Bret Easton Ellis's Controversial Fiction: Writing Between High and Low Culture 9781472542267, 9781623562458, 9781441126313

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Part 1 Between the High and the Low
2 The Low: Ellis in the Celebrity World
3 The High: Ellis in the Literary Field
Part 2 Less Than Zero (1985)
4 The Reception of Less Than Zero
5 The Use of Mass Culture and Mass Media in the Novel
6 The Aesthetics of a Blank, Coming-of-Age Novel
Part 3 American Psycho (1991)
7 The Reception of American Psycho
8 The Use of Popular, Mass and Consumer Culture
9 The Aesthetics of Serial Killing
Part 4 Glamorama (1998)
10 The Reception of Glamorama
11 The Use of Celebrity Culture and the Novel of Manners
12 The Aesthetics of the Impossible Conspiracy Thriller
Part 5 New Paths?
13 Lunar Park (2005): The Turning Point?
14 Imperial Bedrooms (2010): Coming Full Circle
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

Continuum Literary Studies Series Also available in the series: Active Reading by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson Adapting Detective Fiction by Neil McCaw Beckett and Death edited by Steve Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew Beckett and Decay by Katherine White Beckett and Phenomenology edited by Matthew Feldman and Ulrika Maude Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman Canonizing Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Joyce and Company by David Pierce London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker Milton, Evil and Literary History by Claire Colebrook Modernism and the Post-colonial by Peter Childs Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Fiction by Hywel Dix Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon by Nick Turner Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust by J. M. van der Laan Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer The Imagination of Evil by Mary Evans The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida by Ruben Borg The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips

Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction Writing Between High and Low Culture

Sonia Baelo-Allué

The Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Sonia Baelo-Allué 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-2631-3 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Sysytems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

For Luis Miguel

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

1. Introduction

1

Part 1: Between the High and the Low 2. The Low: Ellis in the Celebrity World 3. The High: Ellis in the Literary Field Part 2: Less Than Zero (1985) 4. The Reception of Less Than Zero 5. The Use of Mass Culture and Mass Media in the Novel 6. The Aesthetics of a Blank, Coming-of-Age Novel Part 3: American Psycho (1991) 7. The Reception of American Psycho 8. The Use of Popular, Mass and Consumer Culture 9. The Aesthetics of Serial Killing

7 9 22 37 39 48 62 77 79 92 112

Part 4: Glamorama (1998)

129

10. The Reception of Glamorama 11. The Use of Celebrity Culture and the Novel of Manners 12. The Aesthetics of the Impossible Conspiracy Thriller

131 142 156

Part 5: New Paths?

173

13. Lunar Park (2005): The Turning Point? 14. Imperial Bedrooms (2010): Coming Full Circle

175 190

Notes Works Cited Index

201 207 223

Acknowledgements

First of all, I am especially indebted to Professor Francisco Collado for his patience, advice and continued support, and to Professor Susana Onega and the members of the research team ‘Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English’ (MCYT DGI/FEDER, HUM2007–61035FILO) for their guidance and formative influence. I am also grateful to M. Dolores Herrero, Marita Nadal, Cristina Garrigós, Jesús Benito and Constante González Groba for their suggestions and comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Likewise, I owe special thanks to my colleagues of the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza for their friendly support and understanding. My thanks are also due to the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University and the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin for giving me full access to their bibliographical collection of records. My gratitude extends to the staff at Continuum for their editorial help and to Timothy Bozman for improving the readability of this book. Chapter 2 contains material that was published in Memory, Imagination and Desire in Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film, edited by Constanza del Río-Álvaro and Luis Miguel García-Mainar (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter 2004). An initial abbreviated version of Chapter 5 was published in Literary Intermediality: The Transit of Literature through the Media Circuit, edited by Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi (Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). An earlier version of portions of Part 3 appeared in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, edited by Bárbara Arizti and Silvia MartínezFalquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), in Atlantis: A Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (vol. 24, no. 2, 2002) and in Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies (vol. 26, 2002). I further acknowledge the journal Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos (vol. 10, 2004) for allowing me to reprint an initial version of Chapter 10. On a personal level, I want to thank my parents, Abilio and Charo, who have always unconditionally supported me with their love; my brother, Martín, who is the best brother one could ever have; my in-laws, who have encouraged me with their affection, and my close friends, who can always be counted upon. Finally, I would like to especially thank Luis Miguel for his kindness, love and patience. He has given me unlimited personal support when all I did was work. Thanks to him I know there is life beyond books.

1

Introduction

‘The book (American Psycho) is totally hateful – in effect, a how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women.’ (John Leo 1990: 23) ‘It is a book with ambition, a book of serious intent. ... Think of Pasolini, of Genet.’ (Sonny Mehta in Reuter 1990: 10) ‘Mr. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck.’ (Tammy Bruce in Cohen 1991b: C18) ‘This man Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer. He gets us to a “T”. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his.’ (Fay Weldon 1991: C1)

These four introductory quotations raise some intriguing questions: How can a novel be a how-to manual on torture but also a book of serious ambition? How can the same writer be a confused, sick young misogynist and a very good writer capable of portraying our society in every detail? Can any of these opposites be reconciled? The fact that an author such as Bret Easton Ellis has received glowing praise together with harsh condemnation can be explained by the insistence of many reviewers and critics on measuring him against artificially dichotomized standards: his fiction is either pornographic gore or serious postmodern literature. This attitude contrasts with the general blurring of high and low culture that we have been experiencing in the arts at least since the early 1960s. Both literary author and celebrity, Ellis represents a type of contemporary writer who falls between the high and the low, who uses popular culture references, styles and subject matter in a literary fiction that aspires to be more than mere entertainment. His case points up the many contradictions in contemporary culture and underlines the need for a balanced analysis of his fiction which takes into account the author’s multiple ascription in cultural terms and the fact that he draws on sources from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. This book attempts to delve into these contradictions by examining the work of Bret Easton Ellis, a key author in contemporary American literature. Whether his fiction poses a

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Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

sustained social criticism or is the result of modern society’s maladies or both at the same time deserves to be considered in detail through both a textual and a contextual analysis of his fiction. Only after carrying out this analysis can we start to make sense of the opening quotations and the ambiguities that Ellis and other contemporary writers create in their embrace of popular culture. This book has three aims. First, I propose to situate Ellis’s fiction within the current panorama of US fiction and culture by studying the reception of his most important works both in mass market newspapers and magazines and in specialized academic journals and studies. Both the high and the low sides of the market have focused on Ellis and their sometimes contrasting approaches can throw light not only on his oeuvre but on the culture which has received it. Second, I intend to analyse Ellis’s own use of popular and mass culture in his fiction, which ranges from the use of brand names, celebrity names, films, TV programmes and music, to the use of genres such as the coming-of-age novel, the serial killer formula and the conspiracy thriller as structures to be deconstructed and changed. Third, I propose to close-read Ellis’s novels with the help of narratological tools while also analysing their place in the literary field. Special attention will be paid to the author’s use of minimalist, metafictional and blank fiction techniques. To date, Ellis has written seven books of fiction: Less Than Zero (1985), The Rules of Attraction (1987), American Psycho (1991), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005) and Imperial Bedrooms (2010). All his novels explore the apathy, boredom and alienation of affluent white Americans, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. His first novel, Less Than Zero, published when he was 21, was written while he was still a student at Bennington College in Vermont and dealt with the life of a college freshman who returns home to Los Angeles for Christmas break. The success of the novel turned him into ‘the voice of a generation’ and within weeks of publication the book was being discussed by critics, newspaper columnists and film executives as if it were a stateof-the-union address. The year it came out it sold about 50,000 copies, becoming a bestseller. Two years after the publication of Less Than Zero Ellis wrote The Rules of Attraction (1987), which deals with the romantic vacillations of three college students in New Hampshire. Ellis went deeper and deeper through surfaces, showing the shallow life of students at Camden College, a fictional New England liberal arts college. The book provided a devastating account of loneliness and isolation in college as the different characters recount their own stories through an alternate first-person narration. The literary style was more carefully constructed and complex than Less Than Zero’s but the reception of this book was not as impressive since critics considered it less arresting and original, a reworking of the themes of his first one. American Psycho (1991) brought Ellis back into the spotlight of American letters. It caused a great deal of controversy since it was a politically incorrect novel at a time when political correctness seemed to engulf everything. The book is a serial killer’s monologue through whose voice

Introduction

3

we learn not only about his horrific crimes but also his daily routine and life as a yuppie executive in Manhattan. Ellis’s next publication was a collection of short stories called The Informers (1994), a book of interrelated vignettes of Los Angeles life in the 1980s which deals with people who suffer from the death of hope and feeling in their lives. Ellis’s usual subjects of consumer excess, blankness and violence link the different stories which incorporate vampires, college students, murderers and the wealthy. Glamorama (1998) deals with celebrity culture and the worship of popular icons in America. Ellis’s previous books are set in Manhattan and Los Angeles, but Glamorama is also set in London, Paris, Milan and the middle of the Atlantic. The range of protagonists extends to supermodels, teenagers, nightclub owners, terrorists, spies and drug addicts. However, the most important novelty of this book is the use of a plot. The novel is a Pynchon-like conspiracy thriller that deconstructs itself because of the excessive entanglement of the plot, the overload of information and the metafictional tone deployed. From the minimalist plot and shallow characters in Less Than Zero, Ellis has moved to longer and more elaborate stories in a self-conscious mode of writing. Lunar Park (2005) is good proof of this evolution since it is the story of a writer called Bret Easton Ellis who wrote American Psycho and is now married and lives in the suburbs. In the novel there is an obvious play between reality and fiction, a juxtaposition of real events with fictional inventions in a gothic tale of copycat American Psycho killings, toys that are apparently alive and a lurking stalker. Ellis’s most recent novel is a Less Than Zero sequel titled Imperial Bedrooms – the name of a 1982 album by Elvis Costello. With this novel Ellis seems to come full circle after 25 years, revisiting the characters of Less Than Zero and the minimalist style of his first novel, and at the same time reinforcing the literary universe that he has created. In this book I will mainly focus on the three novels that constitute the backbone of Ellis’s production – Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and Glamorama – but obviously there will be references to his other novels, especially his most recent ones, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms, since they rework many of the author’s most characteristic topics and tropes. Less Than Zero was the first novel he wrote and it brought him instant fame at 21. American Psycho is his bestknown novel, a bestseller that both awoke public debate on the role of literature and its limits and earned him death threats and a boycott. Glamorama was his long-awaited return and most ambitious and sophisticated work, where Ellis exposes the celebrity culture he seems to both love and hate. The Rules of Attraction deals with the same topics as Less Than Zero and will be briefly considered in its own right. The Informers is a transitional collection of short stories that Ellis wrote at the same time as he was writing American Psycho, although it would be published later under pressure from his publishers, who needed something in the market after the huge success of American Psycho. It did not arouse much public interest and turned into an anticlimactic disappointment when compared to the previous novel. The analysis of Lunar Park and the brief introduction to

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Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

Imperial Bedrooms will bring up to date the record of Ellis’s role in American literature. All Ellis’s novels are interrelated, since they share similar concerns and characters. Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, turns up in The Rules of Attraction, where one of the main characters (Sean Bateman) has a brother called Patrick, whose life is detailed in American Psycho and who briefly reappears in both Glamorama and Lunar Park. The whole cast of Less Than Zero come back in Imperial Bedrooms. In a similar way, Victor Ward, Jamie Fields, Lauren Hynde and Bertrand Ripleis were college students in The Rules of Attraction and are main characters in Glamorama. In Lunar Park Donald Kimball (the detective in American Psycho) is the detective who interrogates the character of Bret Easton Ellis (the greatest creation of all) in connection with a series of killings carried out in an American Psycho-like style. Ellis has even borrowed characters from fellow novelists, for example, Alison Poole – the main character in Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life (1988) – who makes a brief appearance in American Psycho as a surviving victim of Bateman, and who reappears in Glamorama. This repeated use of characters in different novels helps Ellis in the creation of a universe inhabited by the rich and spoiled where characters seem to grow older but remain just as immature and shallow as before. Ellis’s books do not just share characters, they also have a very characteristic set of topics: shallowness, vanity, narcissism, an obsession with surfaces, juxtaposition of trivial and important things, an affectless narratorial tone, unreliable narrators, flat characters, an apparent lack of critical distance, an awareness of the narrative’s own literary construction, a parodic tone and references to popular culture and fiction. Ellis’s tendency to combine both metafictional forms with a wide use of generic fiction and popular culture is especially interesting. This mixture of styles lies behind many of the questions raised about his status as a prestigious writer and about literature’s changing position in the contemporary cultural field. An analysis of his career cannot ignore these issues, and may help clarify Ellis’s representative role in contemporary American literature. This book is divided into five parts. The first one focuses on Ellis’s various connections with both high and low culture. I first deal with Ellis’s ambiguous position as a celebrity author and with the way each novel has contributed to his growing fame. He has blurred boundaries both in the subjects he has chosen to deal with in his fiction and in the way he has carved out his career, not unlike the way a star in the entertainment media might. His case has to be considered in the context of the changing world of book publishing which fears being taken over by the entertainment corporations, but which is also aware of the need for high sales and more innovative marketing campaigns. I will also place Ellis within the different literary currents in the contemporary American literary scene, focusing especially on blank fiction, which I believe provides the best context within which to understand the author’s work. The second part deals with Less Than Zero. I first analyse the reception of the novel which was divided between those who thought Ellis was heir to Fitzgerald,

Introduction

5

Hemingway and Salinger and those who considered Ellis a product of promotional hype. Thus, Less Than Zero brought him, on the one hand, commercial success and the attention of mass market magazines, and, on the other, the respect of many critics for capturing the speech of teenagers and the banality of their world. In the next chapter I go beyond Ellis’s incorporation of popular culture in the novel (music, TV programmes, films, fashion and other consumer choices) and focus on how he makes literary forms of them, transforming their style into narrative prose. In the final chapter of this part I consider the novel’s controversial subject matter and Ellis’s way of tackling it. In generic terms the novel plays with the conventions of the coming-of-age novel and displays a lack of a traditional condemning narrative voice, while leaving room for social criticism in very ambiguous ways. In the third part I analyse American Psycho, Ellis’s most controversial novel. First, I focus on its reception and on how cultural critics and magazine writers across the political spectrum took issue with the book’s publication. In this debate the question of whether the work was serious art or mere pulp fiction was latent in the arguments in its defence and its attack. Second, I analyse Ellis’s use of popular and mass culture in the novel and the ways in which the seriality of the killer’s murders is linked to the seriality provided by different forms of mass culture: talk shows, daily news, advertisements, pop music, magazines, pornography and consumerism in general. Finally, I deal with the way American Psycho deconstructs the serial-killer generic conventions and how 1980s New York yuppie society is depicted in the novel, becoming an unwitting accomplice to the serial killer crimes. In the fourth part, Glamorama’s reception is first considered, paying special attention to the contradictions and ambiguities that emerge from this study since Glamorama was hardly treated as a novel but as a reflection of the author’s shallow lifestyle. The next chapter considers Ellis’s use of celebrity culture within the framework of a novel of manners. TV programmes, magazine articles and photos are of great importance in a world where celebrities construct their personality through pseudo-events and media images, which can only lead to a world of the hyperreal and fake identities. In the final chapter of this part I analyse the novel by taking into account the other genre that frames it: the conspiracy thriller, a genre that usually seeks to restore social order by connecting events and disclosing hidden plots. Glamorama reworks these conventions since society as depicted in the novel is not naturally good but a celebrity-obsessed New York and the hero is a paranoid and passive person, incapable of disentangling the conspiracy. The final part of this book, in which his last two novels are analysed, brings us up to date with Ellis’s career. Starting with the study of Lunar Park’s initial reception, I consider its marketing campaign, its different influences – ranging from Shakespeare to Stephen King – the connections with his previous novels and the extent of his departure from his characteristic blank style. The analysis of the novel serves as review of the author’s main motifs and stylistic choices since

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Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

it offers an interesting metafictional game in which Ellis becomes the protagonist of the story, constructed out of the personalities of his most distinctive fictional characters. However, the Ellis character evolves out of these depictions and is able to openly express his feelings and learn from his mistakes. The final chapter of this book briefly considers Imperial Bedrooms and the way Ellis seems to have closed his 25-year literary career by returning to the characters and style of Less Than Zero, both closing and reinforcing the circle around the alternative literary universe he created during these years. Both the chapters in this book dealing with the reception of the author’s works and those dealing with the use of popular culture show that the blurring of the high and low, though usual and characteristic of our present culture, is still ambiguously done and not completely accepted in certain milieux. Ellis’s hybrid case exemplifies the many contradictions that the high/low culture debate still displays. His use of popular and mass culture genres and references, together with minimalist, blank fiction and metafictional techniques, has led to discomfort on both sides of the cultural spectrum. The representation of torture, rape, murder, sex and drugs in the name of serious literature and for a bestseller readership has caused much of the controversy that his works have encountered. Hence, this book is an attempt to grasp the context which has surrounded Ellis’s literary production, bearing in mind the changes that have taken place in the literary market, but it is also an attempt to analyse his most important novels as the literary works they are. As a result, the ambiguities and uncertainties of the postmodernist transgression of boundaries resurface and prove that this indeed remains a contentious issue.

Part 1

Between the High and the Low

2

The Low: Ellis in the Celebrity World

Ellis represents a new generation of writers who are not afraid to create a celebrity status in order to make a name in literature, and who in their novels display the dangers and benefits of openly combining high and low culture. Celebrity authors represent a midpoint between high culture (literature for the elite) and popular culture (celebrity culture). It is obvious that the role of authors cannot be the same in times of very sharply divided high and low cultural categories as in times of blurred boundaries and a consumer-oriented economy. In this social atmosphere celebrity authors have flourished, a phenomenon that some literary critics interpret as a threat to the ‘sacred’ field of literature. The role of celebrity writers brings forth questions such as the relationship between small printing houses and big corporations, or between literature and the marketplace. Bret Easton Ellis exemplifies the benefits and side effects, the dangers and values, of the celebrity author in contemporary culture.

2.1 The Emergence of the Celebrity Author Surprising as it may seem, ever since the early nineteenth century – when the professionalisation of authorship and the rise of literature as a commodity began – American authors established a close relationship with both the system of market exchange and the advertising industry. Some of the forms of popular literature that appeared between the 1840s and the 1890s – such as the story paper, the dime novel and the cheap library – represented the emerging literary industry of the nineteenth century, a ‘fiction factory’ where dime novels were seen as commodities (Denning 1987: 17–26). Advertising played an important role in the development of this kind of literature and in the creation of authors as personalities: it fostered a trend for books to be published in serial form accompanied by advertisements; it subsidized magazines dealing with literary personalities and sponsored other related cultural activities. The improvement in communication – through technological innovations such as the telegraph, the rotary press and photography – also contributed to a new cult of literary personality (Moran 2000: 16). While increasing literacy, the diminishing

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Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

price of books and the ideological emphasis of a democratic culture made it possible for writers to reach a wider swathe of readers (Cawelti 1977: 165). In the mid-nineteenth century the word ‘celebrity’ was first used to refer to a famous person, and authors were among the main celebrities because the printed media – books, magazines and newspapers – were dominant. In the twentieth century, the advent of film, radio, TV and popular music was to produce other types of celebrities, those depicted in Glamorama. Literary authors promoted themselves through the lecture circuit and the popular press. The lecture circuit reached its peak in the 1870s and 1880s, providing authors with a source of income. In fact, it developed a system of national celebrities thanks to the press, which reported on the lecturers and sometimes reprinted their speeches, thus creating a number of recognizable names. Charles Dickens’s and Mark Twain’s tours received widespread media coverage, comparable to that of The Beatles in the early 1960s (Cawelti 1977: 166). In the 1880s the cheap, mass-market, illustrated weekly was created. Later, magazines such as Time (1923–) and Life Magazine (1936–) somewhat transformed the way authors had hitherto been treated. By visiting writers in their places of work and residence, they began to deal not so much with the authors’ tours and speeches as with the links between the authors’ life and art. They created a new kind of celebrity, closer to that of stage and screen stars. This kind of celebrity, at least in its early and more innocent stage, was regarded as a form of ‘egalitarian distinction’ (Gamson 1994: 31), or as the ‘democratic myth’ of celebrity (Marshall 1997: 9). Anyone could be discovered and become a star as long as that person had the gift, the talent or the personality. Authors had the power to embody this democratic myth of celebrity, and, accordingly, magazines were not only interested in what made authors special (their art) but in what made them common (their life and history). However, not just any author qualified to represent the democratic myth of celebrity. Journalists would profile and interview commercially successful authors, highlighting their sales figures, their position on the New York Times bestseller list, the size of print runs and the profitability of subsidiary rights, for instance. At the same time, these authors were expected to have serious ‘literary’ aims, which were attested to through their winning major literary awards, participation in commercial book clubs and favourable reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Saturday Review. Commercial success seasoned with literary quality was the successful recipe, Hemingway being a good example of this tension (Moran 2000: 27). For example, John Raeburn sees Ernest Hemingway as ‘both a respected novelist and a bona fide celebrity, a double distinction enjoyed by no other writer of his generation’ (1974: 91). He obtained his initial fame from the recognition of his literary achievements, but he confirmed and increased his renown by making public his private life. Cawelti also considers Hemingway, together with Norman Mailer, perfect examples of writers who used their celebrity persona as an integral part of their art. In fact, Hemingway’s public persona was in certain ways a real-life version of some of the characters in his novels (1977: 171). This is also true of Ellis. After the publication of Less

The Low: Ellis in the Celebrity World

11

Than Zero, he was seen as one of the jaded Californian kids who populate his novel; after American Psycho, he seemed to endorse serial killing, at least according to some feminists, as well as a type of serial consumer obsessed with partying and eating out. After Glamorama, he was a fatuous celebrity interested in superficiality and trivia. In Lunar Park it is Ellis himself who turns the narrator of the novel into a version of himself, mocking the usual confusion between narrator and author present in many reviews of his novels. It is to be expected that something similar will happen with Imperial Bedrooms since the characters in the novel are the same age as Ellis and live in Los Angeles, where Ellis moved back some years ago. As can be seen, like Hemingway and Mailer, Ellis has used his celebrity persona as an integral part of his art. Unlike in Hemingway’s case, however, the reflection of Ellis’s persona in his art seems to have worked to his detriment, rather than enhancing his figure in literary circles. A possible explanation for this negative perception may arise from the fact that the idyllic conception of celebrity as a democratic myth has changed as promotional and publicity methods have become more and more obvious and intricate. In the case of film stars, the idea that fame is an artificial creation of studios in search of box office sales has grown. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, cultural conservatives and Marxist critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) denounced the domination of the masses who had become passive consumers and blindly identified with stars. In the same vein, in his 1967 classic, The Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord describes how, in his opinion, the spectacle and its stars fosters a lack of critical awareness. However, although people are prone to identify with stars, stardom is in fact reached by only a few, enough to keep alive the artificial myth of potential universal success. Besides, from 1901 to 1941 there was a progressive change of interest, from ‘heroes of production’, such as business leaders or politicians, to ‘heroes of consumption’, mainly movie stars and sport celebrities (Lowenthal 1961: 109–140). In this line, Daniel J. Boorstin formulated the distinction between heroes (known for their achievements) and celebrities (known for their image or trademark) (1961: 61). Celebrities are people known for their ‘well-knownness’, a definition that still holds true since one of the most prevalent ideas about celebrities nowadays is that they are shallow, artificially constructed, nonproductive, consumable and interchangeable. Horkheimer, Adorno, Lowenthal, Boorstin and Debord were concerned with celebrities who had nothing to offer but their image. For them, the differences between celebrities and serious authors were clear. Celebrities were idols of consumption: they ‘sold’ the values of lifestyle. Literary authors, on the other hand, should be idols of production according to these critics: they produced their literary art, their writings. While celebrities were brand names and massproduced, interchangeable commodities, authors were talented people who had an unmistakable style of their own. Whereas celebrities were known for their ‘well-knownness’, authors were known for their writing. Many celebrities became famous thanks to the visual media, since image was all they had to sell (their exchange value); authors became popular because of their work (their

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Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

use value). These critics were perpetuating a romantic image of the author as an individual creative genius of original works. For Joshua Gamson, the binary oppositions they were trying to maintain were: surface versus substance; image versus reality; irrelevance versus truth; imitation and copying versus originality and imagination; passivity versus involvement; lifestyle and consumption versus work and production (1994: 6–7). However, if we analyse the contemporary cultural arena, it is apparent that many of these binary oppositions no longer hold true. The fear is now, especially over the last few decades, that mass consumption has completely taken over high culture and authors are now closer to being seen as film stars than as prestigious literary creators. Literature is now part of a consumer-oriented culture and even an active participant in a struggle for its own survival. For Jeremy Rifkin this responds to a more general trend whereby the cultural sphere is being pulled into the commercial sphere. From a production-oriented capitalism that emphasizes saving, capital formation, organization of the modes of production and disciplining workforces, we have moved into a consumer-oriented capitalism. This form of capitalism also includes culture, which has openly become a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. This is a culture industrially produced for mass consumption, since the arts have been removed from the museum and put into the marketplace (2000: 143). As Rifkin observes, nowadays the old giants of the Industrial Age (Exxon, General Motors, USX and Sears) are being surpassed by the new giants of cultural capitalism (Microsoft, Viacom, Time Warner, Disney, Sony, Seagram, News Corporation, General Electric, Bertelsmann AG and PolyGram). The publishing industry has also experienced these changes, and, from the 1960s onward, has been increasingly drawn into the sphere of monopoly capital. It has thus been transformed from family-run houses to major publishers owned by multimedia parent companies. The case of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house that, at the eleventh hour, refused to publish American Psycho, is illustrative. It was already part of Paramount Communications when, in 1995, Paramount and Viacom merged, bringing together Paramount’s collection of 50,000 films, Simon & Schuster’s 300,000 book titles, Blockbuster Entertainment’s 500 music stores, Nickelodeon and MTV, as well as several theme parks and television and radio stations. In 1999 Viacom merged again with CBS, which made Viacom the industry leader in the media and entertainment fields. In 2005 the two companies split and the former Viacom was renamed CBS Corporation, which included CBS, The CW, CBS Radio, CBS Outdoor, Showtime, Simon & Schuster and most television assets formerly owned by the larger company. As a result, Simon & Schuster is now a division of the media conglomerate CBS Corporation, one of the four largest English-language publishers, but also a small piece in a huge multimedia company. This change from family-run houses to media conglomerates has brought about two side effects: planned marketing and pressure for commercial success. Curiously enough, until recently book promotion was seen as inefficient. As Joe Moran remarks, there existed the widespread belief that books were all

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distinct, unmarketable products, issued by publishers working for the love of literature rather than for mere financial gain (2000: 36). The importance of marketing has nevertheless grown in the last two decades, to the extent that cultural critics such as Andrew Wernick believe all available goods nowadays participate in the promotional condition of our culture. This logic of promotion is an all-pervasive and irresistible force affecting cultural goods; it now exists as a generalized social category and goes beyond mere advertising, marketing or public relations (2000: 302). In this cultural atmosphere, parent companies play an important role, since books are sold through mass media products owned by the same company, such as magazines, newspapers, the internet and radio and television stations. Of all possible forms of publicity, publishers have promoted those that concentrate on the author, because they are cheap and effective. These inexpensive forms of promotion include magazine and newspaper features, television and radio appearances and author tours. The New York Times has even denounced the practice of some literary agents to provide, together with book proposals, videotapes of their clients, image being as important as writing when selling books (McDowell 1988). As Moran explains, 80 per cent of all published books are commercial failures; however, one bestseller in a season makes up for all losses. This is the book and the author that receive the greatest promotional effort, namely ‘the six-figure print run, the lavish book jacket, the pressure on the news media, the ten-city tour, the television interviews, the advertisements, the four-color posters and bookstore displays’ (2000: 38). The concentration on the author implies that only the most marketable and photogenic have a chance of being promoted. Ellis is one of these authors even though Less Than Zero was an unexpected success which did not have a huge promotional campaign. The Rules of Attraction did, but did not benefit from the free publicity generated by Ellis’s pervasive image as a shallow brat pack member. American Psycho generated enormous amounts of free publicity but it did not have a promotional campaign as such because of the death threats the author received. However, it made Ellis a well-known name outside literary circles. The Informers was widely reviewed but, as it was just a collection of stories which Ellis had written when he was still a student, it was not the object of a huge promotional campaign. Glamorama, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms did receive the full promotional treatment, which even involved the introduction of new innovative marketing techniques, such as the creation of fake web pages, and thus confirmed Ellis as a celebrity author.

2.2 Ellis’ Career as a Celebrity Author Ellis’s relationship with the celebrity world began in 1985, when he published his best-selling novel, Less Than Zero, at the age of 21. It sold about 50,000 copies in its first year of publication, and its success turned Ellis into ‘the voice of a generation’ and won him instant fame. Within weeks of publication the book

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was being discussed by critics, newspaper columnists, and film executives. Ellis was interviewed by People magazine on 29 July 1985, together with Whitney Houston, as representatives of the next generation of American artists and entertainers; notice how both worlds were already inextricably linked. Even now he is profiled in newspapers as if his story were that of the classic celebrity discovered by someone who spotted his talent; as if he were a postmodern Lana Turner. When interviewed by People in 1985 his profile was not only about Less Than Zero and its film adaptation, but also about his life as a student in California and the separation of his parents. Here we see the democratic myth of celebrity at work: Ellis was portrayed as both someone special (a writer) and someone with plenty of things in common with his potential readers. He did not belong to the celebrity world yet, so he did not hesitate to say that he didn’t want the adaptation of his book to become a mainstream film; he would favour an independent movie. As Greg Bottoms suggests, he was talking to People magazine, which usually deals with image, celebrity and shallowness, ‘like someone who wouldn’t use People to line a bird cage’ (1999). Since the publication of his first novel he has learned better. Less Than Zero brought him, on the one hand, commercial success and the attention of magazines like People, and, on the other hand, it earned him the respect of many critics for capturing the speech of teenagers and the banality of their world. Being compared to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Salinger, for a while Ellis was successful and prestigious, a combination that not all critics were ready to forgive. This honeymoon did not last long and critics gave full vent to their resentment with the publication of Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987). The book was a complete failure and Ellis was pilloried in the press as much for his lifestyle as for his literary style. On top of this, and in the same year, the film adaptation of Less Than Zero was equally disastrous. Besides, Ellis had started to act as a pretentious, fatuous celebrity. But what does that mean? In Julie Burchill’s words: Stars behave as the newspapers and some racial memory tells them stars behave: wearing dark glasses into nightclubs, refusing to be photographed after six solid months of working nine to five – nine at night to five in the morning, that is – on their exposure, bursting into tears for no apparent reason, sleeping with famous pushovers and showing amazement and disgust when their sheath size is revealed to a sniggering public, eating and drinking themselves silly, getting divorced, punching photographers, getting remarried to someone half their age and twice their height, trying suicide on for size, retiring to a health farm, being Born Again and making comebacks. (1992: 133) Ellis himself has admitted that when he was 21 he would give interviews drunk at lunch, and thought it was cool to smoke unfiltered cigarettes and not to take

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his sunglasses off (in Grove 1999: C1). He had a drug problem and suffered a nervous breakdown due to the pressure. Worst of all, his literary reputation quickly thinned. Elizabeth Young observes how Ellis’s early achievement was forgotten, comparable to the careers of rock stars who ‘run down quickly and are soon stranded, rich, hungry for further adulation and lacking the material with which to achieve it’ (1992a: 19). He was treated as if he were a member of the entertainment industry, and, indeed, he was often photographed in the company of other celebrities. Some literary critics could not forgive the fact that Ellis had become a media star too quickly, and, the more of a media star he became, the less they were willing to take his work seriously. However, when everyone thought that Bret Easton Ellis was past history, he reappeared in 1991 with his worldwide best-selling novel, American Psycho. The novel not only brought him public vilification but also death threats that prevented him from going on a publicity tour. Not that he needed more publicity; after all, practically all newspapers and publications had something to say about Ellis’s new book. Simon & Schuster paid an advance of $300,000, which clearly marked his status as a celebrity author. For Hugh Look, commanding huge advances is one of the signs that define an author as a possible star (1999: 14). He also mentions as a sign of entry into stardom the moment when the public buy books on the author’s name alone, something that was to happen to Ellis, especially after the publication of American Psycho. Simon & Schuster ended up cancelling the publication of the novel. The next day, Vintage Books, a Random House–affiliated company, acquired American Psycho and decided to publish it as a trade paperback. Many saw this cancellation as a case of a corporation interfering in the realm of literature, and the Authors Guild, the National Writers Union and the PEN American Center considered that the book had been cancelled on orders from Martin Davis, chairman of Paramount Communications, not on orders from Richard E. Snyder, chairman of Simon & Schuster. Partly due to this controversy the novel turned into a media event – it still sells 22,000 copies a year – and, as a result, Ellis became a household name and the novel secured him a place as a chronicler of an amoral society (Battersby 1999). Seven years elapsed between its publication and that of Glamorama, interrupted only by the appearance of a collection of short stories called The Informers (1994). In those years a seven-year personal relationship crumbled, his father died, he himself started drinking too much and allegedly became addicted to heroin. All these events are reminiscent of the stereotypical description of celebrities offered by Julie Burchill, which also included the making of comebacks. Ellis’s comeback was the publishing of Glamorama, a bestseller which was not as successful as expected but which helped Ellis recover his name as a writer. This period of his life is satirized in Lunar Park, where his addictions are exaggerated as he again plays with his celebrity status and his public image as an enfant terrible. One way or another, over the last few years Ellis has quite often made the news and kept his fame. Certainly there is a price for it: Eileen Battersby suspects

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Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction

that, during the years Ellis spent writing Glamorama, he might have become famous for being famous (1999). Her words echo Daniel J. Boorstin’s definition of celebrities as people known for their ‘well-knownness’. Many critics insist that Ellis has become an image or trademark created by the media and that he is only a ‘big name’ rather than a ‘big man’. Daniel Mendelsohn, in the New York Times, stated that Ellis had become a hip brand-name label in the publishing world and people ‘bought’ it for the same reason they bought a $300 Helmut Lang plain cotton shirt (1999: 8). Reviewers themselves, who have a very characteristic way of dealing with Ellis, have reinforced this impression. After mentioning the list of brands Ellis was wearing, Lloyd Grove, of the Washington Post, claimed: ‘Still, the trendiest brand name in which he’s clothed is Bret Easton Ellis’ (1999: C1). Gardiner has studied how the marketing system leads to concentration on a limited number of high profile books which should be written by authors whose names are instantly recognizable. As a consequence of this process the author becomes a brand name, ‘a sign of the event of commodification’ (2000: 67). Ellis himself refers to his work as if he directed an enterprise characterized by his ‘trademark style: present tense, first person’ (in Bold Type 1999). When asked his opinion about why so many critics consider Bret Easton Ellis a put-up job, a creation of the very media he is constantly satirizing, he answered that all novelists and all artists are in a way. Everything is a fantasy and that is what novelists do the whole day, fantasize about things. Nevertheless, he complained that people keep connecting his work and his life when they should be looking at the art, not the artist (in Blume 1999). In spite of his words, Ellis has always been willing to use his image to promote his books. He has given a considerable number of interviews, readings and book signings, and gone on international book tours. He even actively participated in a celebratory promotional BBC documentary about his life, called ‘This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis’ (1999), in which his homosexuality was suggested, and which included accompanying dramatizations of his work performed by actors such as Dechen Thurman, Jason Bushman and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz. Ellis himself describes his style as a trademark and it is significant that he uses this term instead of copyright, thus reflecting the change the world of authorship has seen in legal terms concerning the protection of cultural texts: there has been a shift in emphasis in American law from copyright (ownership by author) to trademark (ownership by corporation). In 1998 Washington passed the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) which extended copyright protection to the lifetime of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. In that same year the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed which toughened the legislation to prevent the illegal trade in digitized copyright material. These acts have led to the protection of corporate interests rather than those of authors themselves since corporations can retain rights to works for nearly a century. These acts apparently defend the

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artists’ rights but in fact let companies hang on to rights longer and keep competitors at bay.1 As Moran underlines, authors are now less in control of their image and their work, and the uses to which these are put, even though the celebrity machinery seems to assert just the contrary (2000: 60–61). For example, Bret Easton Ellis may own the copyright to American Psycho but he is losing control of his work as it is being spun off into a Broadway musical and merchandized through a soundtrack album, T-shirts and even a Patrick Bateman action figure. This is a marketing model which extends copyright and seems to have turned Ellis and his books into a trademark to be exploited by the corporation. In 1999 Ellis himself confessed that he did not see his celebrity status as real, that it was based on facts that fell outside his control and on choices he never made. For example, Less Than Zero was meant to be an assignment for his tutorial, and the reaction to American Psycho was unexpected (Ellis in Blume 1999). He had a similar opinion in the case of Glamorama: if he had been thinking about the marketplace he would not have used so many metafictional devices; he would have got rid of some of the film crews which are inexplicably filming the action and would have added an authorial voice to the narration. However, he preferred to be pure and faithful to his intentions (Ellis in Grove 1999: C1). His publishers must have thought otherwise since Knopf printed an estimated 85,000 copies of the novel. Even though Ellis claimed that he did not look for controversy, he admitted it had given him a broader readership (Bold Type 1999). The drawback is that some critics do not take him seriously; the ‘screaming’ prevents them from seeing his actual intentions as a writer. Ellis’s status as a celebrity has also changed: he is still well known but he has learned to deal with his fame. He agrees that he has become very proficient at being a public figure. As he himself says, ‘I’ve had practice and I can glide more smoothly. I’ve learned some of the rules’ (in Grove 1999: C1). He knows how to use his fame and how to capitalize on it. In fact, his own story as a celebrity author is an important part of Lunar Park. Besides, he has indeed profited from a series of media events, such as the 1999 BBC documentary about his life, which was followed by the successful film adaptation of American Psycho in 2000, a novel that in 1991 was considered a ‘how-to manual’ on dismembering women. Considering the small investment, the film was a success; as a result, Lions Gate Films bought sequel rights and in 2002 filmed American Psycho II, starring Mila Kunis and directed by Morgan J. Freeman. It was the story of a woman who had managed to escape Patrick Bateman in the past and had become a serial killer herself. The link with the story of American Psycho was rather feeble and even Ellis saw the production of this film, which ended up being a flop, as an excessive byproduct of greed. Nevertheless, the success of the first film, American Psycho (2000), encouraged other directors to adapt his other novels. The Rules of Attraction, also a Lions Gate production, was directed by Roger Avary and was released in the spring of 2002. It was an adaptation that Ellis ‘flatout loved. ... I thought it was a knockout movie’ (in Amazon.com 2005). Avary

