presented without editorialising, without the authorial thumb on the scales that would tell the reader how to feel, without the moral framework that the novel as a form has, since at least the eighteenth century, been expected to provide. The absence of that framework is what has made Ellis consistently controversial, consistently misread, and consistently more interesting than either his admirers or his detractors have generally managed to acknowledge. He is not, despite the surface evidence, a nihilist. He is a satirist — but a satirist so committed to the formal logic of his satire that he refuses the safety valve of ironic distance, and the refusal is what makes the work so uncomfortable and so precise.
Less Than Zero and the Invention of a Voice
Ellis was a student at Bennington College in Vermont when he wrote Less Than Zero, published in 1985 to an attention disproportionate to the modesty of its formal ambitions and entirely proportionate to the accuracy of its social observation. The novel is narrated by Clay, a young man returning to Los Angeles from his first semester at an Eastern college, and it follows him through a winter of parties and drugs and the particular vacancy of people who have been given everything except a reason to want it. The Los Angeles it describes — the canyons and the beach houses and the recording studios and the dealer’s apartments — is rendered with a flatness that is itself a form of horror: nothing is emphasised, nothing is condemned, the atrocities and the pool parties and the video stores accumulate with equal weight in a prose that mimics the anaesthesia of its characters.
The voice was new. There had been nothing quite like it in American fiction — not the Carver minimalism it superficially resembled, because Carver’s flatness was the flatness of deprivation and Ellis’s was the flatness of surfeit, and the emotional textures produced by those two conditions are entirely different. The novel was criticised for glamorising what it depicted, for making the lifestyle it described look appealing, for failing to provide the moral coordinates that would tell the reader where to stand in relation to Clay and his friends. These criticisms missed the point in a way that would recur throughout Ellis’s career: the absence of moral coordinates was not an oversight but the argument. A novel that condemned the world of Less Than Zero from a position of secure moral authority would have been a different and lesser novel — one that allowed the reader to locate themselves comfortably outside the world being described, to observe it safely, to feel superior to it. Ellis refused this comfort. He still does.
“Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in.”
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, 1991
American Psycho and the Novel That Could Not Be Published
Simon & Schuster dropped American Psycho in 1990, one month before its scheduled publication, after excerpts circulated and produced a response whose ferocity suggested that the novel had touched something the culture was genuinely unwilling to examine. Vintage Books published it in 1991, and the controversy that followed — the calls for boycott, the feminist protests, the National Organisation for Women’s description of the book as a how-to manual for misogynist violence, the banning in Queensland, Australia, that remained in force until 2011 — constitutes one of the more instructive episodes in recent American literary history, because the people most loudly opposed to the novel were, in most cases, objecting to a book they had not read, or had read selectively, extracting the violence from the context that gives the violence its meaning.
Patrick Bateman is a vice president at a Manhattan investment bank in the late 1980s, handsome, well-dressed, socially accomplished, and either a serial killer of extraordinary depravity or a man whose fantasies of violence are so vivid and so detailed that the novel cannot — will not — tell us which. The ambiguity is not a narrative trick. It is the argument. Bateman exists in a world in which identity is so thoroughly constructed from surfaces — the business card, the restaurant reservation, the right brand of mineral water — that the self beneath the surface has either disappeared or was never there, and the violence may be the only thing that feels real to him, the only activity that carries genuine sensation rather than the simulation of sensation that the rest of his life provides. The novel asks, without answering, whether a society that produces Bateman is meaningfully different from one that simply is Bateman — whether the distance between the man who fantasises about murder and the system that treats people as commodities to be acquired and discarded is as large as we prefer to believe.
The chapters in which Bateman describes his morning skincare routine — the exfoliants, the moisturisers, the precise sequence of products applied in the precise order — are among the funniest pages in American fiction of the period, and their comedy is inseparable from their horror: the same consciousness that can describe a murder in clinical detail applies itself to the cleansing of its face with equal care and equal emotional neutrality, and the equivalence is the joke, and the joke is also the indictment.
The novel is, among other things, a formally extraordinary achievement: the brand-name lists that infuriated critics on first publication are not padding or showing-off but the structural equivalent of the violence, the same deadening of affect applied to consumer goods that Bateman applies to human beings, and the accumulation of both produces, over the course of the novel’s considerable length, a reading experience that is exhausting and deliberately so — the exhaustion being the point, the reader’s own numbness in the face of the hundredth designer label or the hundredth atrocity being the experience the novel is engineering, and the recognition of that numbness in oneself being its most uncomfortable gift.
The Rules of Attraction, The Informers, Glamorama
The Rules of Attraction (1987) is the novel that the Ellis bibliography tends to treat as a minor work between the debut and the masterpiece, and the treatment is unjust. Set at a fictional New England college clearly modelled on Bennington, narrated in rotation by three characters whose perspectives contradict and overlap and occasionally describe the same events in ways that cannot be reconciled, it is formally the most adventurous of the early novels and emotionally the most naked — a book about the specific misery of desire in an environment where desire is simultaneously universal and unspeakable, where everyone wants something and no one can say what, and where the result is a kind of continuous low-level anguish that the parties and the drugs manage but never resolve.
