Lunar Park

Lunar Park. Ellis, Bret Easton. New York: Vintage, 2005.

One could call this book a Bret Easton Ellis tribute novel which just happens to have been penned by Ellis himself. Lunar Park is kind of like a graduate thesis on Ellis and his work except that it is also a novel and an intriguing story in its own right.

The first part of the novel is a brisk first person account of Ellis rise to fame as a literary superstar who never really needed to grow up. He seems to have hit upon a niche spot in contemporary fiction and his signature style of moral blindness and harrowing depravity satisfies (or at least shocks) readers worldwide. In his creative process Ellis depends more and more on the drugs that fill his novels and his Syd Barrettesque behavior eventually contributes to his demise in that he fathers a child with a well-known actress with which he has a characteristically self destructive relationship. Fatherhood, to put it mildly, is not given much attention in the Ellis oeuvre (just read Glamorama or "In the Islands" from The Informers).

We must stop here for clarification: this is not an autobiography of Ellis (even though the first section basically is). In real life Ellis is bisexual and (so far as we know) has no children. Ellis in this way creates a kind of pellegrino Ellis who lives through the metaphysical hell of the plot but who is distinct from poeta Ellis. Dante shielded his readers from the mundane world of his wife and family whereas Ellis shares these themes in an attempt to make himself appear normal. It does not work on the one hand. Father Bret attempts to fit in with the upper class parents in the ubiquitous McManshion neighborhood in the northeast (not sunny SoCal). But the end result is that he's just the same type of guy as before except on a kind of liberal rehab regiment in which he can slip off from responsibility and do a line or two provided he can lie and keep a straight face.

Yet this honesty is refreshing because Ellis undertook a massive risk in making a fictional character of himself. This book could have been unbearably pretentious in the wrong hands. Ellis succeeds in poking fun at himself. For all the praise and scorn heaped on the man, he has published comparatively little (seven novels in twenty five years). Ellis wisely writes in a romantic subplot with a beautiful graduate student who is doing her masters thesis on his work as the pellegrino "teaches" a creative writing class and spends the rest of his time crafting his new work "Teenage Pussy". Her graduate advisor attempts to persuade her from studying literary trash in depth as if, below the nihilistic LA surface, there lies some nugget of truth or virtue.

Ellis is at a point in his life where money doesn't really matter all that much; he's already made a fortune since publishing Less than Zero while still in college (though he blew a lot of it rockstar style). Of more importance is learning how to deal with being a dad and with leaving behind the vestiges of his enfant terrible past life as a substance abuser. And then weird things begin to happen and pellegrino Ellis finds his home besieged by the demons of his past both real (his father) and imaginary (Patrick Bateman).

This book is an acquired taste and one could say the same about Ellis in general. Yet this novel is profoundly different from the rest of his work, and not merely because Ellis himself is the protagonist. Ellis deftly touches upon multiple themes and genres. Lunar Park is part memoir and part horror story but below the surface of this novel is the awesome power of family and its potential for destruction. Ellis never comes to terms with his falling out with his father (who seems like a real shithead but I suppose Ellis has to be a little biased) and he must rectify this in order to save his own relationship with his son. The deadpan moral depravity that Ellis so usefully provides in his earlier work is here morphed into a malevolent force which pays homage to the power of literature. I don't wish to give away the details any further than that, but one of the points of this novel is how dynamic the creation of the written word is.

Lunar Park is the closest we have to Bret Easton Ellis opening his mind for his fans. This book is so entrenched in the author himself that even the title is not explained as it's a kind of inside joke shared between father and son. Even if one doesn't care for Ellis complaining about his bitter relationship with his father (not all of us can drive off in a BMW and snort eight balls in the Hollywood Hills to escape our family problems), there are moments of brilliance here. Ellis is spot on in describing the new wave system of parenting in which children are a kind of commodity raised to fruition even if that means stunting their emotional growth with unnecessary medication. Depravity and malevolence are the bread and butter of this author and in Lunar Park he does not disappoint. But Ellis shows with this novel that he can branch out and show his emotional side and the last chapter of this novel is so touching that you wonder how the author of American Psycho could have written it.