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also filmed but never released a spin-off of The Rules of Attraction called Glitterati. It was assembled from the video footage shot for the European sequence of The Rules of Attraction in October of 2002 and starred Kip Pardue in the role of Victor Ward, the main character in Glamorama. Avary also tried to adapt Glamorama but the 2001 terrorist attack in New York hindered the project as the novel’s topic had become a very sensitive matter.2 Gregor Jordan filmed the adaptation of The Informers based on a screenplay written by Nicholas Jarecki and Bret Easton Ellis which was released in 2009. Even though there were well-known actors involved such as Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, the film was the worst-reviewed film at the 2009 Sundance film festival and Ellis has claimed that ‘it was the most horrible work thing that I’ve ever been involved with. It was just a mess about how it turned out’ (Ellis in Pearson 2010). PalmStar Entertainment has already bought the film rights to adapt Lunar Park, which is in pre-production. Ellis’s latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, starts with the sentence, ‘They had made a movie about us,’ a metafictional comment on the film adaptation of his first novel. Apparently, all of Ellis’s novels have been adapted or are in the process of being adapted to the screen, so it seems logical that a writer as mediatic as Ellis should work well in other media, including documentaries about his life. In 2007 it was reported that Ellis had signed to develop The Canyons, a cable television soap opera for Showtime about a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings in Los Angeles (Goldstein 2006), one of Ellis’s favourite subjects. Ellis has also written the screenplay based on Adam Davies’s novel The Frog King (2002), an Intermedia and GreeneStreet Films project which is in development. He has also written the film adaptation of Molly Jong-Fast’s Normal Girl (2000), a novel about an upper-class New York girl who falls into a spiral of parties and drugs and who seems the quintessential Ellis character, as well as a script called The Golden Suicides, which is about the deaths of the artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan and the script for Michael Hornberg’s novel Downers Grove. This film, which is directed by Nelson McCormick and stars Hayden Panettiere and Nikki Reed, is scheduled to be released in 2012. The writer is also the main subject of a fictional book called Vernon Downs written by Jaime Clarke and which to date remains unpublished. Impetus Press made the publishing announcement and sent out advance reader copies but then declined to publish the book. Its potential market for the book may have been very limited since it relied heavily on the readers’ knowledge of Bret Easton Ellis. It is the story of a young writer obsessed with a celebrity author called Vernon Downs (a pseudonym for Bret Easton Ellis). Other real-life people are hidden behind anagrams, such as Amanda Urban, Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt and Joan Didion. The story reflects Clarke’s own relationship with Ellis who, like him, attended Bennington College and whom he has interviewed on two occasions (Clarke 1999: 61–102). Ellis found the book very funny and gripping, in the style of Nicholson Baker (in Waters 2005) and has even included Jaime Clarke in Lunar Park as a writer who wants to publish a biography of Ellis, which

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in fact Clarke tried to do. In 2009 a novel was released entitled Stalking Bret Easton Ellis: A Novel in Two Parts, written by Caroline Weiss and Margaret Wallace, which points to a high degree of familiarity with Ellis’s name on the contemporary scene. It is obvious that Ellis has been redeemed over the course of the years. As Robert Wilonsky points out, ‘a decade ago, the American Psycho author was vilified. Now, he could launch a franchise’ (2000). In fact, there is a Patrick Bateman talking 18-inch action figure which has a sound chip that plays parts of the film adaptation dialogue, and a Cult Classics 7-inch action figure which looks like Christian Bale, the actor who played the role in the film adaptation. Apparently both come with two knives, an axe, a briefcase, a videotape, a nail gun, a Walkman, an alternative hand and a newspaper base. There are even plans to produce a stage musical of American Psycho that would retain the novel’s satire and would include 1980s songs by such bands as Talking Heads, Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News (Goldstein 2008). Ellis has even mentioned in an interview that he shares the same gym with Tammy Bruce, a feminist who organized a boycott against American Psycho when the novel was released (Gordinier 2010). Consumer culture and time seem to have tamed the fears caused by the initial publication of the novel. Ellis has not only been redeemed commercially but also in terms of literary prestige. For Malcolm Bradbury, Ellis is an author who has ‘been taught quite a lot in universities in recent years. ... He’s a writer who’s had an enormous influence on the last three years’ intake of our students’ (in Beckett 1999). After all, Ellis’s novels are very complex and draw on literary devices such as metafictional commentary; flat, undeveloped characters; plain language instead of an aestheticized discourse; unreliable narrators and open endings, together with generic hybridity; interest in surfaces; the equal treatment of reality and fiction; a parodic use of traditional devices and a mixture of languages derived from cinema, television and literature. The problem is that some critics, especially newspaper columnists, have understood these techniques not so much as literary, but as a reflection of Ellis’s persona and life. I have already pointed out the way celebrities are usually portrayed as shallow, imitative, passive, artificial and empty. Since Ellis has turned into a celebrity, all these negative characteristics have been applied to him, and, since they are present in his fiction – as literary devices – his works have been considered an extension of his public persona. Thus for some critics and reviewers his obsession with denouncing the superficiality of contemporary culture only results in fiction that is disgusting and superficial itself, the kind of fiction that validates and perpetuates the evils against which it rails. On the other hand, there are more and more critics who understand Ellis’s fiction as a serious attempt to criticize contemporary American society. Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney (1992) were the first to see Ellis as a representative blank fiction writer mistreated for all the hype that surrounded him. They analysed his books as literary works and certainly retrieved the satirical and

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critical message of his fiction. Other influential critics, such as Carla Freccero (1997), Linda S. Kauffman (1998) and James Annesley (1998), have also played a key role in recovering Ellis’s status as an important writer, and a 1999 article about Ellis in the prestigious online literary magazine, Saloon, was given a title which speaks for itself: ‘It’s Time to Add Bret Easton Ellis to the Canon’ (Keats 1999). Ellis has also been included in anthologies dealing with key American authors such as Alan Bilton’s An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (2002) and, more recently, A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction (2010) where there is a chapter on the author written by James Annesley. A Continuum book on American Psycho was released in 2002. Written by Julian Murphet, it belongs to a series which, as the book jacket says, aims at providing ‘accessible and informative introductions to the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years’. The publication of this short book, which is mainly a reading guide to the novel, proves that the outrage stirred up by the novel’s original publication in 1991 has been overcome. In fact, in 2010 Naomi Mandel edited for Continuum the first collection of academic essays dealing entirely with Ellis’s later career, focusing on American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park. The author’s career and evolution is particularly interesting in that he represents a new form of writing and selling fiction which does not hesitate to exploit the promotional techniques that used to be reserved for the entertainment industry alone. In fact, many publishers believe that their real competitors are not other publishers but manufacturers of leisure products such as videos, audio books and CD ROMs (Gardiner 2000: 68). Consequently the techniques used to promote books and authors resemble more and more those of the leisure world. Ellis’s novels have been promoted through posters, trailers, fake web pages and TV appearances, illustrating an attitude towards literature that has aroused the suspicion of scholars such as John Aldridge, who in his Talents and Technicians (1992) criticized the ‘assembly-line fiction’ exemplified for him by Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Louise Erdrich, Lorrie Moore, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis among others. He stated that the reputation of these authors had been built up through book reviews, literary gossip and publishers’ advertising rather than through serious criticism. He blamed the system of corporations, the commodification of literature and creative writing programmes, which manufacture authors to satisfy the demands of the market. For Aldridge, the fact that many contemporary writers have had a similar training acquired through writing programmes makes them interchangeable, which has enabled publishers to market their works as mass-produced products (1992: 34). Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis are by-products of the assembly-line fiction he denounces. As an alternative to this kind of writer, Aldridge proposed an ideal writer who ... becomes a witness and an incurable isolate, doing his work alone and in secret, and being in the end not only fully aware of his otherness but coming

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to coddle and cultivate it because it forms the perspective necessary to his imaginative re-creation of life ... his entire relation to reality is defined by his productive isolation from community. (1992: 29) Aldridge’s ideal writer belongs to the past; in our culture of commerce and marketing writers cannot simply isolate themselves and ignore the society in which they live and to which they belong – with the possible exception of Thomas Pynchon. In this sense, I rather agree with David Brooks, who considers that intellectuals and authors understand the world better if they are part of commercial culture. Writers should, indeed, take advantage of the new media since this is a way of spreading culture and gaining an audience that has been too limited in the past (2000: 187–88). This is not to say that we should ignore the dangers of this situation. Whereas in the past actors were commodities that belonged to the studios and were used to promote films, in the future authors may become commodities belonging to corporations that use them to sell books. The shift in emphasis in American law from copyright to trademark may end up with corporations imposing on their authors a style and ideology when writing. Just as some screen stars have not been discovered but manufactured, so there are signs that fabricated celebrity authors are already starting to populate the literary scene. Bearing these dangers in mind, literary critics have to adapt to contemporary readers’ new concerns and authors’ ways of dealing with, and taking advantage of, their fame. Critics have to accept that, while some decades ago celebrity authors might have aroused contempt for not cutting themselves off from commerce and popular culture temptations, nowadays corporations and the market have promoted the entrance of authors into the entertainment industry, a phenomenon which will probably mark their future role as well and which Bret Easton Ellis has learned to master. Celebrity authors cannot be judged by past standards, according to which they have ‘sold’ themselves to the system and do not deserve any serious attention. This restrictive attitude may be changing, as the analysis of the reception of Ellis’s novels will prove. He is starting to be judged not for his public persona and his status as a celebrity, but for his works. The old dichotomies between idols of production and idols of consumption, use value and exchange value, or surface and substance are not so easy to apply now.

3

The High: Ellis in the Literary Field

Bret Easton Ellis holds a controversial and ambiguous position in American letters. Different labels have been used to describe his style and place him within a literary movement. At the beginning of his career the term ‘brat pack’ was used, mostly with negative connotations, but it was progressively discarded in favour of other, more literary, terms such as ‘minimalism’ and ‘downtown writing’. The always ubiquitous postmodern label has also been applied to Ellis, together with other umbrella terms such as ‘hybrid fiction’ or ‘Generation X’. Rather than help us understand the literary context out of which a writer emerges, labels can be empty, reductive and useless. Besides, Ellis’s style has changed and evolved from the simple style of Less Than Zero, an apparently minimalist novel, to the intricate and metafictional latest ones: Glamorama, Lunar Park and the opening of Imperial Bedrooms. The critical reception of his works has evolved accordingly, placing Ellis among a changing list of writers – depending on the specific stage in his career – and sometimes praising him as the voice of a generation, but most often criticizing his works. In this chapter I want to deal with all these labels and choose the one that I think can be most safely applied to his career and style: blank fiction.

3.1 The Brat Pack Label Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, was published in 1985 and it became an instant success. He entered the bestseller lists and drew the attention and applause of literary critics and reviewers. Even Michiko Kakutani praised the novel in the New York Times. She has since reviewed all of Ellis’s works, except for Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms, and severely criticized them all. Kakutani’s change from praise for Ellis’s first novel to contempt for his next novels is representative of what many reviewers have felt towards Ellis’s work. As we saw in the previous chapter, his loose lifestyle as a literary celebrity has marked the way his novels have been received, even though in the last few years there has been a progressive recognition of Ellis as a significant writer, as one of the most representative American voices in recent decades. At present he is studied at universities, regularly included in anthologies of contemporary and postmodernist authors and his novels are the object of new critical essays every year.

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To understand the reasons for this change we should go back to the second half of the 1980s, when, after the publication of Less Than Zero, Ellis became part of what was called the ‘brat pack’. This label is a pun on ‘Rat Pack,’ a name applied to a group of actors that included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin, very much in the public eye in the 1950s and also well known for their binges and parties. In the 1980s the term ‘brat pack’ referred to a group of young actors who became very popular in such teenpics as The Breakfast Club (1985), St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) and About Last Night (1986). In 1988 Bruce Bawer borrowed the term and applied it to a group of young writers who were becoming very visible, and included Meg Wolitzer, Peter Cameron, Susan Minot, Elizabeth Tallent, Marian Thurm, Amy Hempel and, especially, David Leavitt, its most celebrated member (1988: 316). What these authors had in common was their youth, their being overly hyped and their having an excessive sense of their own importance – just like the Hollywood brat pack. Their works combined a minimalist style with a focus on the wealthy, precarious families of young people. Bawer did not mention Ellis as a brat pack member in this first use of the term, but he did mention him earlier in the book as an example of workshop fiction, which he described as the sort of fiction that mainly favours short stories in the present tense with a spare, elliptical tone, stories obsessed with surface details of contemporary phenomena (16). Since ‘workshop fiction’ style coincided with brat pack style, the terms ended up becoming synonymous and Bret Easton Ellis became one of the most representative members of the phenomenon. Bawer’s concept of workshop fiction became ‘assembly-line fiction’ for John Aldridge (1992), who wanted to underline the idea that the writing of these authors was interchangeable, the product of a literary market only interested in manufacturing commodities that sold. Criticism of Ellis and the brat pack also came from some of his own contemporaries, such as David Foster Wallace who, in his 1988 essay ‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young’,1 complains that a new interest in young writers such as David Leavitt, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, among others, had inverted the traditional criteria for detecting talent. Being young was an asset and agents visited writing workshops at universities in search of new young talent, whose reading market was precisely upscale urban youth. After an initial interest of critics and publishing houses there was a swift and severe backlash and suddenly they were accused of sameness, of being morally empty, bad minimalists and workshop writers. Foster Wallace seems to have partly agreed with this criticism since he felt that these writers did not interpret the world but ‘whined’, and at the time there was a need for art not to be nihilistic. Instead, he favoured a serious, real, conscientious, aware and ambitious art; an art that conspicuous writers did not seem to offer but that he expected would flourish in the future. As Foster Wallace suggested, the brat pack was the result of a series of changes in the publishing industry. As mentioned above, at the time there was an interest on the part of editors and publishing houses in promoting young writers

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who could make young readers buy books. Many of these writers came from writing programmes at universities where they were spotted by equally young editors. Ellis was a perfect example of this new type of writer. As Bob Asahina – editor at Simon & Schuster – claimed: ‘Bret came along at a time when there was great interest in what young people were up to. It was young people he was writing about, and he was young himself’ (Asahina in Sheppard 1987: 79). Besides, it was not only writers who were young. A new generation of young publishers and agents were also emerging in the 1980s, becoming more and more visible, sometimes turning into celebrities themselves: Gary Fisketjon, Morgan Entrekin and Amanda ‘Binky’ Urban are examples, all being closely related to the brat pack. Fisketjon was the editor who discovered McInerney and published Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Morgan Entrekin discovered and edited Ellis’s Less Than Zero and Amanda Urban was and still is Ellis’s agent. Curiously enough, in Ellis’s mock autobiography, Lunar Park (2005), he considers these editors part of the brat pack, which, according to the Bret Easton Ellis character in the novel, was essentially a media-made package: all fake flash and punk and menace. It consisted of a small, trendy group of successful writers and editors, all under thirty, who simply hung out together at night, either at Nell’s or Tunnel or MK or Au Bar, and the New York as well as the national and international press became entranced. (2005: 8) Editors and writers were, then, connected by their age and visibility. In his 1988 collection of interviews and profiles called Reasons to Believe: New Voices in American Fiction, Michael Schumacher did not focus just on new writers and brat pack members such as Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis but also on some editors connected to them, Gary Fisketjon, Gordon Lish and Tom Jenks. This interest in new young writers was also possible because of the development of trade paperback series, which were quality fiction books published in paperback format to reduce the costs and reach a wider market. This format allowed the publication of first novels by unknown young authors such as McInerney, whose first novel Bright Lights, Big City became an instant bestseller in the Vintage Contemporary Series. Ellis’s Less Than Zero was published in hardcover. Nevertheless, the cover – a pair of sunglasses inspired by an Elvis Costello poster – was also clearly designed to attract a young readership that was closer to the visual media than to the written novel. It is also important to mention that at the time large corporations were buying up publishing houses. Many of these corporations belonged to the mass market entertainment media. Thus they could benefit from subsidiary rights obtained from movie adaptations which should, at least theoretically, attract the same young readership as the novels. The three most important brat pack novels were adapted to the screen in the 1980s. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was adapted in 1988, directed by

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James Bridges with its main character played by Michael J. Fox. Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero became a film in 1987, directed by Marek Kanievska. The main characters were interpreted by brat pack actors like Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and Robert Downey Jr. Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York (1986) was adapted in 1989 and directed by James Ivory. Although none of these films was especially successful, they all boosted the sales of the books which had already become bestsellers when first released. The interest of the entertainment industry in these authors was also matched by their willingness to openly promote their books in unconventional ways. The most striking case was that of Tama Janowitz, since she went so far as to make a brief commercial video for Slaves of New York which appeared on cable television. In it she is seen walking down the street, then in her New York studio, and, finally, dining with Andy Warhol and rock star Debbie Harry. Janowitz also made advertisements for Amaretto and Rose’s Lime Juice, which appeared in magazines that also published reviews of her books. As George Garrett explains, by 1988 different authors were promoted at different speeds. Long before 1988 some ‘serious’ writers had started to show up on the bestseller lists after years of hard work and a number of novels which earned them their status: Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Walter Perry and Kurt Vonnegut among many others. In contrast, there were writers such as Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie and Frederick Barthelme, who, according to Garrett, were simply awarded that status by their publishers at the outset, their careers being backed by continued publicity. The brat pack represented a further step: first-time authors who, at a very early age, turned their first novels into bestsellers thanks to an attention which is usually reserved for blockbuster authors. Garrett implies that they did not deserve this attention and that this trend was one of the dangers that the publishing industry had to face: ‘... the attempt on the part of the publishers to create (by fiat as much as fact) its own gallery of stars and master artists’ (1999: 116). This book intends to prove that, despite Ellis’s lifestyle and self-promotion, his works deserve in-depth analysis and close reading, which may show that Garrett’s fears were unwarranted in the case of Ellis. In sum, after the author’s early success with his first novel, and especially after his second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), which was much less successful in terms of sales and critical reception, he became inextricably linked to the negative aspects of the brat pack label and the world of mass culture. As mentioned above, a noteworthy fact about the origins of terms such as brat pack and assembly-line fiction is that they evolved from expressions outside the literary world. The brat pack term was originally used for hyped actors and the assembly-line idea took these writers away from literature and free artistic creation and into the factory of mass-produced ideas. The first signs of Ellis’s ambiguous status in the literary arena are seen at this early stage of his public life. His behaviour and lifestyle surpassed what conservative critics had traditionally expected from literary authors, and, as a result, Ellis was initially connected to

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Hollywood stars and the mass culture field rather than to any existing literary current. Many critics and reviewers have been wary of accepting Ellis, the ‘celebrity author’, as an author with serious intentions. This difficulty is reflected in the alacrity with which they disregarded Ellis’s work as vulgar and lacking literary merit. The blurring of boundaries between high and low culture has met with greatest resistance from the literature lobby and this battle has been dramatically enacted in Ellis’s career. As his career has evolved, literary critics have placed the author in other literary contexts. Nevertheless, the brat pack label has stuck in the language of newspaper and magazine reviewers, especially those wanting to criticize Ellis and minimize his importance in the literary field. In the chapters dealing with the reception of his main novels we will see the use of the label in different, contemptuous ways. In any case, if we focus on the way literary critics, rather than reviewers, have dealt with Ellis, the most used labels are those of ‘postmodernism’, ‘minimalism’, ‘downtown writing’ and ‘blank fiction’. I will briefly elucidate the meaning and problems posed by each of these terms in order to end up focusing on blank fiction, to me the most useful definition and the one that best accounts for Ellis’s style.

3.2 The Postmodern Label Ellis’s fiction has also been considered postmodern but this umbrella term is problematic since it has sometimes come to stand for metafictional and experimental writing, and sometimes for anything created post–World War II. Todd Gitlin, a well-known expert on postmodernism, includes Less Than Zero in a long list of what can be considered postmodernist, which is worth quoting in full: ‘Postmodernism’ usually refers to a certain constellation of styles and tones in cultural works: pastiche; blankness; a sense of exhaustion; a mixture of levels, forms, styles; a relish for copies and repetition; a knowingness that dissolves commitment into irony; acute self-consciousness about the formal, constructed nature of the work; pleasure in the play of surfaces; a rejection of history. It is Michael Graves’s Portland Building and Philip Johnson’s AT&T, Rauschenberg’s silkscreens and Warhol’s Brillo boxes; it is shopping malls, mirror glass facades, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Monty Python, Don DeLillo, Star Wars, Spaulding Grey, David Byrne, Twyla Tharp, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, George Coates, Frederick Barthelme, Laurie Anderson, the Hyatt Regency, the Centre Pompidou, The White Hotel, Less Than Zero, Foucault, and Derrida; it is bricolage fashion, and remote-control-equipped viewers ‘zapping’ around the television dial. (1989: 347–8) Gitlin’s idea of the postmodern is wide enough to include Bret Easton Ellis and also William Burroughs and the beat generation, Donald Barthelme and

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metafiction, Frederick Barthelme and minimalism. Nevertheless, the concept of postmodernism is not always defined in such broad terms, especially when dealing with literature. For example, in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (2005) edited by Stuart Sim, Ellis is included in the list of postmodernist authors. However, in his entry we read that his novels are not postmodernist in form but they detail the lives of the young, affluent whites who consume postmodernist culture. Thus, Ellis would be a postmodernist only in the sense that he describes postmodernist culture. If we return to Gitlin’s quotation, he mentions a series of styles and tones that can be considered postmodernist and it is undeniable that Ellis makes use of many of them, especially as his career advances and his style gets more complex. In line with The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, in Tim Woods’s Who’s Who of Twentieth-Century Novelists, Ellis is mentioned as having charted the collapse of morality and ethical values within American postmodernist materialist culture. Thus, in both books the accent is placed on Ellis’s depiction of postmodernist culture – namely the 1980s and 1990s society of greed, consumerism, excess and lack of moral values2 – rather than on his use of a postmodernist literary style. The task of summarizing the stylistic features usually associated with postmodernism is a difficult one. The use of metafiction would be the most commonly agreed on characteristic among the critics, especially in connection with the most important works of John Barth, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon in the 1960s and 1970s. Other characteristics of postmodernist fiction usually mentioned are the tendency to violate conventions of genre and decorum, the use of allusion and documentation, the emphasis on plot rather than character, the lack of separation between aesthetic discourse and other discourses and the blurring of high and popular culture in fiction (Hite 1991: 704–7). This last point is one of the most significant characteristics of postmodernism and helps us understand Ellis’s own style.3 Postmodernist fiction can also be defined as not just a series of aesthetic choices but as the writing that takes place and draws from the social and cultural conditions of postmodernity. I believe this approach is much more useful for an understanding of the role of Bret Easton Ellis in the postmodern context. As Ihab Hassan explains, postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme which has emerged in the last few decades and which features ‘globalization and localization, conjoined in erratic, often lethal, ways’ (2001: 3). James Annesley has also underlined the connection between globalization and postmodernism and how the former term goes beyond the concern with representation and a Eurocentric bias (2006: 10). Just as postmodernity is an evolving field – Hassan even affirms that it has changed in the 30 years that have elapsed since he started to deal with it – so are its postmodern manifestations in the arts, which cannot be reduced to experimental fiction alone. This focus on socioeconomic conditions when defining postmodernity was originally developed by Fredric Jameson (1991) and David Harvey (1989).

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These conditions are also the focus of Ellis’s fiction, as he satirizes and exaggerates our consumer society and the time-space compression which leads to instantaneity, disposability and instant obsolescence. Ellis’s characters are always extremely wealthy, have full access to all consumer goods and live immersed in a system of obsolescence that makes them crave for more consumer goods and sensations. When they run out of them they look for other sources of pleasure which have to do with extreme activities such as rape, drug-taking, murder or terrorism, among others. In Less Than Zero Clay wants to see ‘the worst’ and he does as his bored, wealthy, Los Angeles friends rape a girl who is hooked on drugs, watch a very expensive snuff movie and one of them becomes a male prostitute. In American Psycho a yuppie called Patrick Bateman consumes so much that his platinum American Express credit card snaps in two. His craving for serial consumerism leads to his consuming – in the sense of killing – in series. There are chapters that look like catalogues of consumer goods, and even his obsession with brand names is inserted into the changing world of postmodernity. In a world of fast obsolescence and rapid consumption, corporations, governments and political and intellectual leaders have created brand names to construct a stable image that reflects an aura of authority and power but also adaptability, flexibility and dynamism (Harvey 1989: 288). Bateman’s obsession with brand names reflects the 1980s yuppie world of consumerism where his changing personality is constructed out of mass culture fragments and where he finds identity and stability through brand names. In Glamorama it is the ubiquity of mass media and mass production, together with the dominance of television and popular culture, that is closely reflected. The novel shows a world of celebrities who are mass-produced like consumer goods and who participate in the same system of instantaneity, disposability and obsolescence. They have multiplied their number, which has also rendered them more unstable and less durable. Just as Clay wanted to see the worst in Less Than Zero, so in American Psycho Bateman turns into a serial killer and in Glamorama the main character – an it-boy and club promoter called Victor – ends up snared in a terrorist ring formed by models who plant bombs in Louis Vuitton bags. Alain-Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel (2006) have contextualized Ellis’s extreme fiction as part of a new form of international, contemporary literature which they call ‘the contemporary extreme’. This fiction is fascinated with transgression and is engaged in an increasingly global reality where violence operates as ethos. David Roche (2007) has also placed Ellis in the context of other writers such as Russell Banks and Raymond Carver and film directors such as David Cronenberg and David Lynch who have shown an interest in ‘the unhealthy imagination’ or ‘l’imagination malsaine’. In the fictional world of Bret Easton Ellis, postmodernity is reflected in all its extremism. In bourgeois society the symbols of wealth, status, fame, power and class have always been important but, as Harvey underlines: ‘... probably nowhere near as widely [important] in the past as now’ (1989: 289). These are the symbols on which Ellis bases his fictional world, where the wealthy are obsessed with appearances and with

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constructing a personality out of the fragments left by postmodernity. He may not make widespread use of metafictional strategies but his rapport with postmodernity cannot be ignored, just as postmodernist authors cannot be reduced to those who reacted in a particular way and at a specific moment to the changing conditions of postmodernity. Todd Gitlin’s inclusion of such diverse authors as Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Frederick Barthelme, William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis in his definition of the postmodern can be understood as the different ways in which literature has responded to the postmodern condition and to postmodernity. As our world keeps changing, new computer and media technologies develop in our information society and new forms of experience emerge through the use of the internet and the digital production of information. The arts have to find their own means to react to such changes, since they emerge in very specific cultural and historical conditions. Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction can be considered postmodernist in the wider sense which has already been described, as fiction that draws on postmodernity, on the cultural changes of the last few decades. In any case, and since the postmodern label includes many other writers who use very different literary strategies from those deployed by Ellis, it is necessary to narrow the author’s literary context. Bearing this postmodern framework in mind, Ellis is also a ‘blank fiction’ writer. The roots of this generation are to be found in downtown writing in New York, where the style first developed in the 1980s and, also, although it is not so often mentioned, in the minimalist style that bloomed at that same time.

3.3 The Blank Fiction Label Minimalism emerged during the 1970s and 1980s and was marked in its origins by a flat form of writing and by the absence of any formal experimentation. The most representative writers were Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Mary Robison, Tobias Wolff and Frederick Barthelme, but their styles have progressively changed in different ways and some of them have evolved out of the initial minimalist aesthetic. Their representationalist rhetoric may bring them closer to realism but their style does not correspond to traditional realism. They use a pronounced structural reduction, detached and elliptical prose and noncommittal, nonomniscient narrative voices. Plots are slight and characters seem inarticulate as they move through ordinary situations. In fact, characterization and contextualization are missing or conveyed through surface details such as brand names or popular culture references. Most characters belong to the working class or lower middle class and use vernacular dialogue. Minimalist aesthetics is usually seen as a reaction to the abuse of metafiction and experimentation; nevertheless, both minimalism and metafictional writing are deeply connected by postmodernity. As Abádi-Nagy claims: ‘... minimalism is a response to the same (i.e. postmodernist) view of the world, but the same philosophical

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conclusions regarding the postmodern nature of the world result in a radically different ars poetica’ (2001: 129, italics in the original). Although the aesthetic difference between both currents is important, critics such as Kim Herzinger have established the connections between metafictional writing and minimalism as part of a postmodern sensibility. They all share a mistrust of depth, the subversion of traditional notions of historicity, the levelling of the border between high and popular culture and the replacement of notions of ‘time’ with those of ‘space’ (1989: 81). Ellis’s fiction can also be understood in these terms and his style – especially in his first novels – can clearly be identified with minimalist aesthetics. There are obviously important differences, such as Ellis’s interest in the upper echelons of society, in extreme situations (drugs, sex and violence) and in detailed catalogue-like descriptions, which will be accounted for when dealing with the influence of ‘downtown’ and ‘blank fiction’ aesthetics. The link between minimalism and Ellis’s style was made by some critics at the beginning of his career but this connection was usually made in negative terms. In 1985, when Ellis published Less Than Zero, minimalism already had many detractors. A representative attack on minimalism is Charles Newman’s 1987 article in the New York Times, called ‘What’s Left out of Literature’. He describes the minimalist style as a type of fiction that uses ‘the flattest possible characters in the flattest possible landscape rendered in the flattest possible diction’ (BR1). He finds in minimalist fiction a lack of scale and depth, an abuse of predictability and surface and a voice-over aesthetically and ethically neutral. Curiously enough, to exemplify his negative view of minimalism he quoted a section from Less Than Zero, automatically placing Ellis within this literary current. Marc Chénetier’s analysis of new American fiction since 1960 also connects Ellis to the minimalist school, which he describes as being characterized by surface sameness, everyday life subjects, noncommitted characters, uncomplicated plots, avoidance of commentary, investment and complicity. Chénetier especially values Raymond Carver’s method and use of ellipsis but dismisses his followers as mere imitators. A further drop in quality comes with the imitators of imitators represented by the works of David Leavitt, Emily Prager, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz – the original brat pack. The French critic uses different arguments to account for this drop in quality. They use ‘the doubtful pleasures of a reputedly “immediate” presentation’ (1989: 225), they are not concerned with facts and causes but with reflections and effects, having moved from the antiestablishmentism of the 1960s and 1970s hippies to yuppie worries about social success. He also complains that book parties are held in discotheques where there is no discussion of the works and that: ... instead of the easy rides of the sixties, they propose their easy reads for the end of our century. On the whole, what we have is a set of vaguely anorexic stories that do not take any risk, that, to take up Adorno’s critique, offer themselves as ‘distractions’ from boredom and everyday toil. (1996: 225)

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In a way, Chénetier accuses this fiction of being too easy and uncomplicated and their authors of earning money and celebrating it. The early fiction of Bret Easton Ellis is therefore coupled with mass culture fiction; it is easy, flat, heavily promoted, indistinguishable, far away from the artistic world of Greenwich Village and closer to the economic attraction of Soho and Wall Street. Less Than Zero represents for Chénetier the perfect example of the new dime-store novel. In contrast to Chénetier’s negative connection between minimalism and Ellis’s fiction, it is worth mentioning Günter Leypoldt’s more positive analysis of it. Leypoldt sees in brat packers such as Ellis and McInerney a productive continuation of the minimalist style: McInerney favours traditional neorealism with minimal realist leanings, whereas Ellis radicalizes the poetics of Carver by pushing empirical details to the extreme and reducing character, plot and ethical commentary to fragments (Leypoldt 2001: 217–69). For Ramón-Torrijos Ellis uses minimalist techniques to create a realism of a new kind, concerned with the reporting of contemporary American life but also with the blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction (2000: 31–50). Abádi-Nagy has also viewed Ellis’s connection with minimalism in positive terms and seen his fiction as one of the best examples of minimalism’s capacity to convey satiric social messages (2000: 245). Although I agree that Ellis’s first novel is written in a minimalist style, the label cannot be applied to his whole career, and his fondness for wealthy characters and extreme situations has nothing to do with the preference of minimalists for working class or middle class characters and ordinary situations. The interest shown in his work in drugs, sex and murder is to be linked to a different movement: ‘downtown writing’. Downtown writers were active mainly in New York during the 1980s, when Ellis started his writing career. In Shopping in Space, Elisabeth Young and Graham Caveney have traced these origins and dealt both with downtown writers such as Joel Rose, Lynne Tillman, Catherine Texier, Mary Gaitskill, Gary Indiana, Dennis Cooper and David Wojnarowicz, together with brat pack members such as Ellis, McInerney and Janowitz. In these critics’ views, this movement began in the mid-1970s, when a generation of artists developed in downtown New York. They were not just writers but also performers, video directors and musicians. Their influences were varied and included the Beats, the New York School, Dada, Pop Art, the hippie movement, Marxism and anarchism. As Taylor points out, they liked to undermine traditional structures such as the boundaries between different media and artistic conventions. Their work was transgressive in style, genre and content, since they rebelled against the traditional art scene and the structures of society that had led to poverty, homelessness, Vietnam, misogyny and racism (2004: 386). Thanks to the downtown scene there was a creative renaissance in the New York of the 1980s and through the publication of journals such as Between C & D (edited by Joel Rose and Catherine Texier), writers found an alternative way of getting published. These writers would not have found a niche otherwise because they were not publishing

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in the minimalist style or in the more traditional realist vein. These downtown journals offered a way of releasing a very alternative and transgressive art. Critics such as Robert Siegle, Elisabeth Young and Graham Caveney have associated Ellis with ‘downtown writing’, but, once Ellis’s connection with minimalism has been described, it may be difficult to see his link with the downtown movement. During the writing of his first novel he was still at college, so he did not even live in New York. Once he moved to New York, he did not take part in the downtown movement; in fact, at the time he had more links with Wall Street than with the alternative Lower East Side. In one of the first book-length studies of downtown writing, Robert Siegle mentions Ellis as an example of the wrong fiction and of a writer who – together with McInerney – sensationalized downtown nightlife and style (1989: xii). Siegle underlines the fact that downtown writers were a community and showed a ‘critical engagement with the social, political, and economic structures of the culture’ (xiii). Besides, they chose not to live in the comfortable academic and professional worlds and did not try to get rich. Ironically enough, by now many of these writers have gone mainstream and have published beyond the small alternative presses and magazines that were their only publishing vehicles at the beginning. This is the case of Dennis Cooper and the late Kathy Acker,4 for example. The fact that Ellis achieved celebrity status, openly cultivated his fame and was published by a mainstream publishing house such as Simon & Schuster makes the connection with the downtown movement difficult to establish. However, a connection that is more easily made may be found in some of the subjects Ellis deals with, and, to a certain extent, in his writing style. As Elisabeth Young and Graham Caveney summarize, downtown writers wrote ‘a flat affectless prose which dealt with all aspects of contemporary urban life: crime, drugs, sexual excess, media overload, consumer madness, inner-city decay and fashion-crazed nightlife’ (1992: vi). Ellis’s style can certainly be flat and he does deal with drugs, sex and consumerism. This is especially the case in American Psycho, where Ellis transgressed the boundaries of what had traditionally been considered acceptable in literature. In this novel we find horrific descriptions of torture and detailed narrations of sexual intercourse which led many critics to consider it close to pulp and pornographic fiction. However, these excesses are common in downtown novels such as Dennis Cooper’s Try (1994) – where we can read a description of an obese middle-aged man sodomizing the corpse of a thirteen-year-old boy – and in many of Kathy Acker’s books – where daughters have sex with their fathers, sometimes even castrating them afterwards. Jeanette Winterson establishes this connection between Bret Easton Ellis and the downtown movement in the introduction to a 2002 anthology of Kathy Acker’s works. She mentions Acker as the true mother of a writer like Bret Easton Ellis, but stresses as an important difference between them the fact that Acker offers no disgust but transgression (ix). The comment seems to play down Ellis’s own transgressive intentions in his works since, according to Winterson, disgust is reserved for ‘the hypocrites, the morons, the authority figures, the moneymen,

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the politicians’, (ix) whereas Acker was writing from her position as a woman in a man’s world. Ironically enough, as a wealthy white man Ellis is denied the transgressive intentions that Acker can have by virtue of being a woman and that Cooper possesses as a homosexual. As James Gardner suggests in his book about the age of extremism, the novels of A. M. Holmes, Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper intend to send a message about the falsehood of the mores and standards of the establishment. It is a way of empowering homosexuals and women, which provides them with ‘at least the appearance of respectability, if not virtue’, whereas a novel such as American Psycho mocks the establishment’s attempts to assimilate those on the margins (1997: 198). In summary, Ellis’s fiction has shown a clear rapport with postmodernity – especially with media saturation, the world of consumer culture and mass society – in a fiction that has tended to combine a minimalist aesthetics with a downtown transgressive tone in his choice of murder, pornography and drugs as important thematic concerns. Ellis is not alone in the use of these interesting combinations, and, together with other writers, is part of what has been called ‘blank fiction’ or ‘blank fictions,’ since there is a wide variety of manifestations. The term was first used in 1992 by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney and they included as members of this generation both downtown writers and more mainstream brat pack members. This broad inclusion points to the way the noncommercial nature of the first downtown writing gave way to the more commercial, mainstream take of Ellis, McInerney and Janowitz. The influence of these blank writers in the United States started in the 1980s, continued in the 1990s and is still alive at present through the voice of writers such as Ellis himself and Chuck Palahniuk.5 In 1998 James Annesley published a new book on this trend, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel, in which he updated the blank fiction phenomenon through the 1990s, including new voices such as Douglas Coupland, Donna Tartt, Brian D’Amato, Richard Hell, Evelyn Lau, Mark Leyner and Susanna Moore, among others. The subject matters these writers cover usually have to do with contemporary urban life and include violence, indulgence, crime, sexual excess, media overload, decadence, drugs, consumerism and commerce. Their novels are loaded with images of excess and draw their material from the particularities of the 1980s and 1990s. There are references to specific products, real people and places that offer a vivid depiction of postmodernity and late twentieth-century life. In this line, Will Slocombe has argued that blank fiction is postmodern because it demonstrates Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore inherently connected with economics and ‘overtly concerned with the value-economy of consumption, and the ways in which this absents ethics’ (2006: 142). To deal with these subjects, they do not favour dense plots and elaborate styles but a flat, affectless, atonal prose. Although the subjects they deal with are usually very controversial, they tend to use first-person narrators that generally do not condemn the morally despicable acts described, which is the most criticized aspect of this fiction. As

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Slocombe suggests, blank fiction’s position remains unclear since ‘whether it condemns consumer society (and is therefore ironic in its glorification of violence) or revels in it (celebrating the freedom from ethical concerns) is ambiguous’ (2006: 142). In minimalist writing there was also this tendency to use noncommitted narrative voices but, since the subjects were not so controversial, their use was not as fiercely criticized as in the case of blank fiction. The blank fiction tone fits in perfectly with novels that depict mass society, which, according to Dominic Strinati ‘consists of atomised people, people who lack any meaningful or morally coherent relationship with each other’ (1995: 6). The links in mass society are contractual, distant and sporadic instead of communal and well integrated. There is no sense of community to provide values, and, since they lack a sense of moral value, people in mass society turn to fake moralities, mass culture and mass consumption. The characters in these fictions are clearly mass society members and, as such, cannot be expected to give moral guidance, which is not to say that these novels have no morals or pose no criticism. As we will see, they do but in a different way. Characters in blank fiction writing are apparently undeveloped, something that matches our postmodern culture, where personality itself has become a commodity. In Ellis’s fiction characters are often so immersed in consumer culture that they have no real personality; in fact, they speak through mass culture. For example, some characters in Less Than Zero use songs to express their feelings and in American Psycho Patrick Bateman describes his apartment as if reading from a commercial brochure, while his sexual encounters are portrayed as pornographic literature. Products, personalities, places and mass cultural references to the period in which the novels are set are key in blank fiction novels. These writers deal with the reality they live in, freely incorporating plain language and mass culture into their writings. Most of them were born in the 1960s or afterwards, so they have grown up in a culture where boundaries have been progressively blurred and mass culture has become increasingly more important and influential in all forms of artistic expression. In his book about blank fiction Annesley underlines the importance that consumer culture has in this writing, since blank fiction does not just deal with its own period but ‘it speaks in the commodified language of its own period’ (1998: 7). The fact that blank fiction’s language resonates with references to commercial culture and surfaces has aroused the suspicion of some literary critics who have dismissed it as lightweight or as a means of strengthening contemporary capitalist structures and promoting further consumerism. For example, David Lehman dismissed Jay McInerney’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction for having ‘the intellectual nourishment of a well-made beer commercial’ (1987: 72). Roger Rosenblatt considered Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) ... the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore. But that is unfair to sophomores. So pointless, so themeless, so

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everythingless is this novel, except in stupefying details about expensive clothing, food and bath products, that were it not the most loathsome offering of the season, it certainly would be the funniest. (1990: 3) Neither Lehman nor Rosenblatt stop to consider the use of commercial and mass culture but interpret it as a sign of the lack of artistic merit and capacity in these writers. Other critics, such as Elizabeth Young, Graham Caveney (1992) and James Annesley (1998), have defended blank fiction writers from these accusations and studied the ways in which their use of mass culture and consumerism provides a critique of contemporary social practices and lifestyle and discloses a ruined society. Blank fiction writers have an exceptionally sophisticated apprehension of the excesses of our culture and show them from within, posing a criticism which is not directly voiced through a narrator but through the textual implications and the excesses that are satirized in their blank writings. There are critics who, in an attempt to defend this generation of writers, have complained about the term ‘blank’. This is the case of Daniel Grassian, who rejects Annesley’s choice of the term ‘blank fiction’ because he believes it is generalising and derogative to consider young writers blank and impassive: for Grassian their perspectives are not blank but intellectually and culturally rich (2003: 18). However, these writers do use an atonal blank prose where no feelings are conveyed, and where narrators are passive and seemingly unconcerned with moral issues. However, this blankness is neutral, that is to say, it lacks both positive and negative connotations. In fact, on many occasions the effects are not blank but enriching, sometimes even satirical. Besides, Annesley deals with a different group of writers barely mentioned by Grassian in his analysis of generation X fiction. In this book I will use blank fiction as the term that best describes Ellis’s style, taking into account the way it has evolved in each new novel, highlighting some characteristics and downplaying others, depending on the subject matter concerned.