Glamorama (1998) is the most underrated novel in the Ellis canon, and its underratedness is partly a function of its ambition, which exceeded what the critical apparatus was prepared to accommodate. A satire of the fashion world that mutates, in its second half, into a thriller about terrorism and identity and the impossibility of distinguishing between the simulation of reality and the thing itself, it is a novel that anticipated, with uncomfortable precision, the post-9/11 world’s relationship to spectacle and violence and the aestheticisation of catastrophe. That it was published three years before September 2001 is not predictive genius but the logical extension of an analytical framework that Ellis had been developing since Less Than Zero: a framework for understanding what happens to a culture when image becomes the primary currency of value.
Lunar Park, Imperial Bedrooms, and the Turn Inward
Lunar Park (2005) surprised everyone, including readers who thought they knew what an Ellis novel was, by being a ghost story — or something that uses the conventions of the ghost story to investigate what it means to be haunted by the father you hated and the self you constructed in opposition to him. The novel is narrated by a character named Bret Easton Ellis, a famous novelist whose biography closely mirrors the author’s own, and it performs an act of self-examination that the earlier novels, committed to the cool distance of their narrators, had not attempted. It is, in its strange and genre-bending way, the most personal of the novels, and the horror — genuine, effective, unnerving — is inseparable from the psychological material it is processing.
His father, Robert Martin Ellis, died in 1992, and the relationship between the two — cold, competitive, emotionally withholding on the father’s side, furious and grief-stricken on the son’s — runs through Lunar Park as a subterranean current that surfaces in the novel’s ghost and in its protagonist’s parenting of his own son and in the particular texture of guilt that accumulates when someone you have hated dies before the hatred can be resolved. It is Ellis’s most emotionally direct work, and its directness does not diminish its formal intelligence: the ghost story frame is load-bearing, not decorative, and the novel’s horror is precisely calibrated to the psychological material it is processing.
“You do something, and then the world reacts, and you have to deal with the reaction — which is often worse than whatever it was you did.”
Bret Easton Ellis, in interview, The Paris Review, 2012
White and the Culture Wars
White, published in 2019, is Ellis’s first work of non-fiction — a collection of essays, or an extended essay broken into sections, about culture and politics and the condition of being a contrarian in an era that has lost patience with contrariness. It is the most divisive thing he has published since American Psycho, and for some of the same reasons: it says things that the dominant culture has decided should not be said, it declines to adopt the approved positions on a series of political and cultural questions, and it does so with a provocation that is sometimes illuminating and sometimes simply irritating, and that makes it very difficult to assess from a position of genuine neutrality.
Ellis’s political evolution — from the apolitical cool of the early novels to the podcast provocations and the Twitter controversies and the White essays — is a subject that his admirers and detractors have argued about at length, and the argument has not always been edifying on either side. What is clear is that the analytical framework is consistent: the same suspicion of received wisdom, the same resistance to the comfort of moral certainty, the same insistence on looking at the thing itself rather than at the approved version of the thing, that characterised the fiction from the beginning. Whether this framework produces insight or contrarianism in any given instance is a question that each reader must settle for themselves, and the settling is not always comfortable, which is very much in the Ellis tradition.
What the Novels Know
The case for Bret Easton Ellis as a major American novelist rests, finally, on the novels themselves — on the consistency and the precision with which they have, across four decades, mapped a specific territory of American experience with tools that no other writer has quite replicated. The territory is the space where consumer culture and emotional vacancy meet, where the performance of selfhood has become so total that the self being performed has been consumed by the performance, where the available language for feeling is inadequate to the feeling and the inadequacy is not acknowledged because acknowledgement would require a self capable of recognising its own insufficiency.
This is not a comfortable territory, and Ellis has never made it comfortable, and the discomfort has been held against him by readers who wanted the diagnosis to come with a prescription. He has not provided one. He is not, he has said repeatedly, a moralist. He is a writer, and the writing is the act of looking — steadily, without flinching, at the thing as it is rather than as we would prefer it to be. The looking is the contribution. The discomfort it produces in the reader is not a side effect but the point: the evidence that something has been seen that had not previously been fully visible, and that the seeing, however unwelcome, is the beginning of whatever understanding might follow.
Patrick Bateman is still in his apartment on the Upper West Side, moisturising. The music is still playing. The brand names are still accumulating. The novel that contains him is still, thirty years later, the most accurate portrait available of the decade that produced him and of the culture that continues, in its updated forms, to reproduce the conditions of his existence. This is not nothing. It is, in fact, rather a great deal, and it was accomplished by a writer who understood, from the beginning, that the most honest thing a novelist can do is look at the world without the comfort of knowing, in advance, what the looking is supposed to mean.
This essay draws on Bret Easton Ellis’s novels Less Than Zero (1985), The Rules of Attraction (1987), American Psycho (1991), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), Imperial Bedrooms (2010), and the essay collection White (2019), as well as his interview with Nathaniel Rich in The Paris Review (2012). Bret Easton Ellis was born on March 7, 1964, in Los Angeles, California.
My World of Interiors 