Part 2

Less Than Zero (1985)

4

The Reception of Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero was published when Ellis was still a student at Bennington College in Vermont. His first year there Ellis gained admission to a junior-senior nonfiction writing course taught by Joe McGinniss, who was impressed by the writing samples on Los Angeles youth that Ellis had submitted to a course not intended for first-year students. Joe McGinniss, the nonfiction author of the bestseller Fatal Vision (1983), had contacts in the publishing industry, so he handed over Ellis’s work to Morgan Entrekin – an editor at Simon & Schuster – who showed a clear interest in Ellis’s work and encouraged him to write a novel. Probably boosted by this interest, Ellis wrote – allegedly typewriting on the floor of his room – the first draft of Less Than Zero in the nonresident term of the academic year 1982 to 1983. The fact that Ellis took just eight weeks to write this draft was used by some critics as proof of the novel’s lack of quality, whereas others considered it evidence of Ellis’s talent. In any case the book was published, with substantial changes, two and a half years later. The initial draft was significantly edited and abridged – from 400 to 200 pages – and there was even a change in voice, from a third-person to a first-person narrator. Even though McGinniss and Entrekin collaborated in the changes, it was mainly Robert Asahina – a Simon & Schuster editor – who was assigned the editing task. Ellis got a $5,000 advance and the book was finally published as a hardback in May 1985, and soon became a bestseller. Within just three months, more than 69,000 copies were sold and Penguin Books decided to acquire the paperback rights for $100,000. The film industry also showed interest in a novel about ‘young adults’ and producer Marvin Worth bought the film rights for $7,500 before the novel was even published. This ‘young adult’ market had already been discovered by Hollywood since the explosion of teenpics in the 1950s and, in 1985, it was in full bloom with the success of films such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and St. Elmo’s Fire (1985). Less Than Zero was, according to Mark Fenster, ‘a highly successful novel by and about the movie industry’s largest audience, postadolescents’ (1991: 52). Thus it seems logical that the film industry should take an interest in adapting the novel to the screen. At the time the publishing industry was very interested in young writers, since young adults were also becoming one of the most lucrative markets for them.

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The creation of trade paperback series such as the Vintage Contemporary Series where McInerney’s first novel was published is a good example of the interest that the young market awoke. The literary industry also became aware of the potential of this market, and the attention that young writers such as Ellis, McInerney, Janowitz, Jill Eisenstadt and David Leavitt, among others, received at the time is good proof of it. In fact, according to Ellis, when he showed Morgan Entrekin his writing for the first time, ‘[t]hey liked this whole New Generation stuff of affluent kids growing up under the influence of video’ (in Muro 1985: 11). Ellis’s story as a young adult and first-time successful writer heavily promoted by Simon & Schuster also aroused the interest of reviewers and critics. As a result, many of the reviews of Less Than Zero were a mixture of interview and profile where there was no assessment of the novel but rather a retelling of the story of Ellis’s success. After all, at that moment, he represented a version of the American dream: he was very young and already with a first novel in the market that had become a bestseller. The critics who preferred this approach were, to name a few, Elisabeth Mehren (1985) and Susan Squire (1986) from the Los Angeles Times, Mark Muro (1985) from the Boston Globe, Helen Dudar (1985) from the Wall Street Journal and Elisabeth Wurtzel (1985) from New York magazine. Their emphasis was on Ellis’s youth and his still being at college. Dudar underlined how the young writer explained to her that he had to finish some term papers and catch up with the reading of Proust and Dostoevsky. Wurtzel asked Ellis if, after his success, his school activities were not a bit boring, to which he answered that he was ‘really psyched to go back and take classes’ (in Wurtzel 1985: 34). Mehrer and Squire coincided in highlighting the speed at which he had written the novel and the fact that Ellis had just reached legal drinking age. The interest in Ellis the writer, rather than in his novel, also caused some of the reviewers to consider the coincidences between Clay – the main character in Less Than Zero – and the writer himself. Like Clay, Ellis comes from a well-off family from Los Angeles; in fact he studied at the most expensive college in the United States. He also has two sisters, his parents are separated and both Clay and Ellis leave Los Angeles to attend college in the East. McCarthy’s comments were representative: ‘you sometimes get the feeling that chunks of his book were lifted whole from the high melodrama and adolescent angst of Ellis’s diary’ (1985: 80). In much more ironic and malevolent terms Terry Teachout commented for the National Review: The plot, such as it is, deals with the return of Clay, a well-heeled college freshman, to Los Angeles for his first Christmas break, in the course of which he consumes several tons of controlled substances, has several orgasms in the company of various young men and women, decides that he wants to witness the ultimate in depravity and does so, and (one assumes) keeps an elaborate diary every night so that he can write the whole sordid story up for his Creative

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Writing class as soon as he returns to – well, to what is all too obviously Bennington, just as Clay is all too obviously Bret Easton Ellis himself. (1986: 53) As we can see, some of the comments became personal and some critics even accused the novelist of sharing the excesses of his characters. The origin of this character-author link was to be found, according to Kakutani, in Ellis’s use of a ‘slick, first-person narrative’ that ‘encourages one to read the novel as a largely autobiographical account of what it’s like to grow up, rich and jaded, in Beverly Hills today’ (1985: 32). The result of this identification led some reviewers to suggest a certain complicity on Ellis’s part in what he described, a capitulation to the wasted ‘anomie’ he dealt with (Muro 1985: 11). In spite of this authorial identification of Ellis with his depraved characters, there were reviewers that saw, rather, a contrast between them and Ellis. Paul Gray stated for Time that the novels sent a mixed message: on the one hand, there was the ‘hopeful’ case of the writer, an ‘enterprising and successful young man’; on the other hand, there was the lurid and extreme story of his generation in the novel (1985: 80). Thus, Ellis was depicted as the antithesis of the aimless youths that populate the novel and that have no objective in life. According to Ellis his novel was ‘by no stretch of the imagination’ autobiographical and neither had he lived all the depraved things described. This identification was for Ellis insulting but sometimes he took it as a compliment ‘that people were so persuaded by that voice that they thought it had to be real’ (in Maychick 1986: 66). The air of reality of the novel is another important aspect that reviewers agreed in pointing out. For Kakutani the novel possessed ‘an unnerving air of documentary reality’. However, this was not an entirely positive quality, since the novel ended up feeling ‘more like a “60 Minutes” documentary on desperate youths than a full-fledged novel’ (1985: 32). This documentary air that many reviewers saw in the novel has to be understood within the context of the debates about high and low culture. For many, bringing the novel closer to other genres like journalism was a way of reducing its literary value. For example, Terry Teachout assessed the literary value of the book for National Review by stating that ‘[a]s a novel, Less Than Zero is less than satisfactory. As a piece of journalism, though, it is provocative and disturbing, even valuable’ (1986: 53). In the same line, Newsweek reviewer David Lehman felt that the book was ‘almost more interesting as a cultural document than as a novel’ (1985: 70). The consideration of Less Than Zero as a documentary or as a piece of journalism originated in the fact that the depiction of depraved wealthy Los Angeles youth, obsessed with drugs, sex and consumerism, leading shallow lives, was a powerful idea in the US imagination. Seeing it in print and being told by a young Los Angeles author seemed proof of its truth. Furthermore, the insistence on the documentary tone could also be seen at times as an attempt to take literary value away from the novel. Ellis’s ambiguous position between the high and low,

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a constant in his career, finds its origins here. The sordid subject matter was linked, in the view of some critics, to sensationalist journalism. Ellis has defended his documentary-like style and placed his fiction in a grey space between the traditional novel and the new journalism. He has been especially influenced by the new journalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the writer himself summarizes: I started out wanting to be a nonfiction writer, and I still like writing a lot of nonfiction. I hope my nonfiction sensibility is meshed with my fictive sensibility in my books, that I’m using the tools one uses for reportage and journalism, and meshing them with the tools one uses to construct a satisfactory holding block for a novel. I’m influenced by both sides. (In Schumacher 1988: 121) The grey space inhabited by Ellis’s literature is not only the consequence of his new journalism techniques but also of the world of MTV, films and songs. Ellis has stressed that the novel has a cinematic style – he circles the story through quick takes – a technique from Robert Altman’s Nashville (in Schumacher 1988: 123). Much of the style and many of the references in the novel came from the world of pop culture, which was also mentioned in the reviews of the novel. In fact, the novel takes its title from an Elvis Costello song and is composed of very short chapters and scenes that, for Elizabeth Mehren, were ‘like frames from MTV’ (1985: 12). For the New Republic, reading the novel was also ‘like watching MTV’ (New Republic 1985: 142), and for Helen Dudar the novel ‘would appear to be the first full-length work of serious fiction influenced by MTV’ (1985: 1). Greil Marcus also acknowledged the importance of pop music and MTV, but he felt it was just ‘weather’, something in the background which did not provide any meaning. In the novel, everybody talks about music and turns on MTV whenever they have a chance but we do not know why; the pop-song references ‘merely bounce off the flat surface of the prose; no song ever plays’ (1985: 12). Thus, Marcus acknowledged the importance of MTV and music but felt that it had no function. By contrast, for Alix Madrigal the novel ‘doesn’t feel like MTV. It lacks the sensuality of music and the three-dimensional quality of video – or, for that matter, a good novel’ (1985: 4). For John Powers Less Than Zero represented the MTV novel but it was tagged as such not just for its style and references in the novel but because of the MTV audience that matched the novel’s readers, who were ‘young, urbanized, conscious of trends, and starkers for stimulation’ (1985: 44). The MTV channel seemed aware of these writers’ importance and included interviews with McInerney and Ellis between clips since, according to Powers, ‘they’re young, wear hipness like platinum coke spoons – these dudes have lived their novels – and have six-figure movie deals to validate their parking at the hall of celebrity’ (1985: 44). In fact, Simon & Schuster tried to connect both the youth and the world of pop culture with the novel by using an Elvis Costello poster mentioned in the novel as an

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inspiration for its original cover, a pair of sunglasses with different coloured lenses and lime green and black type. In spite of these references to documentaries, diaries, journalism and pop culture, the reception of Less Than Zero was somewhat more complex, since most reviewers were unsure where to place it in the cultural spectrum. The novel was obviously also literature and it had serious literary origins that had to be established; significantly, Hemingway was repeatedly mentioned (Mehren 1985: 12; Muro 1985: 11; Salter 1985: 24). Ellis himself has acknowledged this influence in his flat prose style: I owe a lot of my ‘control’ to Hemingway, at least in this piece of work. I read him relentlessly all during high school – he became, like, my god when I was first starting to take writing seriously. It was Hemingway in high school, and Joyce in college – which is so weird because they’re two widely disparate figures. (In Schumacher 1988: 124) James Joyce’s influence was also mentioned by Mehren (1985) and seen in the nonlineal narrative of the novel. Fitzgerald’s wasted and wealthy landscape in The Great Gatsby also left a mark on the novel (Muro 1985: 11), and even Kerouac’s strain of masculine chauvinism was found in the novel’s gang rape, according to Barnes (1986: 22). Truman Capote was mentioned in connection with Ellis’s quasi-cinematic technique of ‘shots’ or vignettes which, according to Ellis, came from his MTV watching but which, according to Teachout, originated in Capote’s new journalistic In Cold Blood (1986: 53). The publishers – through a jacket blurb – proclaimed that it was this decade’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’, clearly placing Less Than Zero close to a serious and widely appreciated book. Both J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Ellis’s book are coming-of-age novels that deal with a young person who has to face adulthood though the protagonists have very different attitudes towards life: Clay is a completely passive character, whereas Holden Caulfield is in a state of permanent rebellion against a society of adult hypocrites. Nevertheless, reviewers are wont to make a comparison between The Catcher in the Rye and any new novel that happens to deal with young people and might be suspected of certain literary pretensions. Even though critics such as Hugh Barnes, in The London Review of Books, openly embraced the comparison by stating that Clay’s disaffection and enveloping ennui is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s (1986: 22), other critics such as Alix Madrigal found that Caulfield’s refusal to be corrupted, together with his innocence and pain, had nothing to do with the emotionless and passive Clay (1985: 4). Michel Spies found it closer to La Dolce Vita than to The Catcher in the Rye because of its ‘bored and empty guide pointing out the lairs leading to the underworld of the rich’ (1985: 27). Spies placed more emphasis on the fact that the protagonists were incredibly rich than on the fact that they were also very young. At the same time, he used a reference to a film rather than a novel, which took the novel from its literary context and placed it

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in a cinematic one. He also mentioned that the book underlined the sentimentality of films such as The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. Susan Squire also rejected the comparison with The Catcher in the Rye and found the novel a ‘pubescent version of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays’ (1986: 16). Didion is an iconic figure of Los Angeles writing and a well-established writer of fiction and nonfiction. Even though the similarities between the styles of Didion and Ellis are obvious, they were not always seen in a positive light. John Powers talked about a prose ‘afflicted with anorexia Didiona’ (1985: 45), while Rosellen Brown considered the novel ‘a sort of grandchild of Play It As It Lays, written at the age of 20’ (1986: 7). Since both books share a minimalist style and anaesthetized characters in Los Angeles, it seems obvious that the two novels share some ground. Like Ellis’s first novel, Play It As It Lays (1970) had powerfully described a whole generation represented by the story of Maria and the emptiness and ennui that surrounds her life in Hollywood. There is an obvious difference in age, since Maria is in her early thirties whereas Clay is about to enter his twenties. Nevertheless, both drift through lives that seem to go by without their doing anything about it. The style is also quite similar and both have very short chapters; in Play It As It Lays there are 84 short chapters – Less Than Zero has 108 – which are very visual and dialogue-driven. In Play It As It Lays the narrative is elliptical and describes a sequence of events that barely forms a plot. Less Than Zero is also nearly plotless, with events following each other without link-effect connections. There are even coincidences in leitmotifs and actions: freeway driving, passionless couplings, shallow Los Angeles and nihilism are recurrent in both books. Ellis has acknowledged this debt and found Didion a major inspiration and role model. In fact, Kakutani (1985) felt that there were too many echoes of her, which contrasted with the opinion of other critics that linked Ellis just with MTV and saw no literary connections at all. Kakutani linked Didion – and Ellis – with the Los Angeles tradition characteristic of Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West. Helen Dudar placed Ellis’s style not so much in the context of Los Angeles but in the minimalist mode of Raymond Carver, Renata Adler and even Joan Didion herself (1986: 1). The minimalist connection was mentioned in many reviews: Brown (1986) regarded Ellis as one of the newest advocates of minimalist fiction, quite an obvious link since minimalists such as Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were at the time using an impersonal, emotionless style, with narrators who did not judge the character or establish moral positions. Ellis has openly acknowledged this influence, especially that of Ann Beattie, since according to him: ‘[h]er first two collections completely opened my eyes because of the lack of the classic short story structure. They made me realize all the things you could do with the form. Narrative didn’t have to be this straight, linear thing’ (in Schumacher 1988: 123). As a new minimalist, Ellis was grouped with other brat pack writers such as Peter Cameron, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney and David Leavitt, who followed

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the minimalist style. In the Wall Street Journal Helen Dudar found these comparisons ‘hardly fair to an original, abundantly talented, if not fully mature, voice’ (1985: 1). Among all the new minimalist books, the most obvious connection to be made was with Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which had been released the previous year. For Larry McCarthy, using a positive tone, Less Than Zero was Bright Lights, Big City West (1985: 80). By contrast, for Terry Teachout (1986) these novels – together with McInerney’s Ransom (1986) – were examples of how standards had been lowered in the publishing industry. The minimalist ascription of Ellis served to comment on his style in the novel, a feature that all critics agreed to describe as deadpan prose, loose plot, shallow characters and lack of a condemning narrative voice. Events are described through Clay’s voice but he remains detached from them, offering no comment on the despicable events that take place. This style fuelled contradictory responses: on the one hand, the novel was described as ‘a weirdly fascinating book’ (McCarthy 1985: 80), made up of ‘short, vivid, laconic sentences’ (Geeslin 1985: 18), where ‘[t]he violence, gore and sex are necessary because of their direct influence upon the characters’ (Seay 1987: 72). Ellis was praised for his perfect ear for dialogue (Spies 1985: 27; Pinckney 1986: 33), especially ‘a good ear for the sort of dumb exchange of non sequiturs, bad jokes and halfhearted shrugs that pass for conversation between Clay and his friends’ (Kakutani 1985: 32). However, on the other hand, some critics found that, because of the lack of a condemning voice, the book became what it portrayed, since it never distanced itself from that material. The novel was ‘nothing more than a series of random moments in vacant lives, as mean and dead as those it portrays’ (Madrigal 1985: 4). Paul Gray complained about the novel’s hero ‘who stands for nothing,’ and about the lack of explanation for his actions, which was ‘unsettling’ (1985: 80). In sum, Less Than Zero had a mixed reception. There were very positive reviews that considered Ellis the voice of a generation and valued his accomplished first novel; there were others that found the novel ‘depressing, distressing and frightening’ (Geeslin 1985: 18). Among the different opinions, a series of motifs were repeated: first of all, there was a special interest in Ellis as a ‘personality’ and in the process of writing and publishing the book. The fact that Less Than Zero was a first novel and its author still at college also aroused the curiosity of critics, which led to the publication of a great number of profiles of the author and interviews with him. As a result, he became a recognizable name, nearly a celebrity, which gave him unusual visibility for a writer. A downside effect was that, when reviewing his book, some critics just focused on his persona and the biographical details that connected Ellis with the characters in the novel, ignoring his style and the quality of the book. This has been a constant throughout his career – as we will see when analysing the reception of American Psycho and Glamorama – partly because Ellis has fostered his visibility by attending parties, participating in TV debates and discussing his sexual preferences in interviews.

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Many reviewers were not comfortable with the borderland that Less Than Zero inhabited. This was a novel with a catchy cover (a pair of sunglasses), a title taken from an Elvis Costello song, preceded by two epigraphs from songs by X and by Led Zeppelin, written by an author who was still a student. It was also a novel featuring great amounts of sex, drugs and perversions, in an MTV-like style, with many references to pop culture and brand names and, especially, it became a book that had reached bestselling status. All these aspects seemed to place Less Than Zero on the lowbrow side of the spectrum, which shows in odd comments such as ‘[g]ranted, it is hard to expect much out of an author who follows up the success of his first novel by posing for a Vanity Fair photo spread called ‘Looking for Cool in L.A.’ (Teachout 1986: 52). Judgements of this kind were mentioned in many reviews, especially those trying to pan the novel. There was even a tendency to take the book away from literary fiction and interpret it as a piece of journalism or as a documentary. The reviews holding this view were not necessarily negative, but many held that Ellis excelled in this aspect but failed in his fictional pretensions. Other reviewers, in an attempt to defend the novel, preferred to downplay the ‘popular culture’ aspects and focused on those that linked Ellis with the literary establishment: Less Than Zero was seen as ‘the new Catcher in the Rye,’ or as influenced by Joan Didion, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, or Raymond Carver. Many a name was tossed into the balance. For other critics Ellis could not stand comparison with such authors and they saw him rather as a brat packer in line with other hyped authors such as McInerney, Leavitt or Janowitz. All these efforts at placing the novel led to many contradictory reviews: for some, Ellis’s literary debt was too large (Kakutani 1985), for others there was none at all since it was like watching MTV (Dudar 1985), and for another group the novel was too bad to be like MTV as it lacked the sensuality and three-dimensional quality of video (Madrigal 1985). It is fair to say that the mixed reviews matched the mixed sources of Ellis’s writing, originating in what has been traditionally understood to be highbrow and lowbrow literary culture. The problem was not just the content of the novel but also the promotional techniques used and the author’s visibility, which at the time seemed to clash with more traditional forms of understanding literature and its function. The other subject of controversy was Ellis’s style, especially the use of a deadpan prose to describe morally reprehensible actions. There is no clear distance or condemnation of the despicable actions, which caused great controversy at the time. On the other hand, the title of the novel itself, Less Than Zero, does look like a condemnation of what the reader is about to read. In any case, since this is a style that Ellis has used in all his novels, I will discuss this aspect in the close-reading approach to each novel, especially in the case of American Psycho. These issues popped up when the novel was adapted to the screen in 1987, since the novel’s tone and content became problematic. The film producers wanted to benefit from the novel’s commercial potential but could not use the

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dangerous subject matter and literary style; it is a virtually plotless novel that lacks a moral centre. Michael Cristofer, who won the Pulitzer prize for the play The Shadow Box, wrote the first script for the adaptation but it was rejected because it was too faithful to the novel. In the end, changes were made to tone down the sex and moralize against drug use. The producers claimed that, because of AIDS, they ‘couldn’t show a character having “sex” with two different people in 10 minutes. It’d just be totally irresponsible in today’s climate’ (Jordan Kerner in Fenster 1991: 52). The resulting ‘socially responsible teen film’ has turned into a cult film but, at the time of its release, it was a failure in terms of audience and critical reception and had nothing to do with the novel. The power of a novel such as Less Than Zero lies in its detached style, which increases the horror of the reader. If the detached MTV-like style were eliminated, the novel would end up being indistinguishable from the many other cautionary tales that were produced at the time, as the story of the film adaptation proved.

5

The Use of Mass Culture and Mass Media in the Novel

Less Than Zero is a 208-page novel divided into 108 very short sequences, from one single paragraph to three or four pages, thus reducing the attention span demanded for each chapter and mirroring the speed and flow of videos on MTV, which has a never-ending quality; it is 24-hour television divided into very short unconnected music videos or series of videos only interrupted by the veejay’s comments, interviews or advertisements (Kaplan 1987: 41, 144). The prominence given to MTV, videos and songs in general in Less Than Zero can already be felt in the very title of the novel, extracted from the first single of Elvis Costello’s debut album, My Aim Is True, released in March 1977. As Peter Freese claims, the fact that the title comes from a song suggests that Ellis’s referential context does not come from mainstream literature but from contemporary pop culture (1990: 83). The lyrics of the song give a clue to the themes that are going to be part of Ellis’s book. There are at least two important ideas introduced in this song’s refrain, which will constitute two main areas of study in this analysis of Less Than Zero. First, there is the novel’s obsession with television and the visual; second, the lack of traditional family ties. Parents in Less Than Zero are divorced, they have their own lovers and are too self-absorbed to care for anyone else apart from themselves. Clay’s parents know that their son and two daughters, who are only 13 and 15, openly consume drugs, but that does not bother them. As a result, in this society of wealthy narcissists everything means less than zero. Apart from the title, there are two epigraphs that introduce the novel. Both are also quotations from songs, comments on matters developed later in the novel. The first one, ‘This is the game that moves as you play ... ,’ is taken from the song ‘The Have Nots’ of the X group. Once more it is not a high culture reference but a quotation from a 1980s rock song that places the novel in its proper context. The sentence itself is a reference to the present, which is the main tense and time reference in the novel. The MTV perpetual present also finds its equivalent in a novel where everything seems to happen right now. Besides, everything seems a game, which is also an important topic: Clay and his friends are always to be found at the arcade or at home playing video games

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with the Atari, which seems to have led them to believe that life is a game in which ‘game over’ only means you have to start again. The second introductory epigraph is ‘There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West’ from Led Zeppelin’s song ‘Stairway to Heaven’. In this quotation the idea of the West and Los Angeles is introduced. Historically Americans travelled west to conquer new land and find freedom just as Clay travels west from his East Coast university for his Christmas vacation. However, in this case the West will not provide any freedom, only further entrapment in a horrific shallow world that is just the opposite of what the West once represented for the United States. The context in which this quotation appears in the song reveals the despair and deceit represented by Los Angeles. As the lyrics say, Clay’s spirit is also ‘crying for leaving’ and when he finally does he cannot help but bring horrific images of his stay with him. From the title of the novel and the opening epigraphs a series of themes are introduced that become basic for an understanding of the novel. The set of referents does not come from the literary classics but from the world of pop culture, namely youth culture: music, cinema, shopping and brands. The world of MTV and songs is especially relevant in the novel since songs constitute the only means of communication for Clay’s friends. Through song lyrics and popular culture references they find the language that they otherwise lack. This is also the language of the narration, which is rendered by Clay himself in a firstperson account of his life in Los Angeles during his one-month holiday. Thus, songs and MTV soon start shaping the structure of the novel, mainly narrated in a perpetual present of sparsely connected episodes and images.

5.1 Intermediality: An MTV Novel Ellis uses the language and style of different mass media, especially MTV television, videos and songs, as an expressive means since they are particularly close to the youth portrayed in the novel. This form of intermediality1 has to be framed within the convergence of the language of literature and the languages of cinema, newspapers, television and other popular culture forms. Blank fiction writers have openly embraced this blurring not only of high and low culture but also of media languages. Seen from the perspective of literary studies, this intermediality is not entirely new since, in the first half of the twentieth century, there were already voices that proclaimed its existence. Adorno and Horkheimer were among the first to perceive the use of intermediality in the arts. They believed that within the cultural industry popular culture was only concerned with profit and lacked a critical function; it threatened cultural standards and high culture because it aimed at a homogenization of all culture. In their famous 1944 essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, the two critics warned of the progressive confluence of the different forms of the culture industry. They

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claimed that it was mass-produced and identical, and, consequently, films, radio and magazines made up a uniform and meaningless system of entertainment, all of which might lead to the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the fusion of all the arts in one work, a process that ‘integrates all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the film) to the last sound effect’ (124). According to Adorno and Horkheimer this would produce inferior works because each new work would only rely on its similarity to others, leading to a distrust of the untried. Therefore, this fusion of the arts would not lead to something positive but to a loss of culture’s traditional role of resistance, turning it into ‘a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure’ (143). Postmodernism has progressively changed these misgivings about the progressive blurring of high and low culture. In fact, some critics have argued that during the modernist period there was a clearer difference between high art and mass culture, since high art was accessible only to a few people who could appreciate its beauty and values (Huyssen 1986; Carey 1992). On the other hand, mass culture was meant to be enjoyed by the lower class who had practically no access to the new arts, which were too far removed from everyday life. Even though it is not quite as simple as this – we have just mentioned that already in the 1940s Adorno and Horkheimer were warning of the progressive blurring of the arts and that there was a notable presence of popular culture in avant-garde and modernist works – it is undeniable that postmodernism has seriously challenged this gap in a two-sided movement: artists, including literary authors, have drawn from mass cultural forms, and at the same time some sections of mass culture have increasingly adopted strategies from high art. This ‘closing the gap’ is for Andreas Huyssen the postmodern condition in literature and the arts (1986: ix). Intermediality is closely related to these debates about postmodernism and the coalescence of high and low culture, especially in the case of literature’s use of intermediality. In this connection, for Philip E. Simmons mass culture has become the ‘cultural dominant’ or force field in which the novel and all forms of representation must operate. ‘Cultural dominant’ is here used in Raymond Williams’s sense, as a dominant cultural form that coexists with residual and newer forms. The earlier, less influential forms are progressively incorporated into the new cultural dominant: mass culture. This depiction of literature as residual does not imply that it is going to disappear – the number of readers is now larger than ever – but that, in a context where there has been a change from print culture to electronic culture, the role and form of literature is bound to evolve. Thus, when a new cultural form rises to dominance, earlier forms are not abandoned but transformed and incorporated into the new order (Simmons 1997: 2). Therefore, due to our global, image-driven, electronic culture, we are witnessing a progressive drawing near of literature to the languages of mass culture – cinema, television, radio, popular music and consumer culture. Blank fiction writers have freely embraced this mixture of styles, probably because all of these forms of mass culture have been important in their lives;

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they grew up with the technology of television, cinema and music, which are an active part of our consumer culture. As Cecelia Tichi (1991) believes, this is not something negative, in fact it is not the first time that technology has brought about positive change in literature. In an environment of machines, structures, railroad locomotives and skyscrapers, literature was deeply enriched by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams, who believed novels and poems were construction projects and writers were designers. The use of mass culture permits an interesting dialectic within postmodern fiction, the result of which is not always an uncritical defence of mass culture but rather an ambivalent attitude that has to be judged in each individual work. Bret Easton Ellis does not just incorporate mass culture materials, but he also makes of them literary forms, transforming their style into narrative prose. This is the case of Less Than Zero, where Ellis uses the language of songs and the structure of MTV to convey new meanings into the literary form. Less Than Zero was considered by different reviewers to be an ‘MTV novel’ (McCarthy 1985; Kakutani 1985; Powers 1985), a perfect example of one of the possible uses of intermediality in literature. Even more so since MTV is in a way the result of another type of intermediality: stereophonic sound combined with the visual impact of TV. Analysis of the cultural meanings and uses of MTV has become very popular in academia. Grossberg considers it ‘a new “snake” in the cultural garden’ (1995: 367) and ironically remarks that it has become the ultimate example ‘of the commodification of culture, of the capitalist recuperation of “authentic” forms of resistance, of textual and subjective schizophrenia, of the postmodern disappearance of reality, of orgasmic democracy, etc.’ (368). Even though as a cultural phenomenon MTV is a very complex subject matter that should be analysed contextually and relationally to understand its uniqueness, I think that MTV is interesting not only for what makes it unique but also for what it shares with other cultural manifestations as a product of consumer culture and as a postmodern phenomenon. For some cultural critics MTV actually embodies postmodernism. It is an example of the postmodern coalescence of high and low culture since, in the realm of music at least, MTV broke down the boundary between mainstream and underground and it merged commercial and artistic image production, images and real-life referents, past and present, character and performance, mannered art and stylized life (Aufderheide 1986: 112; Kaplan 1987: 7; Seabrook 2000: 101). As a result of MTV’s capacity to blur the boundaries between different artistic manifestations and cultural levels, the avant-garde could become mainstream on account of MTV’s ability to reach a wide audience. Seabrook gives the example of Nirvana, a cult band that defined itself against mainstream commercial culture, only to become part of the mainstream with its second album, which sold ten million copies in 1991. Not only is MTV as a platform an example of intermediality and high/low culture blurring, but so is the very form of the music video clip. Many critics have noticed that videos are on the one hand art since they even use many avant-garde techniques2 and, on the

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other, advertisements for the album containing the song performed by the group, and, thus, consumer culture (Kaplan 1987: 13, Fowles 1996: 194, Rifkin 2000: 196, Seabrook 2000: 65). Bret Easton Ellis is a blank fiction writer who uses and adapts the MTV style to the realm of literature. The style of MTV is especially open to these types of adaptations; it has drawn from but also influenced other media since, under its influence, advertisements have become shorter and livelier; news is divided into shorter segments; magazines and newspapers have copied the style of television; and MTV has copied life itself (Edelste 1997: 106). Ellis managed to combine MTV and literature, imitating the language, style and concerns of MTV and aiming at the very same audience: young, fashion-conscious, urban readers. At the same time, MTV seems to have embraced such intermedial approaches and promoted authors such as Ellis and Jay McInerney by including brief interviews with them between videos. The presence of MTV in the novel is important both to the very structure of the novel and as an entity that is always part of the background to what happens to Clay and friends. It is repeatedly mentioned in the novel as some type of diffuse environment that surrounds all the characters, who seem permanently connected to the video channel. One of the first things Clay does when he arrives home at the beginning of the novel is turn on MTV, but not because he wants to watch it but because he wants to sleep. He usually takes some Valium, turns on MTV, turns the sound off and lies back staring at the television. This combination of watching TV and taking Valium or Thorazine is also Blair’s way of getting to sleep. To wake up, there is the opposite process: Clay turns on MTV really loud and does a line of coke. MTV is also used as background in other contexts; for example, when the characters talk on the phone MTV is always on. MTV is not watched in a concentrated way, it is casually watched as a background atmosphere, on many occasions with the sound off; thus the characters are just left with the process of mixing images, mostly unconnected, and watching the promos inserted between videos. Clay is obviously not the only one who watches MTV. Blair, Rip, Trent’s maid and Muriel are also hooked on MTV. Kaplan has pointed out the way MTV hypnotizes its audience because it is formed by a series of very short texts, whose unfinished nature makes us keep watching in our search for satisfaction (1987: 4). The way they watch MTV even affects the way the characters relate to each other. For example, when Clay goes to Julian’s house to lend him some money Julian is lying on his bed watching MTV. Clay asks him what the money he has lent him is for, but Julian does not answer right away, he ‘watches the video until it is over and then turns away and says, “why?” ’ (104). Julian’s attention span seems to be that of MTV and his concentration lasts the few seconds between MTV videos. This overuse of references to MTV-watching as atmosphere has an effect that goes beyond the simple awareness that MTV exerts an important power over the youth in the novel since, as has been seen in this last example, it affects the way they relate and the way they understand life.

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The influence of MTV is felt on a deeper level, beyond the story that is narrated. It also affects the way events are narrated in the novel, its very style, which resembles and mirrors that of MTV. The videos shown are not connected by any casual or temporal bond; they are simply juxtaposed in a 24-hour format. This is a characteristic typical of the MTV technological platform, which becomes especially relevant when we compare it to other ‘platforms’. Kaplan sees the novel as a form that has fixed, defined boundaries, whereas a Hollywood movie constitutes a unit consumed within a two-hour limit. By contrast, TV is divided into serial, continuous segments to be viewed daily or weekly (news, weather forecast, soap operas or quiz shows) which are not necessarily connected, in the sense that the news of the day has nothing to do, for example, with the soap opera episode of the same day (1987: 3–4). MTV is a TV channel and, as such, is also made up of segments that are not limited to the video units; there are also ads, interviews or commentaries that construct its fragmented viewing experience. This fragmented quality of MTV is reproduced in Less Than Zero through the temporal and spatial disjunction between chapters, signalled precisely by the way chapters begin with temporal and spatial pointers. These pointers work like the establishing shots of videos and films, which place the viewer in an initial context. In the novel these ‘establishing shots’ are necessary in all the chapters since each begins in a different location and some of them also show a temporal discontinuity when they refer to the past. For example, ‘It’s two in the morning and hot and we’re at the Edge in the back room ...’ (20). These references reach a peak of laconicism when the information is directly rendered, without any unnecessary flourish: ‘The Saint Marquis. Four o’clock. Sunset Boulevard’ (172). This very direct written reference to the exact time and location of the scene is commonly found in theatre and film scripts. In a way, it is another form of intermediality, a device like stage directions used in written form for artistic manifestations that are not meant to be read but to be seen and listened to, like film and theatre. Another example is the repeated use of the word ‘Pause’ in the novel, which indicates that there is an extended silence and which is not used for written narratives either but for visual artistic forms. Less Than Zero is a novel that seems to be written to be watched, to be listened to, each chapter resembling a new MTV video that needs to be temporally and locally introduced. These causal and temporal discontinuities are not limited to the links between chapters in the novel; they extend to the construction of the chapters themselves. Some of the short chapters are simply constructed through assorted images that do not seem to follow clear cause/effect connections, just like MTV videos. For example, in one of the chapters Clay buys a porn magazine, there is a man putting bricks on the newspapers, there are coyotes howling, dogs barking and Clay drives home. From his bed he hears the wind: ‘And I think about the billboard on Sunset and the way Julian looked past me at Café Casino, and when I finally fall asleep, it’s Christmas Eve’ (63). The images are disconnected

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and are mentioned as they cross Clay’s mind, since the billboard in Sunset apparently has nothing to do with the wind, or with his porn magazine. The novel is narrated in the present tense or present continuous but when past events are introduced they are also narrated through disconnected images. For example, when Clay tries to remember the previous summer: Last summer. Things I remember about last summer. Hanging out at clubs: The Wire, Nowhere Club, Land’s End, the Edge. An Albino in Canter’s around three in the morning. Huge green skull leering at drivers from a billboard on Sunset, hooded, holding a pyx, bony fingers beckoning. Saw a transvestite wearing a halter top in line at some movie. ... I saw a midget get into a Corvette. Went to a Go-Go’s concert with Julian. Party at Kim’s on a hot Sunday afternoon. ... (106, italics in the original) The list of images continues without any connecting mechanism. Probably because of this apparent lack of connection, the conjunction most used in the narration is ‘and’, which simply adds ideas without establishing any subordinate connection among them. On some occasions this overuse becomes obvious: After leaving Blair I drive down Wilshire and then onto Santa Monica and then I drive onto Sunset and take Beverly Glen to Mulholland, and then Mulholland to Sepulveda and then Sepulveda to Ventura and then I drive through Sherman Oaks to Encino and then into Tarzana and then Woodland Hills. I stop at a Sambo’s that’s open all night and sit alone in a large empty booth and the winds have started and they’re blowing so hard that the windows are shaking and the sounds of them trembling, about to break, fill the coffee shop. (61) Here the use of ‘and’, the simple addition of ideas and information, suggests a lack of complex cause/effect connections. Clay’s aimless physical and psychological wandering around Los Angeles is thus represented in very visual terms.

5.2 The Use of Images: Perpetual Present, Forgotten Past Less Than Zero is in a way constructed through images; they constitute the real narrative units in the novel. As Jeremy Rifkin puts it, MTV ‘levels all the rich gradations of human experience to a single, flat playing surface in which all phenomena exist in the form of pure images, one following the other at lightning speed, with no seeming context or coherence’ (2000: 196–7). The narrated events in Less Than Zero resemble a long list of videos aimlessly selected that simply flash by, with no conclusive ending. The novel thus becomes an MTV platform in which chapters feel like a flow of videos and images to be ‘watched’ by the reader. As the story progresses, the videos that flash by become images in Clay’s life. These assorted images are sometimes inside chapters, like

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passing sentences that depict life as a flow of images: ‘Another video flashes on. / Julian falls asleep. / I leave’ (104), or ‘I light a cigarette. / The man rolls Julian over. / Wonder if he’s for sale. / I don’t close my eyes. / You can disappear here without knowing it’ (176). As mentioned above, these images lack coherent cause/effect links and are, rather, connected through psychological associations in Clay’s mind. Some images become short sentences that extend their evocative power beyond the chapter boundary, since they are repeated throughout the novel: ‘People are afraid to merge,’ ‘I wonder if he’s for sale’, and ‘Disappear Here’. The insertion of these sentences creates a song-like refrain that seems to summarize some of the ideas of the novel and that stays in the mind of the reader after finishing the novel, very much like a song, since its repetitive refrain keeps echoing in our ears once the song is finished. These sentences combine on some fraught occasions when feelings are expressed through images, very much as in MTV videos. At a family meeting where people are too concerned about themselves to care about anyone else, Clay tries to think about something else: ‘I think about Blair alone in her bed stroking that stupid black cat and the billboard that says, “Disappear Here” and Julian’s eyes and wonder if he’s for sale and people are afraid to merge and the way the pool at night looks, the lighted water, glowing in the backyard’ (66); or when Julian wants to stop prostituting himself and his pimp injects him with heroin to make him change his mind: ‘Disappear Here. / The syringe fills with blood. / You’re a beautiful boy and that’s all that matters. / Wonder if he’s for sale. / People are afraid to merge. To merge’ (183). Here we see how intermediality works: the visual images are transformed into short sentences which are juxtaposed to express repressed feelings that cannot be put into a coherent narrative. According to Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, the language of the young has a highly emotional content, which makes teenage culture essentially nonverbal. This culture ‘is more naturally expressed in music, in dancing, in dress, in certain habits of walking and standing, in certain facial expressions and “looks” or in idiomatic slang’ (1997: 65). Clay’s feelings when watching the sexual degradation of his friend Julian find expression not through the verbal but through the visual juxtaposition of images. The importance of the visual is established not just through Clay’s disconnected thoughts but also through photos that seem to embody each single insignificant instant that Clay remembers but is unable to connect with anything else. For example, a New Year’s Eve party becomes fixed in Clay’s mind through the pictures that were taken in the course of the party: ‘I see one of Muriel shooting up, wearing my vest, me watching. Another of me standing in the living room only wearing a T-shirt and my jeans, trying to open a bottle of champagne, totally out of it. Another of Blair lighting up a cigarette’ (148). The language of photos, or short juxtaposed images, becomes the language of Less Than Zero. At the end of the novel, in the final chapter when Clay finally leaves Los Angeles, there is a reference to a song from X called ‘Los Angeles’, which

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is made of juxtaposed images, and images are what Clay ends up taking with him from his stay in Los Angeles: ‘Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left’ (207–8). Thus, it could be said that Clay’s point of reference is actually the image, rather than any longer language or communication unit. As has been seen, the short chapters of the book can also be divided into images linked by the conjunction ‘and’. Even those images are further reduced to sentences such as ‘People are afraid to merge’, ‘I wonder if he’s for sale’, and ‘Disappear Here’, which are really the backbone of the novel, the refrain of the video that Less Than Zero becomes. They resemble the promos that MTV has used to promote itself: ‘I want my Em Tee Vee!’, ‘What if time had never been invented!’ or ‘24 hours every day ... so you’ll be able to live forever’. These last two MTV promos point to MTV’s most characteristic feature: its use of a perpetual present where all videos are flattened in a 24-hour flow, without any historical references. In Less Than Zero nearly all loosely connected events are narrated in the present or present continuous tense. In fact, only 12 out of 108 short sequences use the past tense; they are not linked to the other passages, and, in order to clearly distinguish them as outside the narrative line, they are written in italics. The MTV search for immediacy is thus reflected in the novel, which for some critics results in a lack of psychological depth, historical perspective or moral complexity; just flat images like those on television. I would say, rather, that the fact that the very structure of songs and MTV is reflected in the structure of the novel reinforces and underlines the type of aimless and commodified life depicted in it. Unable to act, some Los Angeles youth just float on a hyperreal world where videos have more to say than their friends or family and where the perpetual present rules over any historical form. Events evolve but they are always narrated in the present, leaving a suffocating atmosphere of disconnected experiences only linked, as has been seen, by repeated sentences that produce their own sad desperate song: an MTV video that the young can identify with and understand. The idea of a perpetual present is not limited to the present tense used in the novel. It can also be seen in the attitudes of the main characters in the novel who live in the present, forget the past and make no future plans. Clay cannot see himself in any perspective, when he thinks about himself this is what he sees: I realize that all it comes down to is that I’m this eighteen-year-old boy with shaking hands and blond hair and with the beginnings of a tan and semistoned sitting in Chasen’s on Doheny and Beverly, waiting for my father to ask me what I want for Christmas. (66) In fact, they are so obsessed with the present that they cannot remember what has just happened to them. Ironically enough, the past actually plays an important

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role in the novel; it represents a time of innocence and nostalgia, which Clay and his jaded friends are trying to forget. In MTV history is replaced by nostalgia for the early days of music video, the 1950s. As Aufderheide points out, the present visions of the 1950s represent ‘the innocent youth of post-war commodity culture seen from the jaded present’ (1986: 128). In order to represent that past, black-and-white footage may be used, and old styles imitated; thus, even though the main ‘tense’ of MTV is the present, the nostalgic past reappears, sometimes in the form of pastiche. But this past comes mainly in the form of nostalgia; there was a time when Clay and his friends were still naive and believed in friends and family, when they still had hope and feelings, a state too painful to remember. Thus, in a conversation in which Julian has asked Clay for a large amount of money, Clay wants to know if Julian remembers when they were in fifth grade, in sports club, after school. Julian’s answer cuts the conversation short: ‘I can’t remember’ (93). In a later episode, when Clay becomes aware that Julian is prostituting himself, a memory of the innocent past comes to him: ‘I look over at Julian and the image of sports club after school in fifth grade comes back to me’ (170). Later on, when Clay is in the hotel room to watch Julian prostitute himself with a businessman, an image crosses his mind: ‘An image of Julian in fifth grade, kicking a soccer ball across a green field’ (175). Five hours later, once the sexual intercourse has finished, a new image of the past crosses Clay’s mind: ‘I look at Julian’s face and remember mornings sitting in his Porsche, double-parked, smoking thinly rolled joints, listening to the new Squeeze album before classes started at nine, and even though the image comes back to me, it doesn’t disturb me anymore. Julian’s face looks older to me now’ (177). The past represents the time of joy, although they try to forget it because if they remembered it they would become aware of their horrifying present, a time of empty and numb feelings. Past and present are two sharply differentiated areas in the novel, to the extent that the 12 chapters which are narrated in the past are written in italics and tell a story of their own. These memory chapters mainly deal with two aspects of Clay’s life: his family before it falls apart and his relationship with Blair. The former set is located during his summer holidays in Palm Springs, when he was younger and before his parents got divorced and his grandmother died. The latter touches on Clay and Blair’s holidays in Pajaro Dunes in Monterey and the things they did together. He also remembers talking to Blair on the phone just before he left for New Hampshire, before they stopped talking for four months. Apart from these two thematic sets of memories there are chapters that deal with other unconnected, assorted memories such as the previous Christmas in Palm Springs, the previous summer or when he first learned to drive. As with the rest of the chapters, these sections are introduced by temporal and spatial references since the narrated events are not temporally connected with the events narrated in the present. There is a group of memory chapters that are temporally connected but fragmented and inserted in the narration in separate chapters. They deal with the

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illness and death of Clay’s grandmother and start with their last week on holiday. These connections are not established just by means of temporal references. People and situations are mentioned that reappear in subsequent chapters, establishing continuity. Thus there are loose thematic links or simply words that wake in Clay the memory of a better past which stands out against his empty present. This is William James’s old ‘stream-of-consciousness’ revisited for the MTV generation. MTV has also been linked to the language and structure of dreams (Rifkin 2000: 197; Aufderheide 1986: 120). In Less Than Zero the first memory chapter pops out of a question that his father asks him: ‘Do you want to go to Palm Springs for Christmas?’ (43). This makes Clay daydream about the end of his senior year when he drove out to Palm Springs to see the old house where they used to spend the holidays. These nostalgic passages are juxtaposed with Clay’s personal decadence and his progressive immersion into a darker present, where he and his friends find an overdosed dead boy, watch a snuff movie, a 12-year-old girl is gang-raped by his friends and Julian – his best friend – prostitutes himself to pay for his heroin addiction. The two types of decadence are connected in Clay’s mind and can only lead to his leaving Los Angeles.

5.3 The Role of Songs and Lyrics It is not only the visual and structural aspects of MTV that are represented in the novel; the structure of songs and their lyrics, which constitute the basis for the videos, also have an important role in a novel flooded with references to songs, which are always to be heard in the background and serve to channel the nearly nonexistent communication between characters. Most chapters are constructed following the structure of songs since they do not usually come to a narrative closure but a rhythmic one. Since events in the novel follow the unfinished 24-hour MTV flow and build up a very open type of narrative, the only ‘close-offs’ are rhythm and repetition. Some critics have claimed that the takenfor-granted idea that music videos are open-ended, in the sense that they are not usually resolved or closed in narrative terms, is inaccurate because videos resolve issues in a different way than that of realist texts. Goodwin believes that closure and coherence are presented in videos though the soundtrack by means of repetition, and structural and harmonic closure (1993: 79). For Goodwin the song ends with the repetition of the refrain that ties it up. Similarly, the kind of closure that we find in Less Than Zero is much more ‘musical’ than ‘narrative’, especially within the short chapters that constitute the novel. The very first short chapter is constructed in a circular manner by mirroring the structure of songs. It starts with ‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ (9) and ends in very similar terms, ‘All it comes down to is that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge’ (10). Its repetitive rhythmic structure also adds

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to its song-like quality: ‘Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen. ... Not the mud that had splattered. ... Not the stain on the arm. ... Not the tear on the neck. ... Not the warm winds. ...’ (9). There are also groups of paragraphs that start and finish in the same way, again creating a rhythm and rounding things off. While it rains, a series of disconnected images cross Clay’s mind in a paragraph that starts: ‘Nothing much happens during the days it rains’ and ends ‘This is how the nights are when it rains’ (114–5). There is repetition not just within chapters but from chapter to chapter, which is especially significant at the end of the book. The last chapters work as a kind of countdown before Clay’s long-awaited departure and return to the East Coast university. As Clay’s departure approaches, each chapter begins with a variation of ‘the week before I leave’. By contrast, the final chapter starts differently: ‘There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group’ (207), but ends in the same way ‘After I left’ (208). In this case, repetition enacts the intensification of Clay’s deep desire to leave everything behind, and the sensation that the last days of his stay in Los Angeles are dragging. Songs are important in Less Than Zero but not just in the sense that their structure is translated into the narrative of the novel. They are also important because they are constantly quoted, conveying meanings and feelings that the young reader and MTV fan may grasp. After all, music represents ‘popular culture stripped to its emotional core’ (Fowles 1996: 119), the perfect way to release feelings and convey meanings. Songs have been used to this purpose in other novels such as Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), where the language of pop music is used to portray characters, moods and feelings. Less Than Zero’s use of music in more ambiguous. Some critics, Pamela Thurschwell, for example, have argued that songs act as background in the novel and are detached from the meanings and emotions they once expressed (1999: 297–9). In my opinion, although characters are often oblivious to song lyrics and the message they convey, on a narrative level their presence works as comment on the events and sometimes channels the characters’ inability to communicate. For example, The Killer Pussy’s ‘Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage’ is on the radio when Clay is discussing his drug consumption with his sisters in front of their unconcerned mother (25). Songs are sometimes also directly used to express feelings and say things that are difficult to articulate. Blair, who is in love with Clay but is unsure about his feelings, sings to Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ (30). This image perfectly illustrates the importance that music has among teenagers when it comes to expressing their feelings. As Jib Fowles puts it, ‘[t]hose who hum along with the music or mouth the lyrics are incorporating the music into themselves and themselves into the musically defined terrain where emotions are doctored’ (1996: 120). The young are those in greatest need of emotional adjustment, thus they are especially devoted to music, which they use to manage their emotions. The songs and their lyrics are sometimes intermingled with descriptions of events. In one chapter Clay is listening to the radio in his car when another car

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pulls up next to him. There are a couple of guys in it who think he is a movie star and try to talk to him but Clay ‘freaks out’, makes an illegal turn and leaves. This description is interrupted by quotations in italics from The Little Girls’ ‘The Earthquake Song’: ‘My surfboard’s ready for the tidal wave’, ‘Smack, smack, I fell in a crack’, ‘Now I’m part of the debris’ (45–6; italics in the original). The lyrics of the song express Clay’s desperation at being in Los Angeles, which he is starting to hate. On some occasions the songs work as prescient comments on what is about to happen. For example, Julian sings to Clay a song they used to enjoy: Tom Petty’s ‘Straight into Darkness’. This is what Julian sings: ‘Straight into darkness, we went straight into darkness, out over that line, yeah straight into darkness, straight into night ...’ (48; italics in the original). As the narration progresses, we witness Clay and Julian metaphorically going ‘straight into darkness’ as Clay sees Julian sell himself to pay for his heroin addiction. After Clay has seen Julian prostitute himself, they meet Finn – Julian’s pimp – in order to get his money. In the club where they meet him Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ is playing (178). The song lyrics comment upon Clay and Julian’s need to run away to, as the lyrics put it, ‘get away from the pain that you drive into the heart of me’. Julian’s own feelings about being trapped in Finn’s hands and not being able to leave are also part of the song; Julian is unable to tell Finn what he feels and in a way the song suggests it for him. Some passing references to songs also construct a background atmosphere. The Clash’s ‘Somebody Got Murdered’ plays in the house where, disobeying Finn’s orders, Julian refuses to have sex and ends up being abused and drugged by Finn (181). After that episode, Clay leaves Julian in the house and meets Trent at The Roxy where X is about to sing ‘Sex and Dying in High Society’ (184). By the end of the story, when Clay is about to leave Los Angeles, he listens to the Go-Go’s song ‘Worlds Away’ where an extract is quoted: ‘I wanna be worlds away / I know things will be okay when I get worlds away’ (198; italics in the original). Obviously the song expresses Clay’s feelings and his deep desire to leave. With all this overabundance of references to songs and lyrics, it is not surprising that the last chapter should also make reference to a song. According to Clay, it is a song called ‘Los Angeles’ by a local group that he heard and ‘the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days’ (207). The song recalls the X’s ‘Los Angeles’, a song that deals with a woman who is leaving Los Angeles because she hates everything there. The images that cross Clay’s mind are not those in the song but ‘personal and no one I knew shares them’ (207). These images are apocalyptic: people getting mad, parents eating their children, teenagers blinded by the sun. This is what Clay takes with him when he definitively leaves Los Angeles; he has composed his own song, his own group of juxtaposed video images in his MTV-like life. As we have seen, Less Than Zero is a very ambiguous novel. Elvis Costello and Ellis’s career share many of these ambiguities. Costello started his career at the

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heyday of British punk and his song ‘Less Than Zero’ was a reaction to a television interview with Oswald Mosley, who had been the leader of the British fascist movement in the 1930s. TV creates historical amnesia, and the fact that Oswald Mosley can be interviewed on TV and nobody is bothered makes everything mean less than zero. The song originated in punk outrage but its success turned it into a commodity. As Thurschwell puts it, people bought the album to rebel but also to conform, just as the song criticized the very mass media that Costello used to get his message across (1999: 306–7). Similarly, as seen when dealing with the reception of the novel, some critics railed against it because they thought that the reproduction of the banal MTV style could only lead to a prose that was also banal and superficial. A detailed reading of the novel may show otherwise. However, we cannot ignore the commercial nature of MTV and the fact that videos are also advertisements for the music and the groups performing it. Their ultimate aim is to make the viewer buy the record, and in doing so they may use avant-garde techniques that break free from more traditional narrative languages. This commercial nature of MTV adds new dimensions to the reading of the novel: is it a criticism of the superficial Los Angeles youth lifestyle, where MTV seems to be their only point of reference? Is it a celebration of MTV, youth culture and everything it represents? Is the novel an advertisement for Ellis in the same way that MTV advertises the groups and songs played? Are we dealing with a Bildungsroman or is this novel something else that cannot be judged by traditional literary standards? Some of these questions will find an answer in the next chapter.

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The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the way Less Than Zero’s controversial subject matter is developed in terms of genre. On the one hand, this is a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel; on the other hand, Less Than Zero is also representative of blank fiction since the horrors of the immoral events do not find a narrative voice ready to condemn them. When dealing with the reception of the novel we saw how some reviewers considered Less Than Zero a new Catcher in the Rye. However, Ellis’s novel is better understood in the context of other novels written about adolescents in the 1980s and 1990s such as Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1987), Jill Eisenstadt’s From Rockaway (1987), Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life (1988), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) or Blake Nelson’s Girl (1994) among others. The connection with these other blank fiction novels was ignored and the reviewers’ obsession with finding in Less Than Zero an updated version of a coming-of-age novel such as The Catcher in the Rye led to the misconception that it was not as accomplished as its predecessor. The Catcher in the Rye and Less Than Zero have different aims and a different style. Even the attitude of the narrators is different: Holden Caulfield is an articulate person ready to tell his story in some detail, whereas Clay tells his in passing, in a detached way where events are just juxtaposed by overusing the conjunction ‘and’ and where no explanation or cause/effect sequence is clearly established. Caulfield more openly expresses his feelings and his disillusionment with the world of adult ‘phonies’, for whom he loses respect as he catches them telling lies. His discovery that adults too readily follow ethical rules that are different from those they preach leads him to rebel and lose respect for them. Clay has to face a different society, where adults are as numb and shallow as their sons and daughters. Thus, what Clay faces is not a generation of adults who do not live up to their own ethical rules but a generation of adults who have no rules themselves, who are more degenerate than the younger generation they should be guiding. In a way Less Than Zero looks more like a follow-up to The Catcher in the Rye than an updated repetition of the same formula. This is how the latter ends: If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody

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I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. (1951: 220; italics in the original) Clay seems to have blindly absorbed that last piece of advice to the extent that he is ready to narrate or enumerate the events that take place but he does so protected by an emotional blandness that prevents him from suffering when things go wrong. He seems to believe that if you do not share your feelings with anyone, you won’t suffer for anyone, which is precisely what Caulfield is tempted to do at the end of The Catcher in the Rye. At the end of Less Than Zero Clay comes to admit the reasons for the emotional protective wall he has built around himself: ‘I don’t want to care. If I care about things, it’ll just be worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if I don’t care.’ (1985: 205). This is precisely what he does: not care about anything. Curiously enough, the novel cannot be read as simply as this; he may not care at present but he has a past in which he did care and it returns now and then to his mind. Repressed feelings also return from time to time triggered by billboards he sees, sentences he overhears, lyrics that he catches which all combine at key moments to say what he cannot express. At the end, Clay does not openly admit that his life in Los Angeles was horrible or that his friends and family are empty inside but he does tell about the horrific images that accompany him. The visual language of Less Than Zero cannot be compared to the more narrative language and style of The Catcher in the Rye because both represent very different ways of telling the story of young people. The society portrayed by each novel is also different since the relation between the worlds of adults and teenagers has also evolved.

6.1 Teenagers and Consumer Culture The role of the teenager has changed throughout history. As Palladino points out, in the nineteenth century they were called adolescents and were considered vulnerable and insecure, in need of protection from the world of adults. High schools were meant to guarantee a healthy adolescence and prevent the common expedient of dropping out and joining the workforce. Around the 1920s, high school programmes started to attract more and more adolescents, and by the 1940s a majority of 17-year-olds had earned diplomas. The teenage market started to develop in that decade and by the 1960s adolescents had become the centre of commercial attention, a market niche, since they had been brought up to be consumers, not producers. At the same time, in the late 1960s and 1970s adolescents became teenagers anxious to flout the conventions of their parents and rebel against them by constructing their own image and personality, for example through the rock ‘n’ roll records they bought or through the clothes they wore. In the 1980s and 1990s teenagers became

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conspicuous ‘born to shop’ consumers (1996: xv–xx). They had baby-boomer parents who had rebelled against their parents and who could not or just would not impose their own norms on their children. Besides, change also affected the way families were structured; in the 1950s most mothers were housewives, but by the early 1990s both parents worked in three out of four families. On top of this, divorce rates increased exponentially, which has also left a mark on the way teenagers understand family relations and parental control (Palladino 1996: 253). Less Than Zero is set in the 1980s, a time when consumer culture reached its peak. In his Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption, Martyn Lee argues that consumption became such an important issue during the mid1980s that it even transformed the physical environment with the appearance of shopping malls, while it brought about new forms of advertising and marketing and the expansion of credit card use. Consumerism reached an unparalleled intensity which is reflected in Less Than Zero, with its portrayal of wealthy Los Angeles families in the 1980s, in particular young adults who have the means and the need to consume, a dangerous combination that leads them to kinky sex, drug abuse and even death. The first signs of this detached consumer society are given at the beginning of the novel, when Clay returns home for the Christmas break and finds no one there. His mother and sisters have gone to do some Christmas shopping instead of waiting for Clay’s return. Lacking family support to shape their identity, the young people in the novel have to trust commodities to shape it. Roughly speaking, they are a group of people who are usually insecure and in the process of shaping their character, thus commodities provide them with the possibility of constructing their personality through their consumer choices. Young people in Less Than Zero are also extremely wealthy, which accelerates their craving for consumer objects, decreasing, in the process, their own capacity to feel anything for one another. This is something promoted by their own families: Clay’s father gives them checks as a Christmas present and after Muriel has been in hospital because of her anorexia, her mother buys her a $55,000 Porsche to compensate for her lack of care. Money is the only language through which parents and children speak. Clay’s friends look basically the same: they are all blond, tanned, blue-eyed, with white teeth; all wear sunglasses. As Mike Featherstone underlines: The tendency for consumer culture to differentiate, to encourage the play of difference, must be tempered by the observation that differences must be socially recognizable and legitimated: total otherness like total individuality is in danger of being unrecognisable. (1991b: 87) These insecure but wealthy young people insist on all looking the same. Adults also look the same in this world: the executive who gives Rip some coke, Julian’s pimp or Clay’s father who does his best to keep looking as if he were his son’s

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age thanks to a hair transplant and a facelift. When Clay returns from New Hampshire he does not completely come up to Los Angeles standards, especially because he has lost his tan, which is repetitively remarked on by his friends and family, who advise him to go to various tanning salons, have some vitamin E capsules or simply dye his skin. By the time he leaves Los Angeles, Clay looks like everybody else: ‘I can make out my reflection, blond hair cut too short, a deep tan, sunglasses still on’ (167). Throughout the book there are various norms of behaviour that have to be followed in order to be part of this privileged group of the young. These norms also extend to the body itself, the most important commodity of all. Bret Easton Ellis himself, in an article written in the New York Times five years after the publication of the novel, claimed that from the videos that youths watch – we have already seen the importance of MTV in the novel – they draw a clear conclusion: ‘image has become the key selling point, making the pretty, the young and the Nautilized the norm’ (1990: 37). In the novel there are some fleeting images of those who cannot fit in, such as a fat girl who is sitting alone at a bar trying to chat up a bartender who simply ignores her (108). This society’s philosophy is summarized in the words of a man who has paid for sex with Julian: ‘Yes, you’re a very beautiful boy ... and here, that’s all that matters’ (175). It is only at the end of the novel that someone openly expresses the idea that beauty may not be enough. The scene takes place at the very end when Blair definitely breaks up with Clay: ‘You’re a beautiful boy, Clay, but that’s about it’ (204). Parents and children alike share this obsession with the image in a society without moral rules to guide young people. Blair’s parents are divorced and her father, who is a film producer, brings his boyfriend to his daughter’s party with Blair’s mother as a witness. Daniel is not sure where his parents are, they may be shopping in Japan or in Aspen and Kim learns in Variety that her mother is in Hawaii scouting locations with the director of her next film. This is the general attitude of parents towards their children: they do not seem to care about them. They lead their own frivolous lives without being really concerned about their children’s shallow attitudes. The situation is especially obvious when the subject of drugs pops up. Clay’s mother impassively listens to Clay accuse his young sisters of having stolen a quarter of a gram of cocaine from his room. When Clay tells his father that he looks thin and pale because of drugs, his father just answers: ‘I didn’t quite hear that’ (43). The fact that the events in Less Than Zero take place during Christmas underlines even more the loose family ties among the Los Angeles wealthy in the book. Clay’s parents are divorced so they rarely see each other. When Clay asks his mother to go to Trumps for a drink she claims to be too busy but: ‘She was lying out by the pool reading Glamour magazine when I asked her to come’ (144). He ends up going with his father, with whom he cannot even talk because he is too busy looking out the window eyeing his new Ferrari. Clay’s sisters are not really close to Clay, who is even unsure about their age; in fact, he never gives them a name. All of them meet for Christmas Eve dinner but Clay’s feelings are clear: ‘No one talks about anything

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much and no one seems to mind, at least I don’t. ... I hope I’ll never have to do this again’ (67). The lack of a paternal figure leads some of Clay’s friends to get dangerous replacements. Finn, Julian’s pimp, talks to him like a father: ‘Now, you know that you’re my best boy and you know that I care for you. Just like my own son’ (171). However, when Julian refuses to have sex, Finn shows his real nature. As his name suggests, Finn is actually a shark who says: ‘You don’t have any choice. Do you understand that? You can’t leave. You can’t walk out now. Are you gonna run to Mommy or Daddy, huh?’ ... ‘Your expensive shrink?’ ... ‘Who? Do you have any friends left? What the fuck are you gonna do? Just leave?’ (182) Julian does not have a choice because his parents do not care and his friends are too busy caring about themselves. The situation is obviously an exaggeration of what an unstructured family may lead to, but it is something that conservative radicals also denounced in the 1980s. In his 1987 famous The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom claimed that the family’s spiritual void had left the field open to other temptations such as rock music, which led to ‘the parents’ loss of control over their children’s moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it’ (1987: 76). Curiously enough, Bloom’s radical views find a clear illustration in Less Than Zero.

6.2 Popular and Mass Culture Bloom pointed an accusing finger at rock music and popular culture in general, which also play an important role in the novel. In fact, popular and mass culture is very important in the life of the young people portrayed. They are spoken to directly by advertisers and have their own market share: a long list of retail chains, magazines, television networks and newspapers that have specialized in them. As far as marketers are concerned: ‘teenagers inhabit their own leisure world, one that is dominated by movies, music, fashion, fads, and shopping’ (Palladino 1996: xiv). The world of Less Than Zero is the leisure world of teenagers, a world outside the realm of adults who, as we have seen, are incapable of providing guidance. Young people search for guidance in mass culture and against this background Elvis Costello emerges as an icon. This is suggested by the title of the novel and a poster of Costello in Clay’s room. It is a poster of his Trust album and in Clay’s eyes Costello is more trustworthy than parents and friends. According to Pamela Thurschwell, this poster suggests ‘that commercial signs can be reinvested with a critical significance that the novel gestures towards’ (1999: 301). In the previous chapter, we have seen how song lyrics are adapted by the young people in the novel to say things they cannot openly say. In this case, Costello represents the punk rebellion of the

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1970s and 1980s against unbearable social conditions, which, although apparently worlds away from Clay’s wealthy, blank, passive life, still has a lasting effect on Clay’s mind. The other Costello poster in the novel is a Rolling Stone cover with the words ‘Elvis Costello Repents’ and is found in the consulting room of Clay’s psychiatrist. This poster sends the opposite message to the one in Clay’s room: even Costello repents and is aware of the excesses of punk rebellion. Clay is divided between the two Costellos, the two attitudes towards life and the double implications of mass culture: young people use it and are used by it. In Less Than Zero Clay and his friends are not just young, they are also rich, which gives them access to all sorts of consumer goods, with no limits to their wishes since their parents do not exert any control over them. Clay’s room is loaded with pop culture references: there are records, a television set, comics and the Elvis Costello poster just mentioned. There are constant references to films and on many occasions Clay meets his friends to go to the movies. MTV is somehow present in all the chapters, as are references to songs, groups and albums, as we saw in the previous chapter. Since they have everything, they can enjoy nothing and, thus, they embark on a perpetual search for pleasure that is not to be found. As Clay puts it in an early scene: ‘I get up and drive to a record store and walk down the aisles, look through the record bins, but I don’t find anything I want that I don’t already have’ (94). Mass and pop culture fail to satisfy him because he can afford everything. As a result, he seeks fulfilment in more dangerous entertainment. Mass culture also gets in the way when characters attempt to express their feelings. When Clay visits Muriel at Cedars-Sinai she is watching TV, has Glamour, Vogue and Interview around and, after asking for a cigarette, which Clay does not have, she shrugs and turns the volume up on the television. In another episode, Blair tries to confront Clay on the phone because she wants to continue their relationship but he cannot face a serious conversation with her on this matter: ‘I tell her I can’t remember what our relationship was like and I try to steer the conversation away to other topics, about movies or concerts or what she’s been doing all day, or what I’ve been doing tonight’ (71–2). These are the things Clay’s friends and family talk about so as not get any deeper and discover that they are empty inside. This situation reverberates with Allan Bloom’s diagnosis that the music the young listen to ‘makes conversation impossible’ and makes life ‘into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged masturbation fantasy’ (1987: 75). Ironically enough, even Clay’s psychiatrist seems to share this attitude of rejection towards the open expression of feelings, and when Clay tries to talk about his problems it is the psychiatrist who is not able to face that particular conversation and prefers to talk about Elvis Costello instead. Clay faces the impossibility of communicating with his family, with his friends and even with his psychiatrist, who shares Clay’s interest in MTV and proves not to be the authoritarian figure Clay needs. When Alana visits Clay because she has had an abortion he does not know what to say or do: ‘I think we’ve all lost some sort of feeling’ (158) is Alana’s

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pronouncement and at the end of the novel there are two situations that confirm this statement. One is Julian’s prostitution and the other is Blair’s final breakup with Clay before he definitively leaves for New Hampshire. The former situation reveals Clay’s empty feelings when he discovers Julian’s real condition: ‘Why didn’t you tell me the money was for this?’ and Julian, his eyes all glassy, sad grin on his face, says, ‘Who cares? Do you? Do you really care?’ and I don’t say anything and realize that I really don’t care and suddenly feel foolish, stupid. (172) Julian was Clay’s best friend and now he does not seem to care about his having to sell himself. The explanation of Clay’s attitude is given when Blair faces him and asks him what he cares about and what makes him happy, to which Clay nihilistically answers that nothing does. Thus, Clay and his friends have created a protective shield so that their feelings will not show and they will not be seen to be weak. They forego feelings for mass culture and consumerism, which can only lead to a passive attitude towards everything that surrounds them. Clay remains a passive, characterless person throughout the novel. Not coincidentally his name is Clay, meaning malleable. His favourite sentence seems to be ‘Why not?’ and his passivity ranges from unimportant things like giving trivial advice to friends or deciding where to go, to going to bed with anyone that suggests it, be it a boy or a girl. His attitude towards drugs is also very detached. He takes them whenever someone offers them, even when he does not feel like having any. Neither does he stop Muriel from shooting up some heroin; instead, he stays and looks on. Clay’s attitude seems to embody Bret Easton Ellis’s own views about ‘twentysomethings’, who lack coherence and are ‘clueless yet wizened, too unopinionated to voice concern, purposefully enigmatic and indecisive’ (1990: 1). The passivity that Clay shows with regard to everything that surrounds him accounts for his descent into the world of horror that lurks behind the lives of wealthy young people. The easy access they have to anything money can buy and anything mass culture can offer makes them perpetually bored. There is always a party going on but after one such party, when Blair asks if they had a good time, nobody answers. Shopping also becomes boring when they can buy anything they want and sex turns into an unexciting activity when no one forbids it. Clay always agrees to it and, when he has sex with Griffin, their encounter is described in a very jaded way: ‘I’m sitting on the floor, my back leaning against his bed, bored, sober, smoking a cigarette’ (37). They seem to have seen it all and thus are always eager for new things that will take them out of their general world-weariness. Getting bored seems their greatest fear, something they have to prevent by all means; to that purpose Benjamin recommends reading The Face, one of the most influential magazines of the 1980s. According to Dick Hebdige, The Face facilitates the ‘distracted gaze’ of the urban consumer

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(of looks, objects, ideas, values). It is ideal for pleasure-seeking young people who are learning ‘how to dance in the dark, how to survive, how to stay on top (on the surface) of things’ (1988: 166). The guidance they cannot find in adults they find in mass culture but there comes a point when the level of saturation is such that they cannot find any thrill in that either.

6.3 Drugs, Sex and Death John Fiske (1989a, 1989b) is a firm believer that popular culture is charged with the interests of the dominant class but that a certain degree of resistance is allowed to let people make their own meanings. In Less Than Zero the passivity of the young is so great and their access so unrestricted that there seems to be no room for the resistance suggested by Fiske. Mass culture and popular culture fall short for them, so Clay and his friends start to search for new sources of pleasure and excitement by focusing on three main areas that increase in intensity and horror as the story advances: drugs, sex and finally death. To a certain extent, this is the logical extension of the passivity and mass culture overload they have experienced. Ellis claims that young people are unshockable because from an early age they have been surrounded with visions of fictive and actual violence (1990: 1). Palladino has also remarked on this exposure of young people to the excesses of mass culture: According to a Harris poll, the typical teenager watched about 14,000 instances of sexual material on television during the 1987–88 season. Only 165 of these, however, dealt with practical issues like pregnancy, birth control, abortion, or disease. Popular teenage shows like ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ focus on ‘dating, drinking, sex, broken families, sex, morality, and sex,’ according to one reporter, and they attract a ‘teenage’ audience as young as eight! An equally young audience can tune into MTV, youth’s own cable television station, and watch hours of provocative videos or laugh at ‘Beavis and Butt-head’, a show that celebrates mindless behaviour and sexual obsession. (1996: 254) In Less Than Zero teenagers go a step further, transforming their mass culture interest in sex, drugs and violence into increasingly more acute deviant behaviour as the narrative progresses. Drugs are commonplace for Clay’s friends since all of them seem to be hooked on some type of stimulant, unspecified pills, coke, Preludin, speed, Valium, Thorazine, Nembutal, Desoxyn, Quaalude or Clove cigarettes. All these drugs are socially acceptable to them as they do not pose any moral problem or even social concern on the part of families who seem to be well aware of their children’s open consumption. The most popular drug is cocaine, which is

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consumed both in groups, as a ‘social’ activity, and individually. When coke consumption becomes a habit it is not exciting anymore; they thus move the line of interest to other hard drugs such as heroin. When they see Muriel shooting up heroin, Kim tells her not to do it but ‘her lips are trembling and she looks excited and I can make out the beginnings of a smile and I get the feeling that she doesn’t mean it’ (86). Unlike Blair, who decides to leave the room, Spit finds it wild, the photographer takes a picture and Clay’s hands shake as he lights a cigarette. This is the deepest display of emotion that readers will find in the novel: the crossing of one of the few barriers they still had left and that still makes them feel alive. Their attitude towards drugs is certainly hypocritical. When they talk about a young man called Larry who has not been admitted to Film School, even though his father has a series on TV, it turns out that he is a heroin addict. Rip, who is Clay’s cocaine dealer, mentions that Larry used to be normal, to which Clay cannot hide his astonishment: ‘ “Oh shit, Rip,” I call out. “What does normal mean to you?” / “No, I mean really normal” ’ (112). The ‘normality’ line keeps moving and more and more gruesome situations are considered normal for them. They do not have any morals or ethical guidance, thus Rip and Spin (both dealers) criticize Julian for selling coke to junior high kids but later on they will remorselessly rape a 12-year-old girl. In this sense, their attitude towards sex also resembles their attitude towards drugs. From the very beginning we see that they are not very picky when choosing their sexual partners. Clay has slept with both boys and girls, and it seems in great numbers since he is unsure of their names. Threesomes are also the norm, so when Trent tells Clay not to go into Kim’s room because Julian, Kim and Derf are having sex there, Clay just asks ‘Derf’s here?’ (35). Paedophilic activities are also part of the norm, so when Clay visits Rip he is not surprised to find a boy of about 15 or 16 who has spent the night with him. Sex with Blair is sometimes presented as a boring activity designed to while away the time: ‘I’m tired and a little stoned and didn’t really want to come, but Blair actually came over to my house earlier and we went swimming and then to bed and Kim called up’ (80). The way sex turns into a monotonous activity is seen especially in an episode where Clay goes to a girl’s house to have sex. They do not talk or touch. Instead, they both masturbate wearing sunglasses and using suntan lotion. Afterwards they turn on MTV and Clay leaves. They are so numb that not even sex makes them any closer. Sex has to turn into something devious to really arouse them and make them feel alive. The change starts at a verbal level when Daniel tells Clay about a girl he knows who got shot full of smack and was taken to a party where she was gang-banged by the entire party. Clay just thinks that it is ‘too bad’ but Daniel’s story ends up being just an idea for a screenplay (160). Later on, this fiction will become real when Trent and Clay go to Rip’s house to see something that will ‘blow’ their minds (188). There is a naked girl of around 12 tied up to a bed.

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Spin injects her with some drug or other and gets ready to rape her. Clay decides to leave the room but Rip, Trent and Spin stay. When Clay raises objections and suggests that it is not right, Rip simply answers: ‘What’s right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.’ ... ‘But you don’t need anything. You have everything.’ ... ‘Oh, shit, Rip, what don’t you have?’ ‘I don’t have anything to lose.’ (189–190) They feel empowered because they can get everything they want; hence, they cannot stop at anything. For Baudrillard this is a ‘utopian dream made reality,’ a situation that starts in Santa Barbara and extends through the United States and the developed world: In the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’ What do you do when everything is available – sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has become the whole world’s problem. (1988a: 30) Clay and his friends live a perpetual orgy where everything is on hand, where they already have everything, which leads them to search for what nobody wants: their own destruction. From the very beginning of the book death is there in the background of everything that takes place. In fact, for some critics, such as Elisabeth Young, death is the main concern of the novel (1992b: 39). One of the drug dealers is called Dead; some of Clay’s parents’ friends have died of cancer; on the way to Malibu Daniel, Blair and Clay see two police cars and an ambulance searching for an accident; and when Clay accompanies Julian to meet a client, an ambulance and a police car pass by. Actual death is directly met in the many people who overdose in the novel but, in general terms, death is seen as another game to play. Quite literally, Clay’s sisters play a game in the swimming pool in which they pretend to be dead. Clay becomes more and more obsessed with death. On one occasion he remembers how he started to collect clippings of terrible deaths when he was 15. Back to the present, we learn that there is talk of a monster or a werewolf and that someone has disappeared in Bel Air. The body of a mutilated dog has been found, four people have been beaten to death and coyotes run with red rags (domestic cats). When Clay faces death in more direct terms he is fascinated with it: he and Blair run over a coyote and for ten minutes Clay watches the coyote die. When an overdosed dead boy is found they cannot take their eyes off the dead boy but they still see it as a game and put a cigarette in the corpse’s mouth.

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This interest in death and horrific situations leads Clay to actually watch as Julian prostitutes himself. These are Clay’s thoughts as he makes up his mind to accompany Julian: I also realize that I’ll go with Julian to the Saint Marquis. That I want to see if things like this can actually happen. And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn’t matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst. (172) They have no real friends, no real family, they do not feel love for anyone. At the same time they live an apparently perfect life of luxury and wealth. According to Baudrillard, California projects an image of such perfection that a European ‘dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here’ (1988a: 122). That deadly, dark side repressed by the shallow perfection of Los Angeles comes to life in Less Than Zero. When Rip points at a number of wrecked cars at the bottom of a hill, he says that he had friends who died there. Rip’s name is already a reference to death: R.I.P. ‘Rest In Peace’. After that, they get into the car and enter a dead-end street where this dialogue unfolds: ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. / ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Just driving.’ / ‘But this road doesn’t go anywhere,’ I told him. / ‘That doesn’t matter.’ ‘What does?’ I asked, after a little while. / ‘Just that we’re on it, dude,’ he said. (195) It seems that, after facing death and with their general lack of interest in everything, they just appreciate the fact that they are alive. In their search for stronger emotions that may stimulate them more than their ‘normal’ life of consumerism, sex and drugs, they end up watching a snuff movie at a party. Blair walks out of the room but Clay watches a little longer. When it finishes Trent has a hard-on and Daniel is smiling red-faced. They conclude that the film must have been real because someone paid $500,000 for it and it is impossible to fake a castration. This conclusion does not make them concerned for the two youngsters who were raped, tortured and killed in the film but leads them to further excitement at having seen the real thing, at having met death face-to-face and overcome it. Death and suffering after all are just a game. There is a precarious balance between violence and affluence that is broken in Less Than Zero when, after being saturated with the mass media violence of daily life, the young people pay attention to the uncontrollable and unaccountable violence that contradicts and cannot be contained in their consumer society. According to Baudrillard, this violence is inextricably linked to affluence. He focuses on the different forms of ‘anomie’, or anomalies, which are characteristic aspects of an affluent and permissive society and are the result of

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its difficult balance. These anomalies ‘run from destructiveness (violence, delinquency), through collective escapist behaviour (drugs, hippies, non-violence), to contagious depressiveness (fatigue, suicide, neuroses)’ (1970: 175). Through the drugs they consume Clay and his friends live in a general atmosphere of collective escapism that helps them forget and sleep. At the same time they are constantly jaded, tired, unwilling to act. Destructiveness may be seen in the way their activities evolve towards violence and horror, especially when they face a corpse and mock it, watch a snuff movie and finally rape a girl. The anomalies that can be detected in these young people are the result of the darkest face of their affluent society. These anomalies are soothed by society through different means. On the one hand, we find caring agencies and the use of tranquillizers, relaxants, hallucinogens and different therapies. Baudrillard underlines how ‘[a]n increasingly large budget goes into consoling the beneficiaries of the miracle of affluence for their anxious satisfaction’ (1970: 177). In Less Than Zero this is especially seen through Clay and his psychiatrist. However, the latter is also so immersed in consumer society that he cannot help Clay deal with his general anxiety and panic attacks. In a desperate attempt Clay even tries religion but this too has been deeply commodified. He watches religious programmes where he learns that Jesus will come through the eye of the television screen for those that feel frustrated and confused. Clay takes it literally and waits for an hour but nothing happens (140–1). As we saw in the previous chapter, MTV is often used as a soothing balm to relax and blank out their minds. Clay is in a desperate search for consolation that he cannot find. According to Baudrillard, the affluent society also tries to use the anxiety it generates to create a means of simulating consumption and turning guilt and violence into consumable goods (1970: 178). In Less Than Zero one has the impression that this solution has been used to saturation point already and that they cannot consume anymore, and that as a result they may fall into other more exciting activities such as heroin use, prostitution, rape and death. Clay cannot find what he is looking for in the perpetual MTV present he is living, thus he falls back on the past trying to recall better times when he still had a real family, a girlfriend and a best friend. In the light of the MTV structure of the novel and its already discussed narrative content, it becomes obvious that this is a very complex novel. Its subject matter is also that of MTV: urban life, glamorous lifestyle, luxurious cars and consumer culture, and images of excess. For John Fiske, even though MTV deals with bourgeois capitalism and is closely related to television commercials, it also contains the power of rebellion in itself (1987: 250). There are images of patriarchal capitalism but they run free, not even connected to the words of the song. Sometimes it is the contrast between images and lyrics that provides the means of rebellion. This rebellion is certainly debatable since it confers too much power on an audience who is expected to be capable of going beyond the straight pleasures provided by MTV to find a means of rebelling against capitalism. Youth culture has been thoroughly discussed in these very terms

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since teenagers are the perfect consumers who end up constructing a personality through their consumer habits. On the other hand, they are a group who tend to create subcultures to distance themselves from the adult world and display their self-expression and resistance to their elders. In cultural studies, subcultures have been an important focus of interest because they represent a site of ideological struggle. In his 1979 classic Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige, one of the most influential critics in this area, stated that the youth subculture used consumer culture for its own purposes, loading products with meanings opposite to those originally intended. Consumer culture is used as a form of rebellion against authoritarian figures such as parents. Hebdige adjusted this position in Hiding in the Light, where he saw the politics of youth culture in more ambiguous terms, neither ‘ “commercial exploitation” nor “genuine revolt.” It is neither simply resistance against some external order nor straightforward conformity with the parent culture’ (1988: 35). The studies that have followed this critical path have worked through the ambiguities that consumer culture poses for the young. For Simon Philo, ‘youth is a border territory where power and authority are contested and space is won and lost’ (2004: 219). In this sense, we cannot deal with subcultures and youth in general terms since there are many different types of youth. In a 2004 collection of essays edited by Neil Campbell, where Philo’s essay is included, there is a greater emphasis on specific youth subcultures that take into account variants like gender, class, race and sexuality. Less Than Zero cannot be analysed without considering that the young people represented are extremely wealthy, have complete access to consumer culture and no intention to rebel against it. This apparent lack of rebellion in the novel and its depressing depiction of young people was especially criticized on its release, as we saw when dealing with its reception. The problem lies in the fact that this is not a coming-of-age novel in which, after a learning process, the protagonist evolves and turns into a more mature person. No improvement in society is brought forth through Clay’s actions. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, this is not The Catcher in the Rye, but a type of coming-of-age novel such as that described by Kirk Curnutt (2001) who has dealt with this type of novel and underlined that in the 1980s and 1990s a new type of coming-of-age novel emerged. Instead of young people ready to rebel against their elders, as might have been the case with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, we find young people too blank and numb to even feel or act. They are not oppressed by any adult authority; they lack a point of reference. In the narration there is a stylistic detachment that underlines the amorality depicted but the narrational agency is not disengaged, it blames parents for their numb children, even showing a certain degree of nostalgia for parental authority. Other critics, such as Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean, have also underlined this change in coming-of-age novels where ‘[a]ll values are gone, even the memory or dream of values’ (1997: 233).

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These novels have been blamed for being as blank as their characters, an accusation commonly levelled at blank fiction authors. John W. Aldridge’s reaction to the novel is symptomatic: ‘At the very least a book about people who cannot think or feel had better provide some clue as to the reason they cannot think or feel’ (1992: 134). He even suggests Hemingway as an example of an author who took great pains to explain the reasons for his characters’ actions. Nevertheless, this loose narrative allows for many interpretations that range from Aldridge’s, who sees no explanation at all for the characters’ acts, to those like Peter Freese’s, who believes that science fiction horror and violent porn have led to the callousness and insensitive behaviour shown by the characters (1990: 79), or Nicki Sahlin’s (1991), who gives the novel an existentialist reading in line with the values of Camus and Sartre. Other critics like James Annesley (1998) and Günter Leypoldt (2001), have claimed that the problem with these extreme analyses is that they judge the novel by traditional standards, expecting and looking for clear-cut explanations, or they simply choose one aspect of the novel and turn it into the main one. In my opinion, Less Than Zero is a highly ambiguous work, a perfect example of the advantages and disadvantages that blank fiction writing offers its readers. A traditional cause-effect reading of the novel fails to hold because of the obnoxiousness of the events narrated and the indifference of Clay’s narrative style. He is not a hero in a coming-of-age novel. In fact, he is an extremely passive character who seems only slightly aware of the moral depravity that is going on around him. He never openly criticizes his friends’ most despicable actions, such as the gang-rape of the 12-year-old or the snuff movie. He does not take part in the actions but he does nothing to prevent them. He seems uncomfortable in Los Angeles and is willing to leave but he never openly says so. At the level of Clay’s narration there is no criticism for his friends’ actions, whose company he keeps until his final departure. This is not to say that there is no criticism in the novel or that Ellis as the author of the novel is defending this type of unethical behaviour. As we saw when we introduced the term ‘blank fiction’, these novels have to be read in a different way since the blankness and looseness of the narration offer material that is ambiguous and difficult to interpret in a single rounded fashion. The textual and cultural ambiguity of Less Than Zero already hinted at in the previous chapter dealing with its MTV structure should become more obvious in the present chapter dealing with its narrative concerns. A certain degree of criticism and rejection of Clay’s actions can be seen through the assorted images that combine in his head, for which he never gives an interpretation but which he simply recounts. The set of words or mottos that reverberate through the novel, mirroring the MTV-like juxtaposition of images, work as perfect comments on the immoral actions around him: ‘Disappear Here’, ‘Wonder if he’s for sale’ and ‘People are afraid to merge’. In addition, the paragraphs dealing with the past that Clay nostalgically remembers serve as another juxtaposition to the empty present, a means through which Clay seems to reject such a

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present. As we saw in the previous chapter, the lyrics of the songs that are heard in the background serve as the expressive field through which the harshest criticisms are levelled at the Los Angeles lifestyle. However, whether this type of criticism is effective is not so clear. David Pan, in one of the first critical studies of Less Than Zero, claimed that in Clay there was a combination of media ‘voyeur’ and media ‘critic’. According to Pan, Clay is fascinated by what he sees, but remains distant and seeks to expose the subjugation. For him this technique ends up being a failure since the distance of the critic from the object is what makes criticism possible and Clay never keeps such distance (1988: 144–146). I disagree with Pan’s viewpoint because Clay is a voyeur but never a critic. The criticism is not in his actions or words; the criticism lies at a more structural level, in the MTV style, in the songs, in the mottos, in the juxtaposition of images and in the contrast with the past sequences, that is to say, at that narrative level which in narratology is considered to hold the text’s ultimate implications (Genette 1980). Less Than Zero combines the power of voyeurism through Clay’s actions with criticism at a structural level, which leads to many contradictions, especially in the area of mass and consumer culture. In Less Than Zero a contradictory combination coexists: there is a depiction of mass culture as oppressive and negative for the lives of young people which, however, runs parallel to a representation of mass culture as a means through which these people can express their feelings, a means through which the novel criticizes its own contents. The novel is not a celebration of mass culture but a depiction of its role in the characters’ lives. No rebellion is sought from them because they have nothing to rebel against and hence the book’s ‘failure’ as a coming-of-age novel. Its open and apparently void interpretative offering gives room for the audience to decide on the novel’s inner criticism of what is told, and shows at the same time the advantages and shortcomings of blank fiction novels.

Part 3

American Psycho (1991)

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The Reception of American Psycho

American Psycho was published in 1991 and caused a public outcry. The story of its reception cannot be properly understood without considering the circumstances that surrounded the novel’s publication and Ellis’s own status at the time. Before American Psycho, Ellis had published The Rules of Attraction in 1987, two years after the publication of Less Than Zero. The reception of The Rules of Attraction can help us contextualize the reception of American Psycho and the literary reputation that Bret Easton Ellis had at the time of its release. The Rules of Attraction was both a commercial and critical failure even though, or precisely because, it looked like a continuation of Less Than Zero. It focused on a New England college campus called Camden College where the shallow lives of three college students called Lauren, Paul and Sean (whose brother Patrick Bateman was to become the main character in American Psycho) were described in full detail. Both novels shared common subjects – casual sex, drugs and consumerism – and style – deadpan prose and shallow character portrayal. The only important difference was The Rules of Attraction’s polyphonic structure, since each of the three main characters narrated a part of the story. To understand why The Rules of Attraction was such a failure we have to consider Ellis’s status as a brat packer and the belief that many critics and reviewers held that Ellis and his fellows had been praised in excess and were just the product of promotional hype. For many reviewers the success of the brat packers’ first books had been an illusion and their second books proved their lack of literary significance. Besides, there was a constant feeling that the literary brat pack wanted to change the rules of publishing and dispense with the need for young authors to struggle for success. As Nikki Finke complained, they were ‘demanding to be published, promoted and paid well almost from the start of their careers’ (1987: 1). Besides, their time was ‘taken up with parties and seminars and interviews and all the other paraphernalia of life in the fast lane, the work – the ostensible cause of the writer’s celebrity – either doesn’t get done or gets done badly’ (Yardley 1987: B2). The idea was that after their early and much hyped successful first novels, the brat packers had preferred to behave like celebrities, neglecting their literary careers. Ellis’s second novel gave the chance to fall on Ellis and criticize not just his novel but brat packers he might be seen as representing at the time. On many

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occasions, Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction was reviewed together with Tama Janowitz’s A Cannibal in Manhattan (1987) and both were harshly criticized. Some of the review headlines of the time give an idea of the general tone adopted. The New Yorker’s was ‘Books: Advertisements for Themselves’ and started: Luckily for Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz we’re all too hip to worry about the death of the novel anymore. In more idealistic times – say, from the late forties to the early sixties, when writers like Mailer spoke of the Novel as if it were Grail – the publication of Ellis’s ‘The Rules of Attraction’ (Simon & Schuster; $17.95) and Janowitz’s ‘A Cannibal in Manhattan’ (Crown; $17.95) within two weeks of each other might have been the occasion of panic in the streets of Morningside Heights, or for hastily convened symposia in Partisan Review. (Rafferty 1987: 142) Along the same line, David Lehman’s Newsweek review was called ‘Two Divine Decadents: Lifestyles of the Young and the Naughty’ (1987) and Sheppard’s Time review was titled ‘Yuppie Lit: Publicize or Perish: Hot Young Authors Are Wheeled, Dealed and Hyped’ (1987). All these headlines thus insisted on the ‘fabricated’ nature of the brat packers’ success. The criticism of their second novels reached disproportionate levels. In fact Jeffrey Giles wrote, for the National Review, that ‘college newspapers, which reflect the same audience that Bret Ellis is presumably speaking for, have had no qualms about suggesting that his new book, The Rules of Attraction, is the worst novel ever written’ (1987: 65). This is a statement Giles seemed to agree with and which gives an idea of the extent of the censure that Ellis – and brat packers in general – received. A more in-depth analysis of the reviews shows a general coincidence in some of the pieces of criticism levelled at Ellis. The most repeated notion was that Ellis was glamorizing what he intended to criticize. For many reviewers, the long descriptions of drugs, sex and consumerism were not accompanied by any condemnation. Instead, Ellis preferred to play with the readers’ voyeuristic impulses (Kakutani 1987: 17). In this line, there was a general belief that the novel was not a social satire either. In the New York Times, Scott Spenser acknowledged that Ellis’s deadpan prose was deliberate but it did not work as satire since ‘this time out the author has stumbled over the line separating cool from cold. Where we ought to be saying, “Oh my God, no,” we are, instead, saying, “Who cares?” ’ (1987: 15). The book was received with a lack of interest rather than with concern for those involved because, as Richard Eder suggested, satire needs contrast or an alternative in order to work and in The Rules of Attraction there was none (1987: 8). These arguments had also come up regarding Less Than Zero, but at that time some other aspects were considered to be positive. The acute description of the lives of spoiled youth in Los Angeles, the ear for dialogue, the MTV language and the minimalist influence were taken into account in the reviews. In the case of The Rules of Attraction these other aspects were ignored and the focus was on

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the seeming glamorization of sex and drugs produced by Ellis’s deadpan, uncommitted prose. In American Psycho Ellis dealt with the same type of character: a wealthy, shallow young man, obsessed with consumerism, drugs and sex. There was only one important difference: this man, Patrick Bateman, was also a serial killer given to torturing, raping and murdering. Since Bateman was the narrator of the story and he told the events in a blank, uncommitted prose, the resulting novel became a scandal that reached beyond the literary and cultural scene. Even before the book’s publication, it became the topic of heated debates in the media, and after its publication it turned into a bestseller. The novel sold 100,000 copies at $14 each in only two months in the United States. The sales have continued and the paperback has been reprinted many times. There was even a hardback edition, which is very uncommon when the book has already been released in paperback format, and it has been translated into an impressive number of languages. These data confirm that American Psycho was a clear commercial success, the reasons for which are various; in order to understand them, it is relevant to analyse the story of its publication. The book was initially accepted for publication by Simon & Schuster and Ellis was paid an advance of $300,000 for it. Already on 24 October 1990, more than two months before the planned date of publication, there were rumours circulating in the press about the book’s subject matter. Ellis’s agent, Amanda Urban, admitted that when the manuscript was delivered to Simon & Schuster ‘there was some feeling of revulsion on the part of some of the younger women there’ (in McDowell 1990a: C18). However, this initial revulsion dissolved and the book was accepted. The rumour of the book’s subject matter also alerted the bookshops. Barbara Morrow, co-owner of the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, stated that she was not going to advertise or put the book in the window and that they were taking a very low profile on it. However, they would never take the position of rejecting a book by a well-known author because of subject matter (in McDowell 1990a: C18). In fact, by November a reported 19,400 copies had been ordered by bookstores and American Psycho was included in Simon & Schuster’s winter 1991 catalogue as ‘a black comedy, a disturbing portrait of a psychopath, a subtle send-up of the blatant behaviour of the eighties – and a grotesque nightmare of lust and insanity’ (in Hoban 1990: 35). However, there were some clear negative responses at this stage. After reading the book, George Corsillo, who had designed the jackets of Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, refused to do the cover and even stated that ‘I had to draw the line ... I felt disgusted with myself for reading it’ (in Sheppard 1990: 100). Penguin declined to exercise the paperback option presumably because of the violent content of the book. Finally, on 14 November 1990, Simon & Schuster announced the cancellation of American Psycho’s publication on the grounds of the novel’s brutality and violence. This was a very controversial move since the novel was scheduled to be shipped to bookstores in December. Richard E. Snyder, the company chairman, said that after reading the novel ‘I just decided it was an error in judgement to

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put our name on a book of such questionable taste, and that’s when I decided we wouldn’t publish it’ (in McDowell 1990b: 13). The cancellation of the book was partly due to the fact that Spy (Stiles 1990) and Time (Sheppard 1990) magazines had previously scrutinized prepublication proofs and had published excerpts of the novel that were mainly descriptions of out-of-context torture and killing: I keep spraying Torri with mace and then I try to cut off all her fingers and finally I pour acid into her vagina which doesn’t kill her, so I resort to stabbing her in the throat and eventually the blade of the knife breaks off into what’s left of her neck, stuck on bone, so I stop. (In Stiles 1990: 43) These descriptions raised a public outcry and many considered that a book like American Psycho should not be published on ethical grounds. In spite of the book’s cancellation, Ellis kept his $300,000 advance and, only 48 hours later, Vintage Books – a branch of Random House – acquired American Psycho and decided to publish it as a trade paperback in early 1991. It is interesting to consider Vintage’s decision to publish it as a trade paperback in the Vintage Contemporary Series within the context of the book’s status in the cultural arena. Simon & Schuster’s original decision was to publish it as a hardback, since Ellis was a ‘serious’ writer who had achieved considerable literary prestige after the publication of Less Than Zero in 1985. Hardbacks are usually reserved for the first edition of books written by prestige writers and, for literary critic Robert Zaller, Vintage’s choice of the trade paperback format consigned the book to a literary limbo somewhere between trade and pulp fiction (1993: 318). In my opinion, the publication in the Vintage Contemporary Series did not detract from the novel’s literary merit; on the contrary, Sonny Mehta – president of Knopf and Vintage – claimed that American Psycho was ‘a book of serious intent ... think of Pasolini, of Genet. It’s all a matter of taste and judgement’ (in Reuter 1990: 10). He also insisted that the book had literary quality and should reach readers since it ‘is a serious book by a serious writer. It paints a not very pretty picture of some not very pretty people, and it deserves to be read’ (in Green et al. 1990: 120). Mehta had to defend Vintage Books from those who believed that they were publishing a gory porn book, previously rejected by Simon & Schuster, in order to earn both money and notoriety. Sonny Mehta’s decision to publish the book in the Vintage Contemporary Series was a way of proving his belief in the book’s literary quality. Vintage Contemporary is a line of trade paperbacks created for contemporary fiction in 1984, which even won the 1984 Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing. The editor of the series was one of the brat pack, Gary Fisketjon, and the books published were mainly reprints of quality, out-of-print fiction or current hardcover fiction and quality paperback originals. In a realm where a clear distinction between mass market publishing and quality trade publishing has always

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existed, trade paperbacks bridge the gap between the high and the low. The aim was to publish quality fiction but in paperback format to reduce the costs and make it profitable. This format allowed the publication of first novels by unknown young authors like brat pack member Jay McInerney, whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, became an instant bestseller. The series editor, Gary Fisketjon, had unsuccessfully tried to mix the high and the low before; as David Kaufmann explains, Fisketjon even tried to promote Don DeLillo as a mass market author in paperback format, which led to commercial failure since DeLillo was not what the mass market reader expected (1995: 115). In the Vintage Contemporary Series, he did use the mass market technique but foregrounding the quality and exclusivity of the published fiction. On the one hand, he tried to create a trademark identification through the series: the same trim size, design, typography and similar cover art. An insistence on uniformity brought the series closer to the uniformity of mass production. However, there was also an insistence on the quality of the published books, together with a much higher price than that of mass market paperbacks. As Kaufmann mentions, the books ‘had to be diverse enough to count as literature and similar enough to ensure continued product loyalty’ (1995: 116). The Vintage series seemed an adequate place to publish a novel like American Psycho because it had to be published in such a way that a statement about its literary quality was made, but there was also a need to release it straightaway to capitalize on the publicity generated by its cancellation. Obviously, the official version was that Vintage wanted to publish it quickly so that readers could judge the book itself instead of being guided by the gossip and the extracts that had been published. The trade paperback format allowed for both purposes at the same time: quality printing and fast profit. The cancellation originated controversy itself, but another source of controversy was who had actually cancelled the novel’s publication. Simon & Schuster was part of Paramount Communications, so the cancellation was seen as a corporation taking over the realm of literature. The 1980s were an especially stormy time for the publishing industry, which was increasingly drawn into the sphere of monopoly capital, with large corporations taking over publishing houses. The fear of corporations reducing literature to a commodity was also behind the reaction of the Authors Guild, the National Writers Union and the PEN American Center to American Psycho’s cancellation. They considered that the book had been cancelled on the orders of Martin Davis, chairman of Paramount Communications, not on the orders of Richard E. Snyder, chairman of Simon & Schuster. Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union, summarized the implications of this possibility: ‘When a corporate executive like Richard Snyder or Martin Davis can censor an author based on their tastes or morality, society is taking one more giant leap toward corporate control over the world’ (in McDowell 1990b: 13; my emphasis). Robert K. Massie, president of the Authors Guild, called the cancellation a ‘black day’, one the guild had predicted would come once ‘giant corporations started buying distinguished

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American publishing houses’ (in Quindlen 1990: 17). Amanda Urban, Ellis’s agent, also thought that the cancellation of the book was a case of a ‘giant corporation responding to prepublication controversy and strong-arming its publishing division into abandoning its own tradition of fearless publishing’ (in Cohen 1991a: 13). The role of Paramount Communications in the cancellation of the book was the issue of many articles published at the time. In the Sunday edition of New York Times Anna Quindlen also criticized the way the book had been treated. For her a publisher who makes safe decisions is not a publisher but a printer; editors are the ones who make decisions about taste and literary merit, not publishers, as happened with American Psycho (1990: 17). Of course, not all reviewers agreed with this point of view. When the cancellation started to be equated with an act of censorship, the controversy radicalized and certain critics and organizations reacted strongly. For Lorrie Moore, the publishers’ rejection of the book was a way to exercise their freedom of speech, which is not the same as censorship. Thousands of manuscripts are rejected by publishers everyday and this would not be called censorship either (1990: A27). However, the case of American Psycho was different because, once accepted for publication by Vintage, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) called for its boycott and even opened a telephone line with a recorded passage from the book about a woman who is raped and tortured with an automatic nail gun. All this was happening before the publication of the book, based only on the excerpts published by Spy and Time magazines. There were other problems that American Psycho had to face before its publication: the many references to brand names, companies and people in the book. According to the Wall Street Journal, these references made companies such as American Express consider the possibility of taking legal action against the book because Bateman uses his American Express platinum card to scoop cocaine and order the prostitutes he will later kill (Cox 1991: B1). In fact, one of the few changes made in the book before its publication by Vintage was in the name of the company Bateman works for. In the Simon & Schuster version he was employed by American Express’s Shearson unit; in the Vintage version he works for Pierce & Pierce, the fictional firm created by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). One effect of the hostile reviews and boycotts was the subsequent refusal of some bookstores to sell the book, the same bookstores that, as John Sutherland pointed out, ‘none the less defiantly stock the paperback Satanic Verses’ (1992: 11). The big chains decided to order the book but in small quantities and without any public display on windows or tables. Barnes & Noble. even organized an internal poll among its 800 B. Dalton store managers to decide how to handle the book. The result was clear: the book should be carried but it should not be publicized. Other bookstores, like the Valley Bookstore in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, decided to ‘special order it for customers who really want it’ (in Reuter 1991: 6), while Jean Wilson, owner of The Book Shop in Boise, Idaho,

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declared: ‘I don’t carry adult films in my store, so why should I carry what certainly seems to be a literary equivalent?’ (in Reuter 1991: 6). Regarding what libraries should do, Tammy Bruce – president of NOW – stated that ‘[e]ach library should decide as they do when faced with hard-core pornography’ (in Rawlinson 1991: 17). As we can see, many of the doubts regarding how to deal with a book like American Psycho originated from its ambiguous status as serious/trash material. American Psycho was not published until March 1991. However, as we have seen, there were plenty of articles that dealt with the novel before its release date. In this book I propose to probe the ambiguous status of Ellis in the cultural spectrum and his use of popular culture, which was, precisely, one of the most debated topics in the prepublication articles. Many reviewers, some without having even read the book, rushed to the conclusion that because of its use of violence American Psycho was not literature. In an article called ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity,’ John Leo wondered ‘[h]ow can we get this dangerous junk out of the culture?’ (1990: 23) and ironically proposed that to speed sales Vintage should offer a free nail gun or chainsaw as a present.1 The novel was ‘violent junk’ and had ‘little literary merit’. This last comment is quite interesting, especially if we analyse John Leo’s idea of literary merit, which he elaborated further, referring to American Psycho: In my judgement, it has no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture. The book is so bad it will probably disappoint even sadists. Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language. (Leo 1990: 23) Should we apply Leo’s standard to measure literary merit, many postmodern novels would be found plotless and characterless. At least Leo tried to give some arguments to justify his belief that the novel lacked any literary value. In contrast, Brad Miner in National Review offered none at all and even openly claimed that he had not read the book. Based only on the prepublication extracts offered by Time and Spy magazines, Miner considered that American Psycho was pornography, not literature; in fact it was filthier than the worst porn. He found it ‘immoral, but also artless’ (1990: 43). However, he did not analyse the book in order to explain why it was artless and ‘degrading pulp’. In Publishers Weekly John F. Baker tried to assess whether Ellis was a valuable social critic or ‘a young writer with a terrific knack for with-it brand names in clothes, food, restaurants, clubs, who decided he had to gain attention this time out with something really outrageous’ (1990: 7). He concluded that, after the publication of the novel, publishing would move one step further away from what used to be called standards. In the New York Times Book Review Roger Rosenblatt radicalized the argument by using the notion of standards. For Rosenblatt the contents of the novel were ‘moronic and sadistic’, the book was

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‘so pointless, so themeless, so everythingless’, ‘the most loathsome offering of the season’ (1990: 3). His final message was clear: It would be sweet revenge if we refused to buy this book. Thumb through it, for the sake of normal prurience, but don’t buy it. That nonact would give a nice ending to our tale. It would say that we are disgusted with the gratuitous degradation of human life, of women in particular. It would show that we can tell real books from the fakes. It would give the raspberry to the culture hustlers who, to their shame, will not say no to obvious rot. Standards, anyone? (Rosenblatt 1990: 16) The reviews in the Sunday New York Times usually exert an important influence on the sales of the books examined and on academia’s general opinion of them. For Richard Ohmann, ‘the single most important boost a novel could get was a prominent review in the Sunday New York Times – better a favorable one than an unfavorable one, but better an unfavorable one than none at all’ (1983: 202). The review of the book was certainly prominent and worse than unfavourable. A review like this in a prestigious newspaper might put an end to the reputation of any book and author, even more so if we take into account that the book was due to be published in three months. Rosenblatt was giving an influential opinion to readers who did not have the opportunity to check the truth of his argument for themselves. I certainly agree with John Irving’s reasoning that ‘if you slam a book when it’s published, that’s called book reviewing, but if you write about a book three months in advance of its publication and your conclusion is “don’t buy it,” your intentions are more censorial than critical’ (1992: 25). Of course Rosenblatt would not agree with this argument, since for him censorship is ‘when a government burns your manuscript, smashes your presses and throws you in jail’ (1990: 3). In my opinion, the concept of censorship clearly goes beyond Rosenblatt’s definition and his review was not fair to a book that hadn’t yet even been published. Regarding the novel’s literary merit, Rosenblatt considered it junk because characters did not exist and did not develop. There was no clear motivation for Bateman’s acts and no plot. Moreover, in the end Bateman was not brought to justice. This is obviously not enough to condemn the literary quality of a novel and is a good example of the way American Psycho was treated before its publication. It was considered trash, pornographic and artless, all based mainly on the two extracts that had been published. As we have mentioned, Sonny Mehta defended the quality of the book. So did Joe McGinniss, Ellis’s mentor, who did not see sensational or commercial reasons but the ‘deepest, purest motives. The whole thing is a caricature, as if William Burroughs had written Bonfire of the Vanities. Not to make a pun, but it’s a tour de force. It’s a quantum leap beyond his earlier books’ (in Hoban 1990: 36). John N. Berry, editor-in-chief of Library Journal, also considered it a serious book (1991: 6) but, as we have seen, these voices were the exception rather than the norm.

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Bret Easton Ellis answered critics of his book in March, coinciding (not accidentally) with the long-awaited publication of the novel. Ellis said that he had received 13 anonymous death threats, some of them including photographs with his eyes poked out or with an axe through his face (in Cohen 1991b: C18). These threats may be explained by the way many reviewers confused Patrick Bateman’s actions (the serial killer of the novel) with Ellis’s. Working Woman published an article about ‘the world’s most famous slice-and-dice novel’ (Collins 1991: 134) accompanied by a montage of the book cover (a male close-up, presumably Bateman) and Ellis’s own face. In a more active vein, Tara Baxter – a well-known feminist activist and co-founder of ACLU (not the acronym for the American Civil Liberties Union, but for Always Causing Legal Unrest) – was arrested for reading aloud excerpts from American Psycho in a bookstore and declaring that Ellis should be ‘skinned alive, a rat put up his rectum, and his genitals cut off and fried in a frying pan’ (1993: 249). On the ACLU website, Baxter also suggested that for women to survive as a species they must learn to fight back by any means necessary. She also provided the telephone numbers of Sonny Mehta (president of Knopf) and Alberto Vitale (CEO Random House) so that people could call them and express how they felt. In a similar vein, although in a more contained tone, Tammy Bruce, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, claimed that American Psycho was not art, since ‘Mr. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck’ (in Cohen 1991b: C18). Ellis defended himself from these personal attacks by saying that Bateman is a misogynist. In fact, he’s beyond that, he is just barbarous. But I would think most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate between the writer and the character he is writing about. People seem to insist I’m a monster. But Bateman is the monster. I am not on the side of that creep. (In Cohen 1991b: C18) As a result of these threats and confusion, Ellis did not go on a promotional tour for security reasons and no advertising was done. All this public attention marked the book as different from other fiction. Even very negative reviews like Rosenblatt’s dedicated pages and pages to assessing American Psycho. The way critics concentrated on this book gave the impression that the book had something relevant to say. To dismiss it as mere rubbish failed to do justice to the public attention it received; after all, gore and sensationalist books are printed everyday and they are not reviewed nor do they cause controversy. The real reason for the attention received by the book was Bret Easton Ellis’s previous status as a serious writer. For those who considered Ellis a pornographer, the publication of American Psycho by a reputable publishing house like Vintage constituted an unacceptable dissolution of the boundaries between what a serious publishing house should and should not publish. As a result of this controversy, reviewers fell roughly into two categories: those who

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claimed that Ellis was not writing Literature (with a capital L) and should not have been published by a reputable and serious publishing house, and those who believed that Ellis had written a serious piece of literature, a criticism of the 1980s, which justified the violence and sex. In Newsweek, George F. Will said of Ellis: ‘[f]ormerly a prodigy-by-publicity, he now is a pornographer’ (1991: 66). Pagan Kennedy elaborated on this line and wondered why critics had taken ‘this stock horror schlock so seriously’ (1991: 427). She explained that precisely those who disowned Ellis then were those who had praised him after Less Than Zero and considered him the new F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kennedy believed that, after the failure of The Rules of Attraction, Ellis decided to return to the Less Than Zero formula, increasing its horror scenes. Kennedy captured the essence of the problem in her concluding paragraph: By lauding Bret Easton Ellis for Less Than Zero, the literary establishment provided the jolt of electricity that brought a Frankenstein monster of a book to life. And just as in the horror flicks, the mob, armed with pitchforks and torches, is chasing down the beast – and its presumed alter ego, Ellis – rather than its true creator. (1991: 428) Kennedy implied that, because at first the literary establishment failed to identify Ellis as a pseudo-literary writer of violence and porn, they created the false image of him as a serious, valuable writer, which is the real issue at stake. It is obvious that Ellis would not have caused any trouble if he had been a genre writer or a porn writer but no easy labels can be attached to American Psycho. Nevertheless, some reviewers insisted on placing these labels. In New Statesman & Society Naomi Wolf gave the exact page references to where the sex and violence was to be found – 16 pages in all – and proposed reading them in bookshops since the effect would prevent readers from buying the book. As we can see, she reduced the value of the book to its violent sections, which, for her at least, accounted for the whole book. Besides, it wouldn’t have mattered if the book had been better written since ‘it would still be, in terms of its use of sexual violence, a pornographic piece of writing’ (1991: 34). Thus, for Naomi Wolf, the inclusion of pornographic or/and violent sections in a book is enough to make all of its contents pornographic or gore. In a special feature in The Writer there was a discussion among several book reviewers, critics and novelists about censorship and American Psycho. Curiously enough, most of the comments were in line with Naomi Wolf’s ideas. For example, Anita Diamant (a literary agent) believed that ‘[g]ratuitous violence is present in many second-rate genre books, but creating a place for a book like this on the shelf with other leading books of fiction is unconscionable’ (in The Writer 1991: 21). Similarly, Sven Birkerts (a book reviewer and critic) stated that ‘[a]rt – serious literature – is pledged to truth, and if gratuitous sexual violence be part of a true picture of the human, it had better be explored with

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consummate skill and insight’ (in The Writer 1991: 20). Thus, Birkerts, unlike Wolf and Diamant, believed that ‘gratuitous sexual violence’ may be part of serious literature. Nevertheless, Ellis, apparently, did not show sufficient ‘consummate skill and insight.’ In Mademoiselle Barbara Grizzuti Harrison removed American Psycho from the category of books and called it ‘barf’, published just because it sold. She agreed to give the name of the author in the review on the condition that readers would ‘promptly forget the author’s name – you certainly don’t want to buy this snuff stuff’ (1991: 148). There were other reviewers who offered more open-minded responses. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt considered in the New York Times that Ellis was not ‘a leering sensualist or a cynical pornographer’ (1991: C18) but a cartoonist, since he dealt with unreal people and impossible actions, within a morally flat world. The aim was not exploitation; in fact Lehmann-Haupt found the book too boring for that. Nevertheless, he considered that the book failed to offer a moral framework and provided surface to criticize surface. For him, even though The Silence of the Lambs was more degrading to women, at least the killer’s psychopathology was given a moral framework. Returning to Ellis’s status as a writer, Vince Passaro believed that the book was reviled because Ellis was not a genre writer like Jim Thompson or Thomas Harris. He was a ‘celebrity brat’, thus the idea that he was writing social criticism was difficult to accept, especially after the publication of The Rules of Attraction. Passaro admitted that there was pornographic violence in the novel but saw there a larger aim than the pornographic one: ‘[h]e wants to plumb areas of almost indescribable darkness in his own consciousness, and in that of the larger culture’ (1991: 23). He was not exploitative either, since ‘Ellis isn’t applauding Bateman, he’s condemning him and everything else in sight’ (23). In the same vein, and for the Village Voice, Mim Udovitch believed that the violent acts described were ‘clearly, indeed crudely, condemned on both literal and allegorical levels, not to mention being so flatly written that they are hardly memorable, let alone shocking’ (1991: 65). I would say that the fact that the torture scenes are flatly written does not imply that they are not shocking. In fact, they are made even more shocking by the tone deployed and by the way superficial comments are juxtaposed with acts of torture. The fact that Bateman cannot distinguish between the two makes the narration even more disturbing. Nevertheless, I do agree with Udovitch’s contention that the real scandal surrounding the publication of the novel was that it was ‘so widely misunderstood. Every line, paragraph, chapter, and train of thought proceeds ineluctably on parallel tracks, past the same scenery, to a single destination of social indictment’ (1991: 65). Fay Weldon also defended the novel’s social criticism in the Washington Post. She claimed that Bret Easton Ellis was ‘a very, very good writer. He gets us to a T. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel which revolves about its own nasty bits. Brilliant’ (1991: C1). She also dealt with Ellis’s status and mentioned Thomas

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Harris, Martin Cruz Smith and Stephen King, who do not seem to have aroused any concern for the violence they depict. The difference is that these writers offer the consolation that the serial killer gets discovered, punished and stopped, whereas in American Psycho society does not care. Norman Mailer was more critical of the book, but at least he took pains to analyse its contents and technique, facets that most reviewers simply ignored, limiting their discussion to subject matter and the political correctness issue. As we have seen, some of them did not read the book at all and advised others not to read it either. Mailer at least did not propose censorship or a boycott of the book; he in fact defended the publication of the novel since Ellis ‘forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that much any more’ (1998: 1077). Mailer tried to assess, not without trouble, the literary quality of the novel, which ‘is not written so well that the art becomes palpable, declares itself against all odds, but then, it is not written so badly that one can reject it with clear conscience’ (1998: 1070). According to Mailer, this alone warranted the publication of the book but it had a major flaw: by the end of the novel readers knew no more about Bateman’s need to dismember others than they knew about the inner workings of the mind of an inexpressive actor in an exploitation film. There was no explanation for Bateman’s motivations or for the extreme acts of violence (1998: 1076). Thus, Mailer accused Ellis of not distancing himself from the serial killer. Sadly enough, Mailer failed to consider why this might be. As we will see, it may have been done on purpose to increase the horror and the intensity of a mind that cannot distinguish human beings from consumer objects. In spite of all the controversy, the negative prepublication reviews, the boycott carried out by NOW, the lack of advertising and promotional tours, American Psycho was a bestseller. The controversy provided free publicity and turned the book into a topic of discussion months before its publication. Cultural critics, reviewers and magazine writers across the political spectrum took issue with the book’s publication. The New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, the Nation, Commentary, the New Republic and even the Wall Street Journal printed articles on the publication process and the controversy generated. Besides, several library and publishing journals offered reviews of the book and well-known writers and commentators such as Norman Mailer, Fay Weldon, Roger Rosenblatt and George Will among many others contributed to the controversy with their opinions on the subject. Rosa A. Eberly has remarked on the way the publication of American Psycho created ‘a communication in public by journalists, booksellers, librarians, and a few citizen critics about issues of common concern’ (2000: 130). American Psycho turned into an excuse to discuss more general issues like censorship, the role of corporations and the limits of serious fiction. The analysis of the novel’s reception proves that, although many arguments were levelled against the novel after its initial release, very few of them were really explained. There were many reviews but most of them did not seriously

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analyse the novel’s stylistic features or literary choices. They feared that Ellis was blurring the boundary between what was acceptable in serious literature and what was not. The fact that he was bringing the lowest type of writing, namely gore and porn, to the very gates of high art was too much for the book to be given serious consideration. Curiously enough, according to David Eldridge, the film adaptation benefited from the references to both high and low culture genres in the novel and used them to reach a broad crossover audience (2008: 32–3). Ellis redraws the limits between the high and the low in American Psycho and to a purpose that deserves more serious consideration than the initial reviews gave.

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The Use of Popular, Mass and Consumer Culture

To understand American Psycho it is important to study why, how and to what extent Ellis uses popular, mass and consumer culture in the novel. In contrast to the opinion of some reviewers, this use cannot be simply reduced to a mere form of exploitation. American Psycho features a very characteristic figure in American popular culture – the serial killer – and, formally, it mixes popular genres and the language of different media. The opening quotations of the novel already testify to Ellis’s interest in blurring both high and low culture and different media. One of them is taken from the realm of high culture, from the preface to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground; the second one is an excerpt from Fortune magazine’s ‘Miss Manners on Office Etiquette’ (6 November 1989), an interview by Brian Dumaine of etiquette expert Judith Martin; and the last one is a two-line quotation from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’, a song included in the 1988 Talking Heads’ album Naked. The quotations seem to me conscious combinations of high and low sources. Like American Psycho, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a first-person narration. The narrator is not even given a name but we know that he is a veteran of the Russian civil service who has recently retired. The novel is mainly a collection of notes in which the narrator describes his alienated position in society, his obsessions and concerns. American Psycho is also made up of the notes of a man, Patrick Bateman, but he is not alienated at all. He is an active member of society – rich, handsome and successful. Nevertheless, Patrick Bateman and ‘the Underground Man’ do share a lack of identity. The latter tries to build himself into the type of hero characteristic of the Russian romantic fictions that he habitually devours. He sets out to rescue a prostitute named Liza by convincing her to give up her degrading work. She falls in love with him but when she visits him at home his mask falls and he cannot live up to the character he has artificially built. Bateman’s mask also falls every time he sets out to kill one of his victims; his carefully constructed 1980s successful yuppie character disappears. For Joel Black, ‘the Underground Man’ is the prototype for Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and for Bickle – the lonely character pushed into a world of violence in Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver – as well as for all the other alienated, media-dominated, urban antiheroes in modern literature who

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create their social identity by copying the heroic or romantic fiction they have come across (1991: 170). Ellis updates Dostoevsky by adding popular culture – films, television and pop music – to books. Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho, is immersed in and influenced by the world of popular culture. As we will see, he is hooked on pornography, slasher films, TV shows, the news, fashion magazines and music. The very paragraph quoted by Ellis from Notes from Underground could be a presentation for Bateman himself. A specific section of the extract (‘I have wished to bring before the public, somewhat more distinctly than usual, one of the characters of our recent past’) could have been written by Ellis, since Bateman is a yuppie executive emblematic of the 1980s in the United States (‘our recent past’). In Dostoevsky’s quotation we also read that ‘... the personage describes himself and his views and attempts, as it were, to clarify the reasons why he appeared and was bound to appear in our midst’. This is also part of American Psycho, a novel whose narrator is the serial killer himself, who details his life, routine and killings, all in the same flat, careless tone. Whether he clarifies the reasons for his acts is a more ambiguous matter. We have already seen that those critics who believed Ellis was writing an empty, exploitative novel could not stand the reference to a prestigious canonical author such as Fyodor Dostoevsky. Roger Rosenblatt’s approach is representative: ‘Mr. Ellis quotes from “Notes From the Underground” in one of his epigraphs. I wondered: could this fellow really think that he, like Dostoevsky, was being shockingly critical of the amorality of modern urban life? Why, yes! The rake’ (1990: 16). In spite of Rosenblatt’s words, Ellis does present a critique of American society in the 1980s, so the Dostoevsky quote ends up making perfect sense. The second quotation is an excerpt from Fortune, which points to the fact that the juxtaposition of high and low culture is going to become a central aspect of the novel from the very beginning. Miss Manners talks about the importance of manners nowadays, and about how people equate them with ‘happy ideas’, which is not always necessarily the case. Manners restrain our inner impulses; if they were set free ‘we’d be killing one another’. In American Psycho, Bateman is the living proof of this theory. He is very polite and correct in his treatment of his friends and fellow workers. He is ‘the boy next door’ and ‘total GQ’; in fact, he masters the rules of etiquette and correct behaviour and he even lectures his friends, who keep asking him questions about the norms of protocol. This apparent correctness hides his inner self, which leads him to kill again and again. This is another of the topics in the novel: the game of playing at appearances, sincerity and manners. The last quotation comes from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’, a Talking Heads song, which brings us a step further in the movement towards popular culture: from literature, to magazines and, finally, music. The quotation is rather short, ‘And as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention’, but provides one of the most important messages of the novel. In American Psycho nobody cares about Bateman’s acts. Nobody hears or sees anything, and those who do see

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something are happy to accept money rather than denounce Bateman. Society becomes an accomplice in Bateman’s crimes; his social position and money seem to protect him from suspicion or arrest. These initial quotations point to the way Ellis deliberately mixes sources coming from high and low culture and from different media. They also hint at some of the main topics in the novel. Bateman is a character who is part of our recent past, and who will narrate the events that follow. Besides, this character shares with ‘the Underground Man’ an interest in popular culture and a lack of identity and personality. Manners and politeness conceal a murderous personality; appearances rule over reality. In this general chaos, society is going to remain passive; people will care only about themselves and their own personal interests. As we can see, the choice of quotations is certainly relevant and works as a very good introduction to the novel in regard to both its style and contents. The blurring of high and low culture continues with the opening sentence of the novel: ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. ...’, a graffito placed on a Chemical Bank wall, taken from ‘Inferno’, the first section of the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri. These opening words return the novel to the world of high culture and present the story as unfolding in an ‘inferno’, a living hell located in New York. The torture scenes and murders that follow can certainly be understood as part of such a hell, and the opening sentence serves as a warning for the reader. In spite of these high culture references, American Psycho is the novel that best seems to illustrate the influence of mass culture on blank fiction literature. Its serial-killer subject matter is taken from popular literature and cinema and was especially popular at the time of American Psycho’s publication thanks to Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and its successful 1991 film adaptation. The novel’s title clearly recalls Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960), but, according to Ellis, the title was inspired by the titles of two other films, American Anthem and Psycho 3, which were part of a double feature showing at a cinema. Ellis decided that the fusion of these two names gave him a perfect title for the novel he had written. Thus, the title of his novel was inspired by two B-movies. The novel’s main character is a rich white heterosexual yuppie called Patrick Bateman, a name with at least a threefold origin. First, it may be a reference to Batman in regard to the hero’s double personality; in fact on two occasions a friend (Francesca) calls him ‘Batman’ (206–7). After killing a homosexual and his dog at night, we read: ‘... and then I’ve opened my umbrella and I’m running down Broadway, then up Broadway, then down again, screaming like a banshee, my coat open, flying out behind me like some kind of cape’ (166). The image of the cape flying brings forth images of Batman and, especially, Dracula after having sucked the blood of one of his victims. Second, Patrick Bateman’s name also resembles that of Norman Bates – the psychopath in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). There is even an oblique reference to the film: when Bateman is meeting with his colleagues and when the city of Phoenix is mentioned, all Bateman can say is, ‘ “Phoenix. Janet Leigh was from Phoenix ...”

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I stall, then continue. “She got stabbed in the shower. Disappointing scene.” I pause. “Blood looked fake” ’ (108). His comment goes unnoticed, at least by his colleagues. Third, taking into account that the story is set in the 1980s, there may even be a reference to the actor Justin Bateman, who was very popular at the time. In 1987 he had starred in Teen Wolf Too, a teen B-movie about a guy who discovers that he can become a werewolf, which he uses when boxing and to make himself more appealing to girls. Patrick Bateman is also a Dr. Jekyll who turns into Mr. Hyde in order to get what he wants. Although Bateman seems a successful man, perfectly integrated into society, he is actually a sexist, a racist and a xenophobic serial killer. Bateman himself narrates all the events portrayed in the novel, deploying the same flat tone to describe both his daily routine and his horrific killings. In a narration overcharged with details, we learn of his favourite television talk shows, magazines, films, cosmetic products and preferred ways of torturing people. An analysing of the violent scenes alone would show the book to be an example of the popular horror genre. However, American Psycho is a much more complex novel; it is a metaphor for a shallow, narcissistic society obsessed with consumerism. The yuppie represents the superficial American society of the 1980s, while the serial killer becomes its metaphorical embodiment.

8.1 Seriality and Consumerism The narrative rhythm of the novel is marked by two intertwined forms of seriality: that of Bateman’s never-ending killings, and his serial consumerism of surrounding mass culture. Curiously enough, these two forms of seriality were in the mind of the FBI special agent Robert Ressler when he coined the term ‘serial killer’ in the mid-1970s. On the one hand, there was the term ‘crimes in series’ used by British detectives: a series of crimes committed in a fairly repetitive way. On the other hand, there was the repetitive rhythm of many mass cultural representations. As Ressler explains: ... also in my mind were the serial adventures we used to see on Saturday at the movies. ... Each week you’d be lured back to see another episode, because at the end of each one was a cliff-hanger. In dramatic terms, this wasn’t a satisfactory ending, because it increased, not lessened the tension. The same dissatisfaction occurs in the mind of serial killers. (In Seltzer 1998: 64) Thus Ressler was thinking of adventure serials when he coined the serial-killing label. Similarly, we might postulate that part of the pleasure that audiences get out of consuming serial-killer narratives derives from the way serialized homicidal crimes seem so well-adapted to mass cultural forms. For Richard Dyer, seriality has become an important structure of cultural production under capitalism. It started with the serialization of political essays, novels and cartoons in

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precapitalist times, and has spread to news and movie programming (1997: 14). It is obvious that the serial novels popular in the nineteenth century have given way to the contemporary television serials. In fact, seriality has become the main structure of television, constantly interweaving serial strands, the orchestration of which is known as scheduling. Television programmes can be reduced to segments, which are about five minutes long and organized in groups (John Ellis 1992: 112). Apart from advertisements, news, promotional material and title sequences, most programmes are themselves composed of a number of segments; that is the case of series and serials. The serial provides a narrative progression and conclusion, whereas the series (fictional or nonfictional) does not. The fictional series (everlasting soap operas or situation comedies) revolve around a situation and a group of characters, while the nonfictional ones (documentaries, news programmes, chat shows and sports programmes among others) have a recurring format and a set of routines which provide a framework of expectancy. The segments are arranged through scheduling, thus producing a repetitive regular slot. Seriality and climactic moments are marketing devices deployed by these television series so as to defer the moment when all plot lines reach an all-embracing ending. Once this happens, the cancellation takes place. The serial killer kills on and on and does not want the serial to come to an end either, which would imply that he is either caught or dead.1 His killing in series has a similar structure to the TV series and to the mass media structure. Thus it is not surprising that the serialized media and the serialized killings converge in the pathological interest of many real serial killers in attaining media fame. They kill precisely in order to see themselves mass-produced and ‘serialized’ in the newspaper and television reports about them.2 The serial-killer formula combines the structure of the serial and that of the series. The killer kills in series and apparently in a disconnected way. Each new killing creates a framework of repetition and expectancy for the audience, and, ultimately, the serialkiller formula becomes a serial when the series of murders shows that there is a pattern behind them that explains the choice of victims and the nature of the killer. The narrative is completed with the arrest or death of the killer. In this way, the formula combines the attractive aspects of the series with the reassuring ones of the serial. For readers and viewers, the sources of pleasure in the serial-killer formula are many and varied. Richard Dyer argues that bards, jongleurs, griots and yarnspinners have all long known and consciously used seriality to leave their listeners wanting more (1997: 14). The series provides an attractive mixture of repetition and anticipation, since the audience always craves more and the structure makes them anticipate the continuation of the story. The serial structure also provides pleasure, since the knowledge that there is usually a pattern emerging from the choice of victims and modus operandi makes the audience anxious to know who the next victim will be and why. This serial structure also

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guarantees the promise of closure that will infuse the whole narration with a final meaning. Accordingly, one of the important aspects and pleasures of the serial-killer fictional narrative is not only its structure in series but its serial structure. The case of American Psycho is more complex because Patrick Bateman kills in series, but the series of murders does not lead anywhere. Every new killing fails to shed light on Bateman’s motivations and, since he murders rich and poor people, children, homosexuals, men and women, it becomes difficult to find a pattern in the killings. Nevertheless, several critics have looked for such a pattern in an attempt to find a metaphorical explanation for Bateman’s killings. Both Alex E. Blazer (2002) and David Roche (2009) believe that Bateman kills in order to get some kind of feeling, as a reaction against the predominance of surfaces in the yuppie world. Daniel Cojocaru (2008–9) argues that Bateman kills in a quest to find his own identity. He kills those who are different and who may have an identity that he lacks. Berthold Schoene (2008) also feels that Bateman’s killings are acts of manly self-assertion. Taking into account the variety of victims and, even though many of them are indeed women, the reader cannot engage in the game of guessing who the next victim will be or where the murder will take place. Even Bateman’s confession seems futile. There is no pattern and no ending to Bateman’s killings, which go on and on, in a sequence replicating the way most television series are broadcast nowadays. The thematic and structural significance of different forms of seriality within the novel seems to require that attention be paid to the devices used in order to highlight the notion and the practice of seriality. Mark Edmundson’s Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (1997) can help us further understand these forms of seriality. Edmundson interprets our culture as a culture of the gothic, where serialized forms of the gothic world have entered our social practices and mass culture. As a corollary to the gothic world, Edmundson also perceives a parallel social tendency towards its exact opposite, what he calls ‘easy transcendence’ or ‘pop transcendence’, which constitutes ‘a vacation, a few hours away from more pressing Gothic fears’ (1997: 76–7). On the one hand, the gothic is now present not only in Stephen King’s novels or Quentin Tarantino’s films, but also in politics, media renderings of the O. J. Simpson case, TV news, environmental debates, etc. On the other hand, easy transcendence is achieved through films like Forrest Gump. If we are made what we are by traumas, Forrest Gump provides a trauma-free past, the opportunity to experience the freedom of a life without trauma. It is not simple escapism; it also contains the gothic pressures that surround us but their power is denied, reassuring us. Other forms of pop transcendence are angels (pictures of whom have been lately mass-produced and impressed on all sorts of objects), TV, celebrities, advertisements and so forth. The nonfictional gothic and the world of pop transcendence include forms of repetitive and serialized mass culture and these forms become key factors of American Psycho, where the examples of pop transcendence are mixed with those of pop gothic and serial killings. Thus, the flow of the novel is based on a sophisticated structure infused

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with the rhythm established by contemporary society’s mass culture and consumerism. Ruth Helyer has analysed American Psycho as a form of postmodern gothic focusing on the novel’s adaptation of the genre’s conventions to the ‘postmodern world of isolated individuals beset by guilt, anxiety, and despair’ (2000: 728). Nonfiction gothic or pop gothic is also a powerful influence on the novel. It is represented by talk shows such as Late Night with David Letterman and, especially, The Patty Winters Show, a fictional parody of The Oprah Winfrey Show, where different traumas are aired every day: raped women, cancer cases, abortions and the like. The sensationalist and morbid orientation of television talk shows has led Linda S. Kauffman to doubt whether American Psycho is really more ‘psycho’ than their average topics. To prove her point she quotes a 1991 Time article on television talk shows that charted the formula for a successful ratings sweep: ‘handicapped sex addicts married to organ donors’ (in Kauffman 1998: 245). This is not so different a formula from the one used in American Psycho: ‘unwed sex addict serial killer, who murders prostitutes, in love with Whitney Houston’ (1998: 246). A possible formula for a successful talk show becomes the subject matter of the book. Nearly all the chapters in the novel start with a brief summary of the programme’s topic of the day. The titles of the programmes vary from the superficial – ‘Perfumes, Lipsticks, Makeups’, ‘Aerobic Exercise’, ‘Salad Bars’ – to the most horrific subjects – ‘Toddler-murders.’ ‘Concentration Camp Survivors’ and even one about a man who set his daughter on fire while she was giving birth. The juxtaposition of these two kinds of subjects implies that society does not really distinguish between the two, and at the same time shows that the subject of American Psycho is as horrifying as the contents of newspaper stories or TV programmes. Furthermore, the afternoon talk show becomes a repetitive obsession for Bateman. He records the programme if he cannot watch it, and when summertime comes and the shows are all repeats he reacts very strongly: ‘[l]ife remained a blank canvas, a cliché, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage’ (279). The Patty Winters Show provides his life with a rhythm, and when the rhythm is broken by the programme’s lack of unpredictability – the repeats are already known to Bateman – his own life is disrupted and he risks unveiling his hidden nature. He goes on holiday with Evelyn, his girlfriend, to the Hamptons but he cannot stand the tempo imposed by the countryside and decides to go back home when he discovers himself ‘standing over our bed in the hours before dawn, with an ice pick gripped in my fist, waiting for Evelyn to open her eyes’ (282). His return to the city coincides with the return of The Patty Winters Show, with the topic ‘People Who Weigh over Seven Hundred Pounds – What Can We Do about Them?’ (283), and it is no coincidence that the return of the programme should occur simultaneously with the continuation of Bateman’s murders; in the same chapter

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in which The Patty Winters Show reappears, Bateman has sex with, tortures and kills two girls. The media also tell gothic tales and horror stories. American Psycho not only reflects the gothic language and codes of slasher films, it also draws on the language of other media that have incorporated gothic language into their own systems. The yellow press has taken up the language of horror. Some of their headlines could be titles for horror tales. In fact, in the eighteenth century a very close connection between the yellow press and the gothic already existed as many gothic tales were based on sensational news pieces. At the beginning of American Psycho, Price, one of Bateman’s yuppie friends, makes a summary of that day’s newspaper: In one issue – in one issue – let’s see here ... strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Communist rally, Mafia boss wiped out, Nazis ... baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots. ... (4) As the narration advances, some of the titles of the chapters increasingly resemble the language of the sensationalist yellow press: ‘Confronted by Faggot’ (291), ‘Killing Child at Zoo’ (296) and ‘Tries to Cook and Eat Girl’ (343). Ellis is exaggerating the language of the yellow press to make readers aware of how far society has gone; the feeling is that these titles of chapters could also be yellow press headlines.3 The serial structure of the news is also seen in the very nature of the items reported. This is what Bateman reads in the New York Post: The Post this morning says the remains of three bodies that disappeared aboard a yacht last March have been recovered, frozen in ice, hacked up and bloated, in the East River; some maniac is going around the city poisoning one-liter bottles of Evian water, seventeen dead already; talk of zombies, the public mood, increasing randomness, vast chasms of misunderstanding. (383) The Post comes out everyday, so readers can read this horrifying news day after day, following it, wondering whether the murderer of the three people who disappeared aboard a yacht last March will be found and whether the maniac who poisons Evian water will ever be caught. Television news programmes also repeat terrifying events endlessly, something Bateman himself seems to be aware of: There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views of the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workers retrieving body parts. (278)

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The event is turned into a series by its constant repetition on the news and, in spite of its gory nature (or probably because of it), people are eager to watch it, even in slow motion. They want to know more and they watch the news every day to find out what really happened. At the end of each programme they know there will be another day, same time, when their questions may finally find an answer.4 Besides, the average American citizen watches television for more than seven hours a day, which makes television language very powerful and easily identified. It is not only the news that shows crime and disaster, there are also ‘true police-stories, true rescue-tales, documentaries about crime, tragedy, sorrow, disease, mistreatment, humiliation, and loss under the postmodern sun’ (Edmundson 1997: 30). We have become used to these series of endless horrors, which may account for our fondness for the serial-killer narrative. This formula satisfies the craving for daily horror but it also provides interpretation and resolution through the figure of the detective, the police officer or the profiler. However, although Ellis is aware of the seriality that surrounds a great deal of society’s behaviour, he is not willing to provide an interpreter for all the horror. As a result, the reader faces a narrative that lacks closure, comfort and reassurance, which intensifies the underlying horror. Edmundson also discusses the side-effect caused by this obsession with horror: pop transcendence, a kind of easy transcendence that works as an antidote to pressing gothic fears and which provides a mental vacation from them. The role of pop transcendence in American Psycho is as relevant as that of pop gothic since consumer and popular culture counterbalance the power of the gothic. Accordingly, Linda S. Kauffman considers that reading American Psycho is ‘like skimming GQ, Rolling Stone, Interview, Playboy, Hustler, Spy, and New York Magazine, complete with music and food reviews’ (1998: 246). Even Bateman’s friends acknowledge this openly when they state that Bateman is ‘total GQ’ (1991: 90). Pop music is one of these forms of pop transcendence, a form that Ellis incorporates in the novel in a very curious way. After the major killings, there are whole chapters completely dedicated to bizarre, bland analyses of pop music. The murder of Al, a black beggar, is followed by a chapter on the band Genesis; that of Bethany, an ex-girlfriend, by a chapter on Whitney Houston; finally, the mass murders in ‘Chase Manhattan’ by one on Huey Lewis and the News. The style of these chapters completely disrupts the narration: the narrator is still Bateman, but they are completely cut off from what has happened before or will happen later. Their style is typical of pop magazines where groups are reviewed and judged in very technical terms: ‘My favorite track is “Man on the Corner”, which is the only song credited solely to Collins, a moving ballad with a pretty synthesized melody plus a riveting drum machine in the background’ (134). Unlike conventional pop transcendence, these episodes do not work as a means of obliterating the horror narrated in the preceding chapters. Their strategic position in the narration, each one occurring after a murder, changes their significance; they stress the horror narrated in the previous pages and the oblivion of the people who are capable of watching the horrors of the evening

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news and then effortlessly listen to pop music. In American Psycho (2000), Mary Harron’s film adaptation of the novel, this contrast is very well captured: Bateman murders Paul Owen while listening to ‘Hip To Be Square’ and commenting on the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News. The critical intention of the novel is underlined by juxtaposing superficial comments about music with an appalling murder. Another example of pop transcendence which is used and deconstructed in the book is the musical Les misérables, repeatedly publicized on buses and hoardings. The basic idea behind a musical is that of entertainment, but in Ellis’s novel Les misérables is used as a form of denunciation, not of escapism. It becomes a leitmotif that figures in the background of everything that happens in the story, as the musical is alluded to or named on at least 20 occasions. Victor Hugo’s misérables are juxtaposed with the contemporary miserable people who populate the book and the city: beggars, the homeless and the insane, some of Patrick Bateman’s easy victims. This is the telling way in which a beggar is introduced: ‘Once outside, ignoring the bum lounging below the Les misérables poster and holding a sign that reads: I’VE LOST MY JOB I AM HUNGRY I HAVE NO MONEY PLEASE HELP, whose eyes tear after I pull the tease-thebum-with-a-dollar trick. ...’ (113). Pop transcendence and the contemporary gothic are juxtaposed in an ironic comment on our enjoyment of Victor Hugo’s misérables and our disregard for those in New York. Hollywood and its celebrities also work for Edmundson as a means of forgetting everyday horrors. Tom Cruise is Bateman’s neighbour, while Donald Trump is Bateman’s obsession. The self-help movement and how-to books have a similar role in the novel; they aim at counterbalancing and protecting us from the power of the pervasive present gothic world. Jean, Bateman’s completely innocent and naïve secretary, reads books with titles such as ‘How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You. How to Keep a Man in Love with You Forever. How to Close a Deal: Get Married. How to Be Married One Year from Today. Supplicant’ (265, italics in the original). However, the form of transcendence most frequently mocked in American Psycho is consumerism. There are constant descriptions of clothes, furniture, videos, restaurants, etc. One of the chapters, which narrates Bateman’s plans for Christmas, is significantly entitled ‘Shopping’. It has the form of a monologue in which Bateman talks about the colleagues he is going to give presents to, his priorities for Christmas and the places where he shops. The monologue is interrupted on three occasions by long lists of products he plans to buy: ... pens and photo albums, pairs of bookends and light-weight luggage, electric shoe polishers and heated towel stands and silver-plated insulated carafes and portable palm-sized color TVs with earphones, birdhouses and candleholders, place mats, picnic hampers and ice buckets, lace-trimmed oversize linen napkins and umbrellas and sterling silver monogrammed golf tees and charcoal-filter smoke trappers and desk lamps and perfume bottles, jewelry

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boxes, office tote bags, desk accessories, scarves, file holders, address books, agendas for handbags. ... (177) The long lists continually disrupt the narrative, exposing the consumerist fever that spreads at Christmas time. The novel’s repetitive structure is thus achieved through a double form of seriality: the seriality of pop gothic and that of pop transcendence, which constitute the narrative rhythm in the novel.

8.2 Brand Names Related to Bateman’s obsessive consumerism is his obsession with brand names and labels, which is not just a sign of his social status, since in the course of the narrative it acquires other, more symbolic, meanings. As Adam Arvidsson argues, the 1980s was the time when the use of brands became most widespread and the yuppies were especially keen on them in their devotion to consumerism and their narcissistic obsession with style (2006: 1–3). Thus, Bateman does not drink whisky but ‘J&B’, he never looks at his watch but at his ‘Rolex’ and does not drink water but ‘Evian’. This sort of description may seem an exaggeration of our consumer culture and our trust in brands. However, Vanity Fair magazine regularly includes in each issue an interview called ‘My Stuff’ which consists of a list of brands chosen by the celebrity interviewed. Thus, there are usually six sections: ‘beauty products’, ‘electronics’, ‘home’, ‘beverages’, ‘clothes’ and ‘necessary extravagance?’. For example, Elle Macpherson’s section on ‘clothes’ reads: Jeans DIESEL Underwear EMI Sneakers ASICS RUNNING SHOES Watch MEN’S ROLEX DAYTONA (GOLD, WITH LOTS OF BLING) T-shirts KATHERINE HAMMETT, PELLET FINET, AND HANRO Day bag HERMÈS BIRKEN Evening bag CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN AND PHILIP TREACY. (2004: 53) In this connection, it is also noteworthy that in the United States there are increasingly more newborns named after major brands such as L’Oreal, Chevrolet or Armani, which, according to psychology professor Cleveland Evans reflects the aspirations of the parents (BBC News 2003). In American Psycho, Bateman sees life through brand names since in his social life everything is reduced to commodity consumption, a practice closely linked to his status as serial killer, itself another kind of consumption. According to Arvidsson, American Psycho was the first literary text where brand names played a prominent part (2006: 2). Nevertheless, Ellis is certainly not the first writer to use brand names in fiction; they were introduced in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, in Joyce’s Ulysses the Guinness Brewery is mentioned repeatedly and so is Pumtree’s Potted Meat. John Dos Passos introduced not just

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brands in his fiction but also newspaper excerpts, popular songs and public documents. The brands add context and help portray daily life in terms that are more vivid and closer to the real experience. Philip Stevick believes that this use of brands is something shared by realist and experimental fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Philip Roth and John Updike are mentioned as writers who construct realism through cultural junk and thus fix their novels in their appropriate place and cultural milieu. In Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971) there are mentions of Wheaties, McDonald’s, Mobil gas and Vitalis. According to Stevick, the use that experimental writers make of brands is different; authors such as Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon incorporated mass cultural objects, especially ephemeral ones, into their fiction for comic effects (1981: 123). Similarly, and as we have seen, one of blank fiction’s most recognizable characteristics is the use of a broad range of mass cultural references. Stevick and Annesley disagree on the meaning of this use of mass culture and brand names. For Stevick they are mainly used for comic purposes – at least in the case of experimental fiction – and he even mentions up to 12 different situations in which an object is potentially funny when it is named (1981: 136–1). On some occasions, the constant use of brand names also produces comic effects in American Psycho. For example, when a taxi driver, who recognizes Bateman as the killer of a fellow driver, aims at him with a gun and Bateman remarks that ‘he’s holding a gun, the make of which I don’t recognize’ (392). Even at a tense and dangerous moment like this Bateman worries about makes and brands. Similarly, when he is being chased across Manhattan by the police he tries to steal a car, but not any car: ‘... the car he would like to steal is a black Range Rover with permanent four-wheel drive, an aircraft-grade aluminium body on a boxed steel chassis and a fuel-injected V-8 engine ...’ (350). Although Stevick is right in his reading of brand names as a device to achieve a comic effect, in the case of American Psycho it is Annesley’s position that proves more interesting and illuminating. The way blank fiction writers use brands and designer labels is more closely related to critical and ideological purposes, as mass culture and consumerism come to contain a double meaning: on the one hand they express the power and reach of commercial culture, and on the other they reveal ‘the ways in which the commodity can be used in an expressive and communicative way’ (1998: 92). When American Psycho was published, the use of brand names was seen as an expression of the first meaning, as a senseless and superficial reproduction of consumerism. One chapter, entitled ‘Morning’, is especially loaded with brand names and mass culture products, and in it Bateman describes in detail his daily routine, the things he owns and the cosmetic products he uses, taking special pains to describe his favourite kinds of shampoo: Over the weekend I plan to go to Bloomingdale’s or Bergdorf’s and on Evelyn’s advice pick up a Foltene European Supplement and Shampoo for

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thinning hair which contains complex carbohydrates that penetrate the hair shafts for improved strength and shine. Also the Vivagen Hair Enrichment Treatment, a new Redken product that prevents mineral deposits and prolongs the life cycle of hair. Luis Carruthers recommended the Aramis Nutriplexx system, a nutrient complex that helps increase circulation. (27) Passages like this led critic Roger Rosenblatt to affirm: I do not exaggerate when I say that in his way Mr. Ellis may be the most knowledgeable author in all of American literature. Whatever Melville knew about whaling, whatever Mark Twain knew about rivers are mere amateur stammerings compared with what Mr. Ellis knows about shampoo alone. (1990: 16) Rosenblatt’s ironic comments ignore Ellis’s point; through the chapter we see the excess in the number of available products and Bateman is depicted as a compulsive consumer, completely engulfed by mass culture. Ellis’s prose straightforwardly reflects this commercial culture but it does not necessarily mean that the narration strengthens capitalist structures by promoting further consumerism. In fact, in the film version of the book, it turned out to be very difficult to obtain the consent of many of the designers to use their brand names and labels. As the film’s director Mary Harron mentioned, American designers such as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren ‘didn’t want to be associated with anything so horrible’ (in Gopalan 2000). Besides, as I have already explained, when the book was published American Express apparently considered suing Ellis and his publisher because the psychopath used an American Express credit card to cut his cocaine, pay for his dinner and order prostitutes and room service. The very companies that obtained free advertising in American Psycho evidently did not believe the theory that American Psycho promoted further consumerism. Ironically enough, the literary market’s connection with brands seems to have changed a lot. In 2001, British author Fay Weldon published a book called The Bvlgari Connection which had been commissioned by Bvlgari (the Italian jewellery company). The brand is featured prominently in the novel and Fay Weldon was paid an undisclosed amount of money to write it. This is probably the first case of paid product placement known in literature, although it is quite common in film and television. Fay Weldon’s example is not the only one. Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman released a novel called Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266–8233 (2006). The book is part of the teen-lit genre and features a teenage girl who wants to find out why her boyfriend has left her and, together with her best friend, follows a series of clues leading to different explanations. Its authors included references to Cover Girl makeup and Procter & Gamble – the consumer product giant – promoted the book on Beinggirl.com, a website that targets teenage girls. Besides, the book was designed to be interactive and

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invites readers to listen to phone messages, check out websites and leave messages on Cathy’s MySpace.com page and on a special voicemail. In a similar way, well-known authors such as Stephen King, John Grisham, Nora Roberts and Amy Tan have auctioned off characters’ names in their books, but only for charity purposes. The prominent use of brands in literature has become widespread now, especially in literature dealing with wealthy professional women, which is starting to become a genre in itself and is usually adapted to other media. Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1996) successfully became a TV series and two films, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) was adapted to the screen in 2006 with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the leading roles and Confessions of a Shopaholic (2001), written by Sophie Kinsella, became a film in 2009. There are even plans to adapt Molly Jong-Fast’s Normal Girl (2000) into a film, whose script has been written by Ellis. The author’s use of brand names in American Psycho is not a case of product placement and he earned no money for their inclusion. Therefore, if Ellis’s intention when reproducing long lists of brand names and products was not to promote further consumerism, one may wonder what his intentions were. As mentioned before, consumer goods have a double meaning: on the one hand they are agents of social control, and on the other they have an expressive use. Ellis employs these goods to criticize them from within at the same time as he uses their expressive meaning. To do so he exaggerates their visibility by naming and repeating them in excess; it is not surprising that Bateman’s platinum American Express card snaps in half after so much use. Through exaggeration he makes us aware of the excesses of consumerism, the result not being pleasure but boredom and asphyxia. Commercial names replace adjectives, qualifying phrases and points of reference. What is being suggested is that they are used for description because they are charged with a series of additional meanings. In this respect, Mike Featherstone deals with the ‘new heroes of consumer culture’ who accumulate goods to display their individuality and create their lifestyle. This kind of individual is conscious that ‘he speaks not only with his clothes, but with his home, furnishings, decoration, car and other activities which are to be read and classified in terms of the presence and absence of taste’ (1991b: 86). Consumerism taken to an extreme invades everything and becomes our only means of relating to and judging others. In this ethos, commodities lose their use value, which is replaced by their exchange value (price). In fact, for Karl Marx (1867) this rupture between use value and exchange value was the most distinctive feature of capitalist societies. In the novel, Bateman openly acknowledges this rupture in statements like ‘... Stash’s admittedly cheap, bad haircut. A haircut that’s bad because it’s cheap’ (1991: 21). His obsession with the exchange value of things also explains his fixation on designer goods, whose use value alone cannot account for their elevated price; Bateman is eager to use them because of the message they carry, what they say about his lifestyle and his identity.

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8.3 Identity and Mass Culture: Selling the Self Mass culture and consumerism are important not just as narrative forms of seriality that mirror Bateman’s serial killings, but it is also basic in the construction and deconstruction of Bateman’s personality, which he seems to have lost by the end of the novel: ... there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. (376–7) Bateman’s personality is ‘fabricated’ and, as Martyn Lee suggests, his consciousness is assembled from fragments of the commodity-form and his experiences are channelled through an endless succession of commodity signs (1993: 176). This is literally seen in passages like: ‘Favourite group: Talking Heads. Drink: J&B or Absolut on the rocks. TV show: Late Night with David Letterman. Soda: Diet Pepsi. Water: Evian. Sport: Baseball’ (395). Bateman’s obsession with brands satirizes the role which they played in the 1980s, when they ‘became something of an omnipresent tool by means of which identity, social relations and shared experiences ... could be constructed. They were spun into the social fabric as a ubiquitous medium for the construction of a common social world’ (Arvidsson 2006: 3). Bateman is a yuppie obsessed with brands, to the point of constructing his personality with them. Since his subjectivity is not only as unstable and fluid as commodity signs are, but also free of social constraints, morality or conscience, he internalizes everything offered by mass culture and consumerism. In our society, all events that matter are media events, which leads to the progressive blurring of the event and its media representation. The media do not simply report or circulate the news, they produce them. Representation does not stand removed from reality so as to conceal or distort it; it is reality. In American Psycho, Bateman’s attitude reflects the power of the simulacrum5 as he internalizes the messages of the media and turns them into reality. His language is permeated with the language of film since his personality is constructed out of fragments and most fragments come from mass culture, especially horror and porn films. Throughout the novel, Bateman keeps renting films, in fact one of his most repeated excuses offered when leaving a place or a person is that he has to return some videotapes. He feels that ‘[t]here are too many fucking movies to choose from,’ (112; italics in the original) so he ends up always picking

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the same ones, those that obsess him, mainly slasher and pornographic movies, which will inspire his horrific actions. He has rented Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) 37 times and he especially likes the scene in which a woman is drilled to death. He will re-enact this scene later on when killing several women. At a Halloween party, Abel Ferrara’s film Driller Killer (1979) is mentioned as one of Bateman’s first ideas for a fancy dress. In this film an artist goes insane and takes to the streets of New York at night to randomly kill homeless people with a power drill. There are many other films mentioned, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (153), The Toolbox Murders (278), together with other invented, very explicit titles such as Blond, Hot, Dead (229) and Bloodhungry (249, 251), whose ad line reads, according to Bateman: ‘Some clowns make you laugh, but Bobo will make you die and then he’ll eat your body’ (249). All these images of horror from all these sources may have shaped Bateman’s thoughts since even his dreams are described as ‘an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns’ (371). Since Bateman is the narrator in the novel, filmic language is also used to narrate events. He uses ‘a slow dissolve’ (8) to separate one scene from another, ‘[p]an down to the Post’ (5) to focus on the Post headlines, ‘slow motion’ (158) when he attempts to murder Luis Carruthers and on other occasions (114, 231, 245) and ‘smash cut’ (11) to start a new scene. Luis’s confession that he has fallen in love with Bateman leaves the latter in shock and unable to kill him. Months later, Bateman meets Luis again, and the moment is described in these terms: ‘Like a smash cut from a horror movie – a jump zoom – Luis Carruthers appears, suddenly, without warning, from behind his column, slinking and jumping at the same time, if that’s possible’ (292). Pornography has also shaped Bateman’s mind. He watches films such as She-Male Reformatory (111), Ginger’s Cut (111) and Pamela’s Tight Fuckhole (177). He buys magazines called Lesbian Vibrator Bitches, Cunt on Cunt (70) and subscribes to Playboy (71). In the morning he watches ‘a movie about five lesbians and a vibrator’ (395) and pornography shapes his sexual fantasies and actual encounters: ‘Last night I had dreams that were lit like pornography and in them I fucked girls made of cardboard’ (200). In the chapter called ‘Dinner with Secretary’, Jean suggests that Bateman could come up to her place for a drink; these are Bateman’s thoughts: ‘I’m beginning to think that pornography is so much less complicated than actual sex, and because of this lack of complication, so much more pleasurable’ (264). His sexual encounters are detailed thoroughly, especially in the three chapters called ‘Girls’ which concern threesomes. These pornographic scenes help us picture the serial killer, Patrick Bateman, as a narcissistic character more worried about the size of his penis – he refers to it as ‘my stiff, huge cock’ (174) – and the volume of his muscles when having sexual intercourse than about the act itself. This idea is very well captured in the film adaptation of the novel, where we see Bateman proudly flexing his bulging muscles as he has sex and looks at himself in a mirror.

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The strong controversy originated by the pornographic and slasher passages was voiced by those critics who were keen on placing boundaries and could not accept that a serious book could use such language and descriptions. Pornography has usually been understood as part of the deep end of the cultural register, a low and vulgar enjoyment belonging to the realm of mass culture, whose opposite pole was high culture. However, boundaries are not always so clear-cut and there are many forms of artistic expression that are difficult to place in our blurry cultural spectrum. In The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, Lynda Nead explores the female nude, which is at both the centre and the margins of culture. It is at once an example of high culture as the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics, and an example of the obscene in the realm of pornography. She states that distinctions are constantly redefined, and the analysis of who looks and the context of their viewing may change the way cultural representations are understood. Consequently these types of frontiers are themselves ‘endlessly policed, invoked, transgressed and replaced’ (1992: 87). Different laws have tried to respond to these controversies and set some type of standard whereby a work of art may be classified as pornographic or not. At present, the prevailing idea is that a book should be viewed as obscene if, when taken as a whole, it appeals to prurient interest and has no redeeming social value – a judgement not made easily. Thus, no obscenity conviction for written work has been won for more than 30 years. It seems that even in legal terms the boundary between what is obscene and what is of literary value is being progressively rubbed out. In 1969, Susan Sontag defended an aesthetic intellectual literary pornography capable of exploring and transgressing social taboos in ‘The Pornographic Imagination’. In her essays, Sontag analysed the French literary tradition and focused on Réage’s The Story of O, Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, and de Berg’s The Image, arguing for pornography on aesthetic grounds. Like Linda Williams she defended the possibility of pornography serving a useful social purpose, a means of exploring and recasting social problems (1990, 1995). The only difference is that Sontag sees these possibilities in a written pornography of a more intellectual kind, whereas Linda Williams, writing more than 20 years later, extends this point of view to mass culture forms of pornography, such as the cinema. In any case, there has been a progressive acceptance on the part of academia that pornography, especially in the case of literary works, may have social aims that go beyond sexual gratification. The pornographic passages in American Psycho are part of the general commodification that takes place in Bateman’s mind. The very explicit pornographic language is completely devoid of any feeling and is the same flat language that is used in the description of both consumerism and torture. Since Bateman sees no difference in any of these actions, he employs the same flat language in all descriptions to reproduce the behaviour of contemporary shallow society. Thus, the commodification of sex is equated with the more general commodification of society. Bateman leads a social life where everything is

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reduced to commodity consumption, a practice closely linked to his status as serial killer, another kind of consumption. Bateman’s personality is also constructed out of the language and messages of advertising, which do not ask people to take it easy for a moment, but only to stand out, to come first, to take what they want and take it now. For Christopher Lasch, ‘advertising institutionalizes envy and its attendant anxieties’ (1991: 73), a philosophy clearly internalized by Bateman, who applies it literally to his own way of speaking and acting. The language of consumerism and advertising favours such themes as youth, beauty, energy, fitness, freedom, luxury and fun, while it hides the darker side of consumer culture: the elderly, the unemployed, the poor or those whose consumption is limited to the consumption of images (Featherstone 1991a: 174–7). In postmodern consumer culture, reality may be partly produced by images but the system of consumption is still sustained by those who have the money to consume the products, not just the images. Patrick Bateman is a double consumer, of both objects and images which shape his behaviour. He is in a way the result of the logic of consumer culture; he represents all that is favoured by such culture, while he detests – on some occasions to the point of killing – everything consumer culture tries to hide. This logic of consumer culture is also the logic of the narcissist, who divides society into two groups: the rich, the great and famous on the one hand, and the common herd on the other (Lasch 1991: 84). In the United States, and during the decade of the 1980s, this general trend was reflected in the figure of the yuppie. While Christopher Lasch considered the 1970s the ‘me-decade’ for the selfishness and narcissism that invaded American society, in a 1991 afterword to his famous The Culture of Narcissism, he concluded that the eighties did not see a revival of altruism or civic spirit, but rather the contrary, since yuppies were known for their selfish devotion to themselves (1991: 237). The yuppies of the 1980s were especially prone to show their success by means of an obsessive consumerism and obvious display of their wealth through consumer objects. Bateman is precisely a handsome, rich and seductive narcissist yuppie; he masters the rules of fashion and his friends repeatedly ask him what to wear or how to match their clothes. He makes reservations for the best restaurants and is admitted into the best nightclubs. He is a member of a health club called ‘Xclusive’ and lives in an expensive apartment, with Tom Cruise for a neighbour; he is even repeatedly mistaken for a model or a movie star (165, 206). Besides, he is also very successful with women. Bateman represents society’s obsession with the cult of the image and the body: dieting, bodybuilding, jogging, a ‘look’ based on surface and image. A society that dreams of ‘fashion, the latest styles, idols, the play of images, travel for its own sake, advertising. ... In short, the orgy’ (Baudrillard 1988a: 96). This culture of narcissism was also inextricably linked to the mass media and the images and messages perpetuated by them. Mike Featherstone has noted that advertisements, the popular press, television and motion pictures provide a proliferation of stylized images of the body, supporting an extended hedonism

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and an obsession with body maintenance (1991a). Advertisements, feature articles and advice columns in magazines and newspapers advise their readers to take care of themselves at all costs. This attitude has emerged too in the way personality handbooks and self-help books have changed since the beginning of the twentieth century: from an emphasis on discipline and self-denial they have passed to the will to win and, in this context, the key terms are personal magnetism and dominance over others, with success or the look of success becoming an end in its own right (Lasch 1991: 56–9). People become commodified in Bateman’s mind, so he uses the same flat tone when describing the two types of ‘consumption’ he performs: the things he owns and the people he kills are equated. Thus, when describing his room after one of his killings, he tonelessly says that ‘things are lying in the corner of my bedroom: a pair of girl’s shoes from Edward Susan Bennis Allen, a hand with the thumb and fore-finger missing, the new issue of Vanity Fair splashed with someone’s blood, a cummerbund drenched with gore ...’ (343–4). He does not seem to see the difference between some designer shoes, an issue of Vanity Fair, a cummerbund and a mutilated human hand. Drawing on Karl Marx’s definition of reification (1867), Jean Baudrillard describes how men of wealth in a consumer culture are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by objects. Their daily exchange is no longer with their fellows, but rather, statistically ... with the acquisition and manipulation of goods and messages. ... (1988c: 29) Thus, Bateman’s attitude is that of a wealthy man caught in a consumerist fever, who has internalized the consumerist logic to such an extent that he literally sees no difference between a person and an object. The reification in his mind is clearly visualized when he describes the people around him: ‘I count three silk-crepe ties, one Versace silk-satin woven tie, two silk foulard ties, one silk Kenzo, two silk jacquard ties’ (119). American Psycho denounces consumerism by portraying the serial killer as the ultimate consumer. In fact, the use of mass culture in the novel is very complex. As a blank generation writer, Ellis has used mass culture openly, to the extent of adopting the seriality characteristic of mass cultural productions in his own artistic language and style. The choice of a serial killer to channel and reflect contemporary consumer culture is effective and challenging: Bateman’s neverending serial killings mirror our own never-ending serial consumerism, the fact that we are engulfed by an ideology of disposal and repurchase in which consumption takes place for the sake of consumption alone. The market continually provides improved versions of goods, artificially outdating products that are still useful. Envy is a powerful feeling that pushes people to purchase, reject and repurchase again; you must have the best, whatever will make you stand out and dominate the rest. This is why the logic of consumerism is inextricably linked to

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the logic of narcissism and why the ultimate consumer narcissist is a man like Patrick Bateman. The fact that he is a serial killer comes as an extension of his immersion in the consumerist system and values. His killing in series is equated to his consuming in series; his equation of people and objects is linked to his ‘apparent’ capacity to buy everything, to own anything he wants. Bateman’s personality is constructed through the images and messages he receives through mass and consumer culture, which leads to his inability to distinguish self from surface. As Lasch has said, commodity production and consumerism ‘create a world of mirrors, insubstantial images, illusions increasingly indistinguishable from reality’ (1984: 30), a world that Bateman thinks exists to gratify his desires. Thus, Bateman is the product of unrestrained consumerism in a society of the hyperreal, in which the difference between the real and the simulated, between our power and that of others is blurred and unclear. Bateman only does what the advertisements entice him to do, as a sports drink commercial claims: ‘It’s your world, drink it up’. Blank generation writers appear to use this rhetoric of consumerism but not to promote further consumerism, nor to exemplify literature fallen victim to the general commodification of society. In the case of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho however, it is a way of denouncing consumerism from within, from the mind of its most extreme representative, he who serially consumes objects and people: the serial killer.

9

The Aesthetics of Serial Killing

Serial killing is a subject treated in sociology, the arts (cinema, literature and photography among other artistic manifestations), media studies and psychoanalysis, to mention just a few disciplines. It has even turned into a business in our consumer culture. Serial killing belongs to the realms of both reality and fiction and as a consequence of this cultural crisscrossing, on some occasions reality and fiction become mixed and influence each other. Nowadays we witness how, on the one hand, the media provides a narrative for actual serial killers by turning their killings into coherent patterns, or how they copy the murders of fictional serial killers; on the other hand, we see how literary writers of great prestige have written works dealing with true crime and how fictional serial killers copy the deeds of real killers or try to resemble them.1 The interactions are never-ending and there is no doubt that, as Joyce Carol Oates puts it, the serial killer has become an icon of pop culture (1999a: 233). There are many ramifications of this phenomenon but in this chapter I will focus on the serialkiller genre and the position that American Psycho holds within it. I will also consider the implications of the stylistic choices in the novel and to what extent American Psycho can be considered a satire or a social criticism of the United States in the 1980s.

9.1 Generic Conventions and Disruptions Serial-killer fiction has close links with both the gothic and detective genres. It takes the chaotic world of the gothic and adapts it to the contemporary world through the figure of the serial killer, a kind of criminal who does not kill only once, as is usually the case in detective fiction. Serial killers kill over and over again and, what is more important, they follow a pattern in the choice of their victims, a pattern that the detective must uncover. Thus, in serial-killer fiction the world of chaos is recuperated from gothic fiction, while underlining the figure of the detective, who competes with the serial killer for the main role in the genre. For Philip Simpson, Thomas Harris can be considered the creator of the serial killer formula (2000: 70) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) serves as a perfect practical example of its conventions. The aesthetics of the novel is

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designed to offer its readers different sources of pleasure: the command of disorder; the enjoyment derived from discovering patterns; the pleasing feelings of anticipation and repetition provided by the serial murders; the identification with an intelligent detective; and, of course, the relish for transforming the murders into clues in an intellectual game. These kinds of narratives have the power to make us minimize the serious implications of murder, turning serial killing into an aesthetic game that can be enjoyed as simple entertainment. By contrast, I believe American Psycho is an attempt to use the genre in a different way, to make readers face the real horror behind the serial-killer phenomenon. It is no coincidence that both American Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs are American products, since the United States boasts 74 per cent of the world’s serial killers, while Europe claims only 19 per cent (Caputi 1993: 110). For Mark Seltzer, serial killing takes place in a culture where violence has become a collective spectacle. Seltzer calls it a ‘wound culture’, which he defines as ‘the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound’ (1998: 1).2 This is the kind of culture that favours the transformation of serial killing into a spectacle in both reality and fiction. Before further analysing this phenomenon, it might be clarifying to give an official definition of it. The FBI defines serial murder ‘as involving an offender associated with the killing of at least four victims, over a period greater than seventy-two hours’ (Seltzer 1998: 9). This ‘cooling-off period’ (distributing the murders serially over time) provides the working distinction between serial and mass murder, with spree-killing falling somewhere in between. In the previous chapter I mentioned that the term was coined in the mid- 1970s by FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler, inspired by television serials. The seriality of serial killers, or at least the seriality of the myth-like serial killer created through the arts and the media, has similar effects to those produced by different forms of serialized mass culture such as television serials and series, film serials, novels in instalments3 or even newspapers. Repetition makes us understand patterns and know what to expect next time. Thus, after each new instalment the audience is left wanting more, enjoying a mix of repetition and anticipation. In the case of serial killing, each new murder becomes a new instalment, a new chapter in the news. People follow the chapters, craving for a conclusion that may disclose a pattern or may impose an interpretation on the random material. As Richard Dyer argues, people enjoy posing questions such as: What will happen next? When will he strike next and whom? When will they get him? What have all the victims in common? Is there a pattern emerging out of all the killings? (1997: 16). For people to sit back and discern patterns, both in reality and in fiction, they need to forget or at least diminish the role of the victims. They need to ignore the ethical implications of the crimes and consider their aesthetic possibilities. Already in the nineteenth century there was a change from an essentially

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religious or moral consideration of crime to a more aesthetic approach. Thomas de Quincey’s 1827 essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ defended the idea of considering brutal crimes as works of art if viewed from an aesthetic or disinterested amoral perspective. In fact, detective fiction adopted these ideas, although the genre chose to concentrate on the detective rather than on the criminal, creating an art of detection. The idea that crime has aesthetic implications may be considered socially unacceptable. However, this is something people do without realizing it when they follow the deeds of a serial killer in the news or when they read in Vanity Fair that a serial killer may be copying some of Salvador Dalí’s paintings (Burrough 2000: 86–99). In his informed book, The Aesthetics of Murder, Joel Black further considers these possibilities and their implications through history. This aesthetization of crime is also reflected in real life through the words of former FBI serial killer profiler, John Douglas: ‘I always tell my agents, “If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting.” We’ve looked at many “paintings” over the years and talked extensively to the most “accomplished” artists’ (in Seltzer 1998: 121). In this sense, for Joyce Carol Oates the enigma of serial killers, those who murder not for money but for its own sake, is the stuff of poetry and art. She even explains the aesthetic attempts of some real serial killers to arrange their victims in artistic ways, for example the New York anonymous axe murder in 1985; the ‘Babysitter’ of Oakland County, Michigan, in 1976; or Ed Gein’s collection of ornaments made of skulls on bedposts and belts of female nipples (1999b: 255–6). In American Psycho, Bateman also has his own collection of objects made of human parts: a head he plans to use as a jack-o’-lantern on Halloween and a necklace made from the bones of a girl’s vertebrae. Another of the pleasures provided by the serial killer is that this phenomenon allows us to locate social violence in the killer’s disorder, rather than in ourselves or in the social order (Freccero 1997: 48) and it diverts the readers’ attention from more real economic and social fears (Simpson 2000: 19). These narratives are reassuring because the serial killer, the only source of disruption, is stopped at the end. People need some kind of social order (the police, the FBI or a detective) to solve the crimes, and in order to solve the crimes the pattern evolving from them must be understood. Thus, serial-killer narrations usually provide control over disorder, the discovery of patterns behind the crimes, identification with a strong representative of the law and enjoyment of the murders as an artistic intellectual game. But what happens when these sources of pleasure are not present in the serial-killer narrative? What happens if there is no strong representative of the law, if the serial killer is not caught at the end, if there is no pattern to be extracted from the killings (in other words, if they are not ‘artistic’), if the seriality goes on and on, an unending cliffhanger (in Ressler’s words), and there is never a chance to lessen the tension? American Psycho portrays the life of a serial killer but in it, unlike in other classical examples of the genre such as The Silence of the Lambs, torture and killings are narrated in detail as Ellis offers gruesome descriptions of horrible acts that

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do not leave the reader indifferent. In fact, I agree with Linda S. Kauffman when she observes that all Ellis has done is translate what viewers see on the screen in horror films into prose, transcribing the thousands of discrete sights, sounds and sensations the brain records in each frame of any horror film. The effect is emetic, not arousing (1998: 249). The fact that American Psycho does not follow the conventions of the serial-killer narrative, made critics like Rosenblatt consider the book pointless or themeless. What the book does is take those conventions and play with them, revealing their status as conventions. The aesthetics of all these conventions surrounding serial killing were cherished by readers and viewers of Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider (1992), Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1994) and Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club (2003), films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1995), Seven (1995), Copycat (1997), and The Bone Collector (1999) and TV series like Dexter or The Mentalist. But American Psycho, with its exaggerated use of some conventions and the complete absence of others, caused disturbance in readers and appeared to be condoning the violence behind the serial-killer phenomenon. Bateman is not a classical monster either. In his analysis of horror, Robin Wood claims that everything our civilisation represses or oppresses re-emerges as an object of horror, and the happy ending signifies the restoration of repression. In his analysis of ‘otherness’, (what bourgeois ideology cannot recognize but must deal with), he presents a list of monsters that symbolize a generalized concept of otherness. They are monstrous embodiments of female sexuality, the proletariat, homosexuality and bisexuality, other cultures, ethnic groups, alternative ideologies and children (1986: 75–6). Patrick Bateman does not fit into any of Wood’s classifications of otherness: he is a white, heterosexual man who is also wealthy, handsome, intelligent and powerful. He happens to be a serial killer and every new killing is described in yet greater detail. What is the effect of having a monster who is not an ‘other’ but a leading member of society, apparently the image of success in the 1980s? When a man who is perfectly integrated in society, who follows all the social rules and is the ultimate consumer in a capitalistic society, becomes a cruel serial killer, the blame cannot be put only on the individual, the blame reaches the whole of society, readers included. This idea becomes clearer when analysing the ending which, as we saw in the discussion of the novel’s reception, was one of the most controversial topics. For a serial-killer narrative to be satisfactory, the serial killer must be caught at the end.4 This is a way of locating the violence in the killer’s disorder, rather than in ourselves or in the social order. At the end of American Psycho, Bateman is free and there is no detective capable of stopping him because there is no aesthetic game being enacted; Ellis ignores the convention of a pattern emerging from the corpses. In this way, there is only violence and the boring repetition of the killer’s daily routine: beauty care, bodybuilding, drug consumption, restaurants, music, tortures and killings. Everything is constantly repeated, serialized with no variation in tone between a murder description

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and a superficial comment: I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat. (1991: 328) Here we see Bateman practising cannibalism, not sparing words in the description of his acts. The description of the cannibalistic act is mixed with very superficial comments about Bateman’s clothes. Ellis shows what a sophisticated cannibal looks like; he may be wearing a Joseph Abboud suit but he is still eating a girl’s brain.

9.2 Excess and Violence The use of violence in American Psycho is highly self-conscious, so much so that it disrupts the whole mechanism of the serial-killer narrative. For the narrative to be enjoyable, it should not be overflowing with horror or superficiality; in contrast with American Psycho, such narratives as The Silence of the Lambs, Seven or The Bone Collector are precisely a measured combination of horror and superficiality in a tasteful manner, making an art of murder. Ellis takes all the violence that appears in the background of these narratives and discloses it, which prevents any possible concentration on the murders in objective, game-like terms. It is highly significant that in 1991 the film version of The Silence of the Lambs received five Academy Awards, while American Psycho was condemned for its violence. As the director of The Silence of the Lambs claimed in an interview, he wanted to give people ‘the good old-fashioned kind of shock they paid their money for without mortifying them’ (in Smith 1991: 33). Ellis forgets about safety and prefers exaggeration and social denunciation: I thought about juxtaposing this absurd triviality with extreme violence ... If people are disgusted or bored, then they’re finding out something about their own limits as readers. I want to challenge their complacency, to provoke them. ... American Psycho is partly about excess – just when readers think they can’t take any more violence, or another description of superficial behavior, more is presented – and their response toward this is what intrigues me. (In Hoban 1990: 36) The use of excess may become necessary when challenging the complacency of those readers saturated with violence deriving from films, songs, TV programmes or even the newspapers.

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How to interpret this excess has become a bone of contention among critics. When analysing the novel’s reception, we saw that for some critics the use of excess could not be a means of denouncing violence. Unlike Young, who considers the novel a satire ‘straightforward judgemental and condemnatory’ (1992c: 120), Peter Brooker considered that the novel does not discover any norms or values; it is rather a symptom. Brooker elaborates further and states that, since there is a first-person narration, no other figure can be employed as a vehicle of consciousness or judgement (1996: 144). David Eldridge also thinks that in the book there is no way out of Bateman’s own perspective, and thus no direct condemnation of his actions. In contrast, in the film adaptation of American Psycho the camera is not inside Bateman’s mind, and therefore provides a more ‘moral gaze’ and allows for an alternative perspective to condemn his acts (2008: 24). I cannot agree with Brooker or Eldridge since they reduce consciousness or distance to narrative voice and since this is a first-person account of serial killing they infer that there is no room for criticism. I find this view very reductive since it does not take into account three important literary techniques present in the novel. First, there is an instance in which the first-person voice disintegrates and becomes a third-person narrative and there are gaps in which we lose track of Bateman’s actions. Secondly, the ever-present possibility of the narrator’s unreliability provides a distancing factor. And, thirdly, there are other vehicles of consciousness such as the metafictional comments present in the novel in the form of graffiti and hoardings that work as a contrast to the actions described. There is a significant occasion when the narrative voice seems to change to an impersonal third-person narrator. This happens in the chase scene after Bateman has killed a street musician: the gun silencer does not work and a police car chases him along the streets of Manhattan. The chase is at first narrated by Bateman but it suddenly changes to a third-person voice when things get out of control. The confusion is increased by the blanks in the narration, which are only filled by three dots. Moreover, this narrator is omniscient because we learn about Bateman’s inner thoughts through a free indirect speech mode: ... the terror he thought had passed engulfing him again, thinking: I have no idea what I’ve done to increase my chances of getting caught, I shot a saxophonist? a saxophonist? who was probably a mime too? for that I get this? and in the near distance he can hear other cars coming. ... (350) In this scene Bateman nearly gets caught, which explains his split identity and allows the reader to see what Bateman is really doing, the way one would in the chase scene in a thriller. The first-person voice only returns once Bateman is safe in his office and, as he puts it, ‘calm is eventually restored, safe in the anonymity of my new office’ (352). When the danger of getting caught disappears, Bateman recovers his narrative power. Other chapters, such as ‘A Glimpse of a Thursday Afternoon,’ start in mid-sentence, in the middle of one

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of Bateman’s anxiety attacks, which makes him wander about and end up in a shabby deli in a derelict area of New York, where he does not know how to behave. In the deli he asks for the maître d’ and shows his platinum AmEx card and is amazed at the cheapness of the food. The chapter also ends in midsentence: ‘... I get up and scream, “Fuck yourself you retarded cocksucking kike,” and I run out of the delicatessen and onto the street where this’ (152). Bateman’s identity is unstable since, when he is outside his safe world of yuppie perfection or serial-killer impunity, he is completely at a loss and even loses his capacity to narrate. As readers we also lose our insight into his thinking. Whether Patrick Bateman is an unreliable narrator or not is another bone of contention.5 Nearly all we know about his actions comes from Bateman’s recounting of them, but since we do not have a second point of view, at least not until the chase scene, we cannot be completely sure of the factuality of his deeds. Whether Bateman is a reliable or unreliable narrator is important because, as Greta Olson points out, readers depart from a literal reading of events when they become aware of the unreliability of the account itself (2003). In the case of American Psycho, this would mean that Bateman only commits the crimes in his imagination – the interpretation clearly favoured by the film version – which would make us read Bateman’s words with a certain ironic distance, in spite of the first-person voice. When the book was published most reviewers took the narration at its face value and did not consider the possibility of the unreliable narrator. At present, there are critics such as Bruno Zerweck who do not believe in this possibility; for him Bateman is a murderer, a psychopath and an unreliable person but he is not an unreliable narrator: ‘There are no inconsistencies or contradictions in the narrative, whether textual or in relation to real-world or literary frames of reference’ (2001: 157). However, a thorough analysis of American Psycho shows many inconsistencies and contradictions in Bateman’s voice. For example, Elizabeth Young argues that many of Bateman’s acts are not to be believed literally, that we cannot even trust Bateman’s own identity since others confuse him with someone else (1992c: 118). There are certainly many situations when it is hard to believe that everybody fails to notice that Bateman is a serial killer. He regularly takes his blood-stained clothes to the dry-cleaner’s, and when a friend asks him about the cause of the stains he says that they are cranberry juice, cranapple juice or ‘Hershey’s Syrup’ (84). If this seems hard to believe, even harder is the scene where he hires a cleaning lady after one of his horrific murders. The maid ‘waxes the floor, wipes blood smears off the walls, throws away gore-soaked newspapers without a word’ (382). Besides, Bateman discovers that Owen’s flat, where he left the tortured corpses of two girls, has been cleaned and is being sold as if nothing had happened (369). Is this a reliable narrator? A narrator who by the end of the book claims to be watching a ‘cheerio’ interviewed on television (386) and affirms that an automatic teller talks to him (395)? I would say he is not a reliable narrator, and, if so, the crimes he claims to have committed may also be a

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product of his imagination. Another issue is whether this affects in any way the reading process since it could be argued that the crimes are narrated in such full detail that the horrific effect is produced anyway. Following this same line of thought, Marco Abel considers that the reader has to deal with the affective component of the novel rather than with the judgement of Bateman’s reliability as a narrator. According to Abel, literary criticism is concerned with judgement, with assessing whether the violence in the novel is good or bad, rather than its affective component, that is, what the violence does to the reader (2007: 44, 49). The uncertainties caused by an unreliable narrator have the potential of producing a distance that cannot be simply ignored. However, whether the murders are real or not may change our judgement of the novel but it cannot change the novel’s affective intensity when read. Returning to Brooker’s previous argument that the first-person narration prevents other figures from becoming a vehicle of consciousness or judgement, we cannot forget that judgement and comment are not just produced through the narrator – unreliable as this one may be – since there are other metafictional comments that can be inserted in the text and that function as a distancing mechanism and form of criticism. American Psycho is a book whose first words, quoting Dante, are ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE, scrawled in bloodred lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank ...’ (1991: 3) and whose last words are ‘... and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT’ (1991: 399), both being graffiti painted in ‘blood red’ that the narrator sees in the city. The opening words become a metafictional device that announces, in a very self-conscious manner, that a spiral of violence and death is to follow, while the closing words imply that no easy escapist ending can be offered. FEAR is another of the words that announces what is to follow. Price’s proud words about his value in society are followed by the FEAR graffito: ‘I’m resourceful,’ Price is saying. ‘I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.’ Price calms down, continues to stare out the cab’s dirty window, probably at the word FEAR sprayed in red graffiti on the side of a McDonald’s on Fourth and Seventh. (1991: 3) The red graffiti seems to indicate that it is Price’s attitude that people should fear. Price’s belief in his superiority is also shared by Bateman, who feels entitled to kill those he considers useless in society. This technique is repeated on other occasions. When in another episode Bateman is looking for a prostitute, his description of her is commented on by the graffiti (also in red) behind her: She’s blond and slim and young, trashy but not an escort bimbo, and most important, she’s white, which is a rarity in these parts. ... Behind her, in

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four-foot-tall red block letters painted on the side of an abandoned brick warehouse, is the word M E A T and the way the letters are spaced awakens something in me and above the building like a backdrop is a moonless sky, which earlier, in the afternoon, was hung with clouds but tonight isn’t. (1991: 168) The word MEAT works as a comment on the way women are treated as objects of desire or commodities to be bought and sold. In this way, the novel not only shows women as objects but comments upon this reification in an indirect way. Bateman will take the meat/woman metaphor to extremes when he tries to eat a woman as he thinks: ‘I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit’ (345). Furthermore, throughout the whole narrative the degrading treatment of homeless people is also commented on by a frequently repeated advertisement on buses and hoardings for the musical Les misérables. Victor Hugo’s ‘misérables’ are thus compared and contrasted with the beggars, the homeless and the insane that fill the book. If the self-conscious comments on the violence of the book are taken into account, it becomes difficult to dismiss them as useless excess. Naomi Mandel believes that the novel posits violence as critique, it is the agent, not just the object, of discussion (2006: 18). Linda Williams also argues that the genres featuring bodily excess (such as pornography, horror or melodrama) cannot be simply dismissed as ‘bad excess’ (masochism or sadism). Their function as cultural problem-solving needs to be addressed (1995: 156). The use of excess brings forth questions that would not have been asked otherwise. In the same vein, John Fiske mentions how ‘norms that are exceeded lose their invisibility, lose their status as natural common sense, and are brought out into the open agenda’ (1989b: 114). This excess meaning escapes ideological control and can be used to resist or evade it. Unlike The Silence of the Lambs, where violence is hidden behind the glamorous intellectual game between Clarice and Lecter, in American Psycho it is underlined by making readers see violence for what it is and making them aware of its real implications. As has been seen in the previous chapter, mass culture contributes to this excess. Patrick Bateman has watched Body Double 37 times. He has read true crime biographies of famous serial killers like Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Ed Gein. He is also aware of the fictional ones; in fact, in one conversation with his brother Sean (one of the main characters in Ellis’s previous book, The Rules of Attraction) we find this misunderstanding: ‘Damien. You’re Damien,’ I think I hear Sean mutter. ‘What did you say?’ I ask, looking up. ‘I didn’t hear you.’ ‘Nice tan,’ he sighs. ‘I said nice tan.’ (229) The name Damien is probably a reference to The Omen, a series of very popular 1980s novels and films based on the story of Damien, the offspring of Satan

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who is destined to become the Antichrist. Damien must be on Bateman’s mind because he is probably one of Bateman’s fictional heroes. Excess is also seen in the topics of The Patty Winters Show, which include toddler murders, Nazis, shark-attack victims and a woman set on fire while giving birth. These very serious subjects stand in contrast to completely banal ones also treated in the programme, such as tips on how your pet can become a movie star, a machine that lets people talk to the dead, salad bars and aerobic exercise among others. This insistence on juxtaposing the banal with the serious is also reflected in the descriptions of the murders and becomes a way of laying bare their brutality and our own attitude towards them in real life. In more subtle ways than those offered by Ellis, sectors of mass culture and the media bombard people with violence, but some people are so used to it that they do not seem to notice it anymore. Nowadays, violence has to be excessive to be noticeable. Ellis’s technique of juxtaposing the banal and the serious, his self-conscious portrayal of violence and his use of mass culture, work as a means of denouncing the violence that is transmitted through different channels every day. Denouncing violence through the use of violence can bring about ambiguous effects. For decades there has been a similar debate about pornography, and many feminist critics have argued that images of sexual violence directly affect the incidence of actual violence on women. The debate is still open because no causal link has been established yet.6 The link between sex and violence in the novel caused much controversy because Bateman ends up torturing and killing many of the women he has sex with. Although the controversy is understandable as the murder scenes are certainly revolting, they are coherent in the mind of a serial killer who is equally conscientious when describing consumer objects, sexual scenes and acts of torture. This stylistic choice has led to conflicting opinions from different critics. Some remain indecisive regarding the effects that a novel like American Psycho may produce. Shaun O’Connell affirms: ‘At its best, Ellis’s novel is his way of making Americans pay attention to a derangement at the heart of our culture – to the madness loose in our cities. At its worst, redundant and lurid, the novel is yet another example of that derangement’ (1995: 295). For James Annesley, the images in the text can contribute to the same destructive process they describe (1998: 21). In the same vein, Jane Caputi claims that the novel ignores any gender analysis of the origins or behaviour of the serial killer and becomes itself a work of femicidal pornography, ‘clearly aimed at arousing the reader’ (1993: 103). On the other side of the debate we find Linda S. Kauffman. For her, American Psycho takes the buried message of many television commercials that represent women in situations of slavery and ‘puts the buried message under a microscope, magnifying the commercialization of mass culture by taking it literally’ (1998: 244). Once more we return to the idea of excess and how it can function as a denouncer of certain serial-killer narrative conventions. Similarly, for Elayne Rapping the elegant portrayal of misogyny as a game in The Silence of the Lambs is more offensive and symbolically threatening to women than in American

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Psycho (1991: 37). Its greater subtlety makes it also more difficult to detect. In my opinion, American Psycho admits such different interpretations precisely because the narrator offers none. Blank fiction writing avoids categorical judgement and open condemnation, and this creates ambiguities that are difficult to clear up. In interviews, Ellis has openly stated his critical intentions in the novel. Nevertheless, ambiguities remain and there is always a danger that the representation of violence may beget further violence, especially when it is taken out of context, as it was by many reviewers even before the novel was released.

9.3 Social Criticism Whether the novel expresses social criticism of the 1980s or not has also prompted heated debates. For critics such as Norman Mailer, the failure of American Psycho is that by the end readers know no more about Bateman’s need to dismember others than they know about the inner workings in the mind of an inexpressive actor in an exploitation film. By the end of the novel nothing is learned about Bateman’s motivations or about extreme acts of violence (1998: 1076). Mailer seems to long for the conventional ending where the killer would explain an infancy trauma that has made him misbehave (Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho) or where the detective explains what the link between the different killings was, as in The Silence of the Lambs. Those books and films in which in the end we learn about the reasons for the serial killer’s acts are in a way consoling fantasies. For Philip Simpson, the critical anger directed towards Ellis and films like John McNaughton’s 1986 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer may be explained by the attribution of blame for the creation of the serial killer to the whole of society (2000: 136). Instead of blaming one isolated person, Bateman becomes the reflection of the selfish 1980s American culture, a decade that saw the increase of the divide between social classes due to the government’s economic policies. In the episode in which Bateman decides to return to Paul Owen’s apartment, where he tortured and killed two women whose corpses he left behind, he discovers that the apartment has been cleaned and there is a real estate agent trying to sell the flat to potential buyers. The agent seems to know what happened but she does not care; she lives in a society too obsessed with appearances and money, and Owen’s flat is too valuable a sale to risk losing: We stare at each other endlessly. I’m convinced she senses I’m about to say something. I’ve seen this look on someone’s face before. Was it in a club? A victim’s expression? Had it appeared on a movie screen recently? Or had I seen it in the mirror? (369) The reference to the mirror suggests that Bateman sees himself reflected in the face of the real estate agent and in the many other greedy members of society

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in the 1980s. Thus Bateman is a yuppie who is presented as the logical product, the true son, of that society. To understand what the yuppies represented in the 1980s it is necessary to briefly consider their origins and the social circumstances which made them possible, and which are clearly reflected in the novel. To many historians, the 1980s are the Reagan years, a time of conservative politics. Ronald Reagan became president of the United States on 20 January 1981. On that day, American hostages who had been held captive for 444 days by Iranian radicals were freed in Teheran. Reagan cut tax rates in an attempt to restore faith in both the market and entrepreneurship. A new age of growth should have followed after this and citizens believed in him because he seemed to be reenacting the American dream. At first, statistics seemed to confirm his theories. As Greenberg points out, there was a spectacular economic recovery between 1983 and 1985: ‘12.3% real growth in the economy and a steady decline in unemployment, from the recession high near 10% to 7.5% in 1984 and below 7% in 1986’ (1995: 134). In the 1984 re-election campaign, Reagan used the image of the American dream; he was the man capable of rebuilding the dream since the United States was on the rise. However, Reagan’s politics did not turn out as expected and the American dream only came true for those who were already wealthy. As a consequence, the yuppie phenomenon was born and the gap between social classes widened not only because of the reduction in taxes but also because of its cornerstone policy: cuttings in the federal budget. These cuts in domestic spending affected many programmes devised to help the poorest, and involved reductions in funding for food stamps, cuts in federal subsidies for low-income housing, limitations on Medicare and Medicaid payments and reductions in educational programmes (Brinkley 1993: 884). Reagonomics created a society more sharply divided between the wealthy and the poor. Such a society is powerfully depicted in American Psycho, a title that seems a pun on the American dream itself. On the one hand, we have the yuppies; on the other, the beggars, prostitutes and immigrants whom Patrick Bateman and his yuppie friends despise. As a real beggar states in a document from the 1980s, collected by Anders Breidlid et al., wealthy people cannot relate to people who do not have any money because ‘they’ve been taught, “anything you want to be in America you can be.” But that’s not necessarily the case, not for everyone’ (1996: 225). This is precisely Bateman’s attitude; when he encounters a beggar, he assumes that he does not work because he does not want to. He says to one of them: ‘Do you think it’s fair to take money from people who do have jobs? Who do work? ... Get a goddamn job. ... You’ve got a negative attitude. That’s what’s stopping you ... I don’t know. I don’t have anything in common with you’ (130–1). These are Bateman’s words before killing him and his dog. Through the murder the gap between the two social classes is symbolically widened and represented in the novel. This is a way of enacting the social difference that was produced as a consequence of Reagonomics. The two classes are so separate in the book that Evelyn, Bateman’s girlfriend, thinks that

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everybody is like her. When talking to Bateman about a common friend, her lines are: ‘Everybody’s rich,’ ‘Everybody’s good-looking, Patrick,’ ‘Everybody has a great body now’ (23). Bateman himself, reflecting on the world of his yuppie colleague Tim Price, concludes that Price’s world is ‘really the world of most of us: big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets the world, boy gets it’ (384). In the 1980s shareholders got rich but they did not fund investment, preventing wealth from reaching all social classes. For critics such as James Lincoln Collier, in the 1980s the government adopted the ethics of self-interest as its basic philosophy. He uses harsh words in his assessment of the situation: The American people voted for these candidates because they were offering them what they wanted: as much self-gratification as they could get, and the Devil take the hindmost. And in doing so they made selfishness the official policy of the United States. (1991: 239) American Psycho reflects and, on many occasions, satirizes this atmosphere of selfishness and greed. The American dream had failed once more and this time it was because only a few had enjoyed the money surplus that belonged to the whole country. In an alienated and selfish society where everyone cares only for themselves the myth of the serial killer flourishes. Both Richard Dyer (1997: 15) and David Punter (1996: 205) have underlined how the serial killer phenomenon is the consummation of alienation and is facilitated by the anonymity of mass society that lacks the affective bonds of community. This mass society does not want to know about Bateman’s crimes. On one occasion Evelyn is telling Bateman how much she would like to marry, to which he answers: ‘I’d want to bring a Harrison AK-47 assault rifle to the ceremony,’ I say, bored in a rush, ‘with a thirty-round magazine so after thoroughly blowing your fat mother’s head off with it I could use it on that fag brother of yours. ...’ Stopping, confused, inspecting yesterday’s manicure, I look back at Evelyn. (124) Evelyn is not affected by Bateman’s words and goes on describing the ceremony, which Bateman of course notices: ‘She does not fully grasp a word I’m saying. My essence is eluding her’ (124). The same happens when he tells Armstrong, another yuppie friend: ‘My life is a living hell ... and there are many more people I, uh, want to ... want to, well, I guess murder’ (141). He tells Owen ‘I’m utterly insane’ and ‘I like to dissect girls’ (216) but nobody seems to care. The situation becomes ridiculous when, after the chase scene, Bateman thinks he is going to get caught and confesses all his murders to Harold’s telephone machine. He is not caught and when he sees Harold he has to repeat his confession: ‘Listen very, very carefully. I-killed-Paul-Owen-and-I-liked-it. I can’t make myself any clearer’ (388). To the reader’s surprise, Harold answers that he had dinner with

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Owen ten days ago in London and thinks Bateman’s confession is a joke. He says: ‘Jesus, Davis. Yes, that was hilarious. That was you, was it?’ (387). Harold does not even recognize Bateman and calls him Davis. Relationships remain superficial in a world where appearances are all that counts. When Bateman has lunch with Jean, his secretary, she tells him that she thinks he is concerned about others, a rarity in a hedonistic world. Taking into account that Bateman is a serial killer the statement constitutes a rather harsh social critique, suggesting that people only trust appearances. Bateman himself clarifies: ‘ “Sometimes, Jean,” I explain, “the lines separating appearance – what you see – and reality – what you don’t – become, well, blurred” ’ (378). The superficiality and anonymity of this mass society is reinforced by the constant identity confusions that take place among the yuppies. I have counted more than 25 occasions in the novel when one yuppie is mistaken for another. As we have seen, this confusion with names reaches its climax when Bateman tries to confess to Harold Carnes that he has killed Owen and Carnes mistakes Bateman for Davis. All these confusions seem to indicate that they all look very much the same. We already saw something similar in Less Than Zero, where all Clay’s friends were described in similar terms and behaved in the same passive way. In American Psycho yuppies go to the same places, buy the same things, have the same credit cards, go to the same clubs. Their behaviour is also very similar, frighteningly similar. They are depicted as superficial people obsessed with appearances and disgusted by the presence of the other. Given that for many Americans in the 1980s the yuppies represented the American dream come true, the negative depiction of this social group becomes a negative depiction of all those who believe in this type of society. The Yorkshire Ripper, active between 1975 and 1981, claimed he was simply ‘cleaning the streets’ of immoral – and therefore worthless – women (Nicholson 1998: 265). The role of the serial killer in the novel is somehow similar. Bateman kills many people and no clear pattern is discerned behind the killings. However, some of his victims belong to groups he considers socially worthless: beggars, immigrants, homosexuals and prostitutes. For Bateman and his friends, beggars and immigrants are ‘members of the genetic underclass’ (266). At the beginning of the book, Price is counting the number of beggars he sees on the street; he counts up to 30. The major cuts in federal subsidies for low-income housing had contributed to a radical increase in homelessness that was plaguing all American cities by the end of the 1980s. In real life people like Bateman had obtained their wealth because of the cuts in funds set aside for social programmes. The beggars remind the reader of the existence of that darker side of the American dream, the price that was paid for the superficial perfection of Bateman’s world. The extended presence of immigrants also responded to a social reality of the 1980s. In the 1970s more than 4 million legal immigrants entered the United States. In the 1980s, that number rose to more than 6 million (Brinkley 1993: 898). People like Patrick Bateman, from a white European

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background, constituted less than 80 per cent of the population, 10 per cent less than in 1950. Racial tensions increased as a result since some people saw this influx of immigrants as a threat to American purity. Homosexuals were another social group singled out for mistreatment in the 1980s. This attitude was linked to the spread of AIDS, an illness documented for the first time in 1981. Its first victims were homosexuals, which led doctors to speculate that the illness might be the result of the contemporary gay male lifestyle, sexual promiscuity and ‘fast-lane’ living (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988: 355). Evangelists proclaimed that the illness was a punishment from God, and there were proposals to quarantine carriers and high-risk groups; immigrants were required to be tested. These were the first reactions, but attitudes changed as researchers discovered that AIDS was infectious rather than contagious and that by the mid-1980s it was spreading through the heterosexual population. Taboos in the media fell and condoms and safe-sex ads proliferated. In American Psycho Patrick Bateman and his friends cannot believe that they, who claim to be socially superior, can get the illness. The following dialogue reflects their attitude: ‘I’m not gonna wear a fucking condom,’ McDermott announces. ‘I have read this article I’ve Xeroxed,’ Van Patten says, ‘and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.’ ‘Guys just cannot get it.’ ‘Well, not white guys.’ (34) For them, white heterosexual men cannot get an illness that homosexuals have. Ironically enough, by the end of the book it seems that one of them, Tim Price, has contracted it. Price disappears at the beginning of the novel and reappears at the end. When Bateman meets him again he notices a ‘smudge on his forehead’ (384) and in a later meeting ‘it still looks like there’s a smudge on Price’s forehead’ (397). Smudges are one of the first visual symptoms of AIDS so it would not be too far-fetched to infer that the white heterosexual yuppie Tim Price does have AIDS after all.7 AIDS usually causes the subject of homosexuality to be brought up in Bateman’s conversations with his friends, so at one point he and his friends joke about homosexuals and Bateman settles the conversation by saying: ‘Ask Meredith if I’m a homosexual. That is, if she’ll take the time to pull my dick out of her mouth’ (37). Bateman’s sexual identity may even be unclear: we have already mentioned his incapacity to kill Luis when he confesses to being in love with Bateman. In any case the macho attitude displayed in the conversation also reflects a belief in his being not only superior to homosexuals but also to women. There is much other dialogue that confirm this attitude: ‘There are no girls with good personalities’ (91), Bateman and his yuppie friends say in another conversation while laughing and shaking hands on it. One of them

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adds: ‘A good personality ... consists of a chick who has a little hardbody and who will satisfy all sexual demands without being too slutty about things and who will essentially keep her dumb fucking mouth shut’ (91). The portrayal of women’s attitudes towards AIDS is not much better than the portrayal of male attitudes. Courtney, Bateman’s lover, wants Bateman to wear a condom, though her reasons are in accordance with the superficial world in which she lives: ‘I have a promotion coming to me. I’m going to Barbados in August and I don’t want a case of Kaposi’s sarcoma to fuck it up!’ She chokes, coughing. ‘Oh god I want to wear a bikini,’ she wails. ‘A Norma Kamali I just bought at Bergdorf’s.’ (104) She seems to believe that AIDS cannot kill her and that a sarcoma would only prevent her from wearing an expensive bikini in Barbados. In the book the attitude of these yuppies has a lot in common, ideologically, with Bateman’s murder of homosexuals. Their attitude responds to the same ideas of class and racial superiority. As a conclusion, I share Carla Freccero’s opinion that the negative reaction of the critics was due to Ellis’s failure to provide a moral framework for his tale of the 26-year-old Harvard graduate, and serial killer, Patrick Bateman (1997: 51). However, the moral framework is the narrative itself. Ellis ridicules the yuppie lifestyle and refuses to present murder as something attractive or gamelike. He presents it in all its cruelty, turning American Psycho into a perpetual chain of serial killing, where both the figure of the serial killer and the yuppie are completely deglamorized. The conventional serial-killer genre presents a reassuring narration that allows readers the pleasure of seeing a detective who, by analysing the bodies of the victims and the circumstances of the crimes, will infer a pattern leading to the killer. It is a clean process of analysis and interpretation in which readers enjoy posing questions such as: Why should the killer do this? What is the connection between the victims? Will the last victim be killed? All these questions usually find an answer through the narrative, especially at the end when all loose ends are tied up. Serial-killer books and films like The Silence of the Lambs glamorize serial killers and at the same time show that, with enough information and a high degree of competence on the part of the detective, signs can be read and murderers discovered and stopped. The pattern behind the serial murders emerges and leads to its author. The serial-killer genre reached its peak in the 1990s but at present many of its conventions have become clichéd. Although serial killers still make their appearance now and then, especially in popular TV series such as C.S.I., Law and Order and The Mentalist, their violence has been tamed. The present popularity of vampires in fiction, film and television as seen in the Twilight, True Blood and Vampire Diaries books, films and TV series is similar to the 1990s obsession with serial killers. Edward, the well-off ‘vegetarian’ vampire in the Twilight series,

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has the potential and the need to turn into a serial killer but he controls his need and becomes a serial consumer instead, gaining the readers’ affection and envy. American Psycho represents a very different perspective on serial killers. The aesthetic sources of pleasure are diminished. There are no clues, no pattern, no strong detective and no arrest of the criminal. Ellis plays with the predictability that generic fiction provides so as to undermine it and create in the reader an effect which is the opposite of that intended by generic fiction. There will be no restoration of the social order. This kind of ending, apart from being a formal break typical of postmodernism, also constitutes an ideological break with more traditional narratives. The chaotic world that Bateman creates with his killings will continue endlessly because the society depicted in the novel has become an accomplice to his crimes. Political correctness and violence is shown for what it is. The aesthetic of the serial-killer narration is denounced as mere convention, while ethical implications arise with each new killing. Horrific and despicable as the narration may seem, it does not leave the reader indifferent and does certainly work against the glamorizing and mythologizing portrayals of serial killers and their actions.

Part 4

Glamorama (1998)

10

The Reception of Glamorama

After the publication of American Psycho and the literary storm that followed, Ellis started the writing of Glamorama, a long and ambitious novel that would take seven years to complete. As the publication of American Psycho had made Ellis a well-known name, his publishers wanted to capitalize on his fame and pressed him to release something soon. In 1994 they published The Informers, a collection of short stories, most of which he had written when still at college, even before the publication of Less Than Zero. The book seems to be a return to the style and fictional world of his first book; the action does not take place in New York (as in American Psycho) but in Los Angeles (as in Less Than Zero), and the style is also similar to the latter, a minimalist, flat, blank narration. There are no hyperrealist descriptions of murder, though there is murder, and no engulfing, repetitive lists of products as in American Psycho, but a simpler, minimalist style which does not inhibit Ellis’s use of names and brands. In The Informers the cars are Ferraris, Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, Porsches, Jaguars and Rolls-Royces. They drink Absolut, Stoli and Tab. They have pot, coke, Valium, Librium, Nembutal, Demerol, Seconal, Darvocet, Dalmane, Quaaludes, nitrous oxide and animal tranquilizers, apart from smoking Benson & Hedges and clove cigarettes. They go to glamorous bars and restaurants such as Le Dome, the Polo Lounge, Spago, Chasen’s and Canter’s Deli, and they wear Armani, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Music and MTV are always present: the Go-Go’s, Boy George, the Beach Boys, Madonna; and so are magazines: Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue. The barely linked 13 short stories deal mainly with wealthy, tanned, blond people in the 1980s. There are UCLA students, divorced entertainment executives, teenagers, child-killers, rockers, anorexics and even a group of vampires that customize their coffins with ‘FM radio, tape cassette, digital alarm clock, Perry Ellis sheets, phone, small color TV with built-in VCR and cable (MTV, HBO)’ (1994: 182). As we can see, Ellis covered well-known territory in this collection of short stories published between his two most ambitious novels: American Psycho and Glamorama. Many journalists started their reviews with questions like ‘So what do you do after you’ve written the sickest novel of the decade?’ (Edelman 1994: 59) or ‘Where do you go after American Psycho, after writing an ambitious, nearly brilliant book that nailed the consumer frenzy and

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greed of the 80s and America’s obsession with violence, not to mention raised a storm of indignation’ (Texier 1994: 38). The answers were varied, ranging from ‘[n]ot much’ (Edelman 1994: 59), to ‘[y]ou go back home to L.A., that’s where you go, to the original scene of the crime’ (Texier 1994: 38). For some, the book read as a sequel to Less Than Zero (Wiegand 1994: 3) but ‘we get to meet the parents as well’ (Texier 1994: 38). Apparently, themes, settings, brand names and characters were recycled from Ellis’s previous novels (Harayda 1994: 12J). In the New York Times Michiko Kakutani explained that Ellis provided just what readers expected and what had been present in his previous novels: ‘shallow, cynical young people with empty, meaningless lives; lots of drugs, designer clothes and fancy cars; perfunctory, sometimes violent sex, and some sort of sensationalistic crime (gang rape, torture and mutilation)’ (1994: C19). In line with Kakutani, most reactions to the book were scornful and disdainful: ‘The real question here is why anyone still pays attention to Ellis’ (Wiegand 1994: 3). There were similar reactions about the characters: ‘... why should we care what happens to them?’ (Edelman 1994: 59). Others cared ‘in excess’ and even addressed the characters in the book directly by asking them: ‘Have you considered career counseling? If not therapy, why not e-mail? Perhaps the Peace Corps, Amnesty International or a kibbutz. For a truly refreshing change of pace, become a nun’ (Leonard 1994: 241). In all the reviewers’ minds, American Psycho was still present and many of them seemed to be still punishing Ellis for its perpetration. Even though The Informers was a much less ambitious book, comparisons with his most controversial novel were unavoidable: ‘First, the good news: The Informers is better than American Psycho. Now, the bad news: It’s better in the way hemorrhoids are better than leprosy’ (Harayda 1994: 12J), or, even more plainly stated: ‘the book is bad and there is no way around that fact’ (Gardner 1994: 86); comments that led other reviewers to take pity on Ellis and say: ‘... please, give the guy a break!’ (Blythe 1994: 158). The violence in the collection of short-stories was not nearly as prominent as in American Psycho but many tried to make an issue out of it. Vanity Fair offered a long interview and portrait of Ellis and echoed rumours regarding a very violent passage in which a vampire excised a 14-year-old’s uterus which had been cut from the final manuscript (Tyrnauer 1994: 96). In the Nation they also took interest in this passage and the reviewer, John Leonard, quoted it in full even though he admitted that it was cut out of the published book (1994: 239–40). In general terms, the reactions triggered by American Psycho were repeated, and so were the arguments used. Those trying to draw literary connections mentioned Joan Didion and Raymond Carver (Star 1994: 46; Harayda 1994: 12J; Anft 1994: 6E), together with a ‘lobotomized Hemingway’ (Leonard 1994: 239). Links with other media were also discovered. For Michael Anft the book resembled a screenplay more than a novel (1994: 6E): Neil Schmit directly compared it with Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts – itself an adaptation of some of

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Raymond Carver’s short stories (1994: 6) – and John Leonard considered that it was a video rather than a novel, where Ellis ‘channel-surfs’ (1994: 240). There was also the recurrent discussion about Ellis’s status as a satirist. In this sense the harshest criticism came from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. She conceded that many of the passages verged on parody because of the sensationalism but: If it’s satire that Mr. Ellis is after, however, it is a mission in which he utterly fails; his book completely lacks the social detail and wit upon which satire depends. In fact, the animating emotion of The Informers seems to be contempt: the author’s contempt for his characters and for his readers. The result is a novel that is as cynical, shallow and stupid as the people it depicts. (1994: C19) As always, other voices claimed Ellis was a satirist and a darkly ironic writer (Kirn 1994: 71); a covert moralist (Blythe 1994: 158) and a closet sentimentalist (Stade 1994: 14).1 By the time of The Informer’s publication, Ellis had already gained a reputation that could hardly change, whatever he published. His use of first-person narratives and amoral characters had prompted the confusion between Ellis’s own attitudes in real life and those of his characters. In the same way, his novels had been accused of fostering what they set out to criticize. Thus for some critics Ellis was still a satirist, a moralist and a social critic, whereas others found him the incarnation of evil. It is obvious that he has always enjoyed and used these ambiguities. His career seems to have followed a logical evolution in the subjects he has chosen and in the way he has dealt with this material. The obsession with commodities shown by the young people in Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction gave way to the obsession with the consumerism of 1980s society in New York, as seen through the eyes of this society’s ultimate consumer: the serial killer in American Psycho. In Glamorama (1998) the topic is again consumerism but in a different sense. The characters are not just obsessed with buying and consuming all available goods and do not just define themselves by the possessions they have. Instead, they have become brand names, who are bought and sold each day on the cultural market. They are artificially constructed according to the tastes of the people, of mass society. This is the world of celebrity culture, a world that is in fact inextricably linked to Ellis’s career as a writer. In effect, by the time of Glamorama’s publication, Ellis was already a celebrity writer, which led some reviewers to believe that he could not criticize the celebrity world since he was part of it. However, Ellis seems to have a Warholian attitude: be both part of that world and outside it; enjoy it while ironically seeing through it. Glamorama works like the previous novels in the sense that ambiguity is an important issue. An analysis of Glamorama’s reception leads to a series of more general questions: Do contemporary authors’ public personae play an

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important role in the way their works are interpreted? Is excessive importance given to placing a literary work in relation to that author’s previous works? Do reviews of literary works deal with literary merit/demerit at all? These are questions that pop up in an analysis of the immediate reviews that followed after the publication of Glamorama in the media, especially in newspapers and magazines. The reception of Glamorama is very interesting in the sense that a number of nonliterary aspects biased it; it is the reception of this novel, it turns out, that has been most influenced by Ellis’s public persona and behaviour. Glamorama is mainly a conspiracy thriller but, due to the pornographic scenes it depicts, it has also been considered ‘a splatter-porn thriller, with a sperm and body count in the googols’ (Levi 1999: E1). It deals with the superficial world of fashion and fame, a world very close to Ellis’s own. Its main character is Victor Ward, a 27-year-old model-cum-actor-cum-club promoter who is immersed in the shallow world of celebrities where appearances are everything and only the beautiful count. The novel has two very different settings: New York and Europe. In the New York section Victor is trying to open a club. Readers follow Victor in the 48 hours prior to its opening. His activities include the constant taking of sedative drugs such as Xanax, reviewing endless lists of celebrities who will attend the opening of the club, arguing with his girlfriend (a famous supermodel called Chloe), having sex with his business partner’s girlfriend (Alison), interviewing DJs, doing a photo shoot, being interviewed for MTV, having sex with his business partner’s lover (Lauren) and finally attending the opening of the club. At the club his simultaneous affairs with Alison and Lauren are discovered and, as a result, he is beaten up by his partner’s goons. The New York section is written in Ellis’s unmistakable style: first-person narrator, short sentences, quick dialogue, long lists of brand names and a toneless narrative voice. There is a continual confusion of factual reality and fiction, to the point that there is a film crew filming everything that happens; real and imaginary people become interchangeable and are reduced to lists of names. Thus, long lists of brand names, which have always been present in Ellis’s previous fiction, are here replaced by long lists of celebrity names: the new brand names of our culture. In Parts 2 to 6, which are mostly set in Europe, Ellis constructs a plot that is actually a deconstruction of a conspiracy thriller. He transports stale genre clichés into a metanarrative construct. In a labyrinthine plot, Victor is paid by a mysterious man to find an ex-girlfriend, now a modelcum-actress. He finds her in London and discovers too late that she has been ensnared in an international terrorist ring formed by glamorous models willing to plant bombs in Louis Vuitton bags. At this point his life becomes a script recorded by an ever-present camera crew who seem to be filming everything. Thus, the reader does not know whether Victor is a character in a film or is seeing visions after taking too much Xanax. The terrorist acts may or may not be part of a movie since reality and fiction are constantly blurred and people are not who they seem to be. Victor, who does not know whom to trust, ends up

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trapped in Italy, where he realizes that his doppelgänger may be in New York living his life. For Ellis the connection between the fashion world and terrorism lies in the fact that fashion has been a form of torture for women for decades and is now becoming the same for men. It is a kind of emotional violence, equivalent, in a way, to the actual violence caused by terrorism (in Clarke 1999: 95). The writer seems to favour these kinds of extreme allegories in his fiction since he used a similar one in American Psycho, where he connected the consumerism of objects at the hands of yuppies with the literal consumption of people by serial killers. This is not the only connection between Glamorama and other novels written by Ellis: Victor Ward and Jamie Fields were characters in The Rules of Attraction; Patrick Bateman has a cameo role in the book; and Victor comes across the words ‘Disappear Here’, a leitmotif in Less Than Zero. Asked about these connections Ellis said: My point being that the worlds of Less Than Zero and Glamorama aren’t really that much different. After fourteen years I’ve changed in some ways, but the fictive universe I’m creating really hasn’t. The concerns are the same, the themes are the same, the tonality of the writing is the same. (In Clarke 1999: 91) Glamorama is a novel full of metafictional devices in which the shallowness of the world of celebrities and its commodification is richly portrayed. In spite of all this, the book was not seriously analysed or even reviewed. The many reviews that appeared after its publication were mainly concerned with criticizing Ellis’s lifestyle and comparing him to the protagonist of the novel. This attitude on the part of critics can be traced back to Ellis’s beginnings as a writer, when he was considered a brat pack member. As has already been observed, these writers were dismissed by critics because they became celebrities too young, partied too publicly and did not hesitate to increase and use their celebrity status to promote their books. The reaction to Glamorama had to do with the image that Ellis acquired early on in his career. In fact, some of the critics chose to review Ellis’s novel together with another brat packer’s new novel: Jay McInerney’s Model Behavior (1998) (Wolcott 1998; Carvajal 1998; Cooper 1998). McInerney’s novel also dealt with the superficial world of models and with a writer who has to interview celebrities for a gossip magazine in order to make a living. His take on the world of celebrities and models is more straightforward and lacks the metafictional devices that Ellis uses. Nevertheless, in the reviews both novels were treated, or rather dismissed, in the same terms. In a way, it is understandable that Ellis’s dissolute past, together with his fame and success, fascinated critics more than Glamorama itself. In fact, a large number of magazines and newspapers chose to interview or profile the author rather than review his book. This was the case with Newsday (Mazmanian 1999) and the Washington Post, which profiled Ellis twice commenting upon his literary career

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and mentioning the plot of Glamorama but without further analysis or reviewing (See 1999: C2; Grove 1999: C1). Ellis seemed to enjoy playing with his public image and his literary characters. This can be clearly seen in the opening of Lloyd Grove’s profile of Ellis in the Washington Post, where Ellis is quoted as he lists the brands that he is wearing in a Bateman-like mood: Bret Easton Ellis wears a Hugo Boss blazer. His shirt is Canali, his tie Polo, his chinos Ralph Lauren. Armani made his shoes. Guess the name on his wristwatch. ‘And,’ the novelist adds unbidden after listing the labels adorning his body, ‘my underwear is Calvin Klein.’ Thanks for sharing, one is tempted to say. ... Still, the trendiest brand name in which he’s clothed is Bret Easton Ellis. (1999: C1) Curiously enough, the cult of personality is precisely what the book criticizes. However, even though this is criticized in the book, it is also still used by Ellis in real life to promote his books. In the summer of 1998, some months before the publication of Glamorama, the writer willingly participated in a documentary about his life and books. It was called ‘This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis’. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London hosted the film premiere, which was actually a television programme – BBC’s South Bank Show – and some weeks later it was released on television. In the United States the film premiered in April 2000, timed for the imminent release of the film adaptation of American Psycho and the paperback version of Glamorama. The fact that Ellis participated in a documentary about his life is not per se censurable; the problem was the kind of attitudes and behaviour that the documentary showed. As Ian Parker complained in the Observer, a serious writer was treated as a pop-culture object. He was shown in a nightclub and shopping but never close to a word processor or doing anything related to his life as a writer (1998: 13). Not without reason the New York Times considered it a ‘flaccid infomercial’ (Van Gelder 2000: E32), since the fictional scenes looked more like trailers for the movie adaptation and advertisements rather than serious critical analyses of Ellis’s work. The author himself acknowledged that the tone of the documentary was not the right one, even confessing ‘[I am] a victim of my own vanity and narcissism’ (in Heath 1999: 117), and ‘[f]or someone as paranoid as I am, I really put a lot of faith in people. They talked me into it. They were so adamant about how much they loved my work. Flattery blinds your judgement’ (in Raven 1998: 4). In his review, Raven ironically added that Ellis still went to the premiere and the party afterwards, somehow doubting the writer’s regret and underlining the way he capitalized on it all the same. The most controversial part of the documentary was the final ten minutes, where Ellis and two fellow writers, Candace Bushnell and Lawrence David, go to a club in a limousine. They share a drunken conversation in the back of the limousine where there is a remark about Ellis’s enjoyment of the sexual act of fisting and he is also asked if he has ever slept with a woman:

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comments that fuelled a controversy about the author’s sexuality. After the documentary, Ellis did nothing to protect that private area of his life and in an interview for Rolling Stone to promote Glamorama he spoke broadly about it. He shared with the interviewer an informal history of his developing sexuality. When he was 16, all in the same week he lost his virginity to a girl, had sex with a boy and got his driving license. For two years he had no sex, then there was a girl and a boy. There were also threesomes in college (a male-female couple and him) and he had his longest relationship was from 1988 to 1995, though in the interview he did not make it clear whether this was with a female or a male. After such explicit sexual history, Ellis claimed that he did not want to declare himself straight, gay or bisexual because that might limit and direct the interpretation of what he had written (in Heath 1999: 117). The way the author has dealt with his own sexuality is also representative of the way he has dealt with his fame: using it while at the same time denying that he is using it; refusing to state his sexuality after narrating all sorts of intimate details about it. In the different interviews Ellis gave he also dealt with his feelings about being famous and the fact that he was also a celebrity. In general terms he denied leading a glamorous life at all. In the Washington Post the writer claimed that he did not sense that he was a celebrity: ‘I’m not recognized on the street or when I go to stores. I don’t have screaming girls who follow me around, or people taking my picture. ... My life is so dull. If people only knew’ (in Grove 1999: C1). In relation to the South Bank Show documentary, when asked by Marianne Macdonald of the Observer about the very celebrity-like scene in the limousine, Ellis claimed that his real life was not about stretch limos at all: ‘It’s so boring. What do I do all day? The mundane things everyone else does. Go to the grocery stores, go to the gym, make phone calls’ (in Macdonald 1998: 4). However, Ellis contradicted himself because he also thought that Glamorama was ‘about my feelings being famous ... in many ways this book is a criticism of what’s going on in my life’ (in Macdonald 1998: 4). Aware of his contradictions he claimed: I’m kind of happy hearing that I contradict myself, because it just tells me, in some weird way, that I’m really human. You know, it helps when you have a life where you’re photographed, where people are making a documentary about you ... it makes me feel more real, more three-dimensional, than I do otherwise. (1998: 4) The question many reviewers asked was whether Ellis could be part of the celebrity world and criticize it at the same time. When directly asked where he placed himself he answered: ‘I always feel that I am as guilty as many of the people I write about. In terms of where I place myself, I’m in the gutter with them all’ (in Raven 1998: 4). His being part of the scene did not make Ellis believe that he could not distance himself from such a world: ‘I can’t deny that I have a toehold in these worlds ... and yet I’m pretty harshly criticising them at the same time.

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I mean, you can be both: You can be part of a scene and also see it for what it is’ (in Grove 1999: C1). Thus, Glamorama is a book written by a celebrity author that articulates a discourse on the celebrity world, a world that the writer researched by immersing himself in the fashion world, going to shows and meeting designers (Clarke 1999: 86). Knopf printed 100,000 copies of this very ambitious book which had a 16-city author tour (from Los Angeles to New York), a national marketing campaign, advertising on websites, even a 3-D poster. There was also an international tour and, as a result, Ellis certainly captured the attention of the most important newspapers and magazines. Nevertheless, most of those who chose to review his book – rather than interview or profile the author – strongly criticized the novel. For Vanity Fair James Wolcott (1998) attacked the writer in almost personal terms a month before the novel was published. In the same article he also commented upon Jay McInerney’s Model Behavior (1998) in a review that opened by saying: ‘An obsession with models is something most men outgrow unless they’re knuckleheads’ (1998: 71), implying quite obviously that both McInerney and Ellis were knuckleheads. He believed that Ellis nursed an ‘angry feeling’ for models because he felt a deep aversion to women, who are tortured and killed in his fictional universe. To support this statement Wolcott claimed that in the documentary broadcast on the BBC’s South Bank Show Ellis half-confessed his homosexuality. Thus, Wolcott drew the far-fetched conclusion that there was a homoerotic component in Ellis’s hatred for women. He even accused both McInerney and Ellis of building up models to make all women feel inadequate, which is what Ellis claims that the fashion world does and that he was trying to denounce in the book. The New York Times reviewed Ellis’s book twice in very unfavourable and also quite personal terms, in line with Vanity Fair’s attitude. Michiko Kakutani, who has systematically and harshly criticized all Ellis’s novels she has reviewed, opened fire by saying that ‘Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t need the National Lampoon to turn him into a parody – with Glamorama, he’s done it himself. This glutinous hodgepodge of a book takes all the most glaring flaws of Mr. Ellis’s recent work ... and tries to pass them off as a novel’ (1999). In the same newspaper, Daniel Mendelsohn also accused the author of not having evolved much in his novels and of being celebrity-obsessed. He claimed that Ellis knew far more about the celebrity world than mere journalistic curiosity required: ‘... he reminds you of those Southern judges who simply had to watch hours and hours of dirty movies in order to determine that yes, they were pornographic’ (1999: 8). In the New Statesman Scott Reyburn also suspected that Ellis actually took the world of male modelling seriously and he indulged in wish-fulfilment (1999: 49). Craig Lindsey even went so far as to say that one could not help but see the author’s reflection when Victor checks himself out in the mirror or describes such trivial goings-on as bumping into a famous face at a club. For him Glamorama did not reveal the shallowness of fame and celebrity, but the shallowness of its author (1999: 23). Ellis himself declared that his interests in fiction mainly

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concern shallowness, vanity, narcissism and finding the truth in surfaces (in Heath 1999: 119). However, it would be unfair and far-fetched to conclude that an interest in surfaces in fiction also implies that the author is a superficial person in real life, or that this subject matter makes the novel superficial or worthless. As the writer himself declared, the book should speak for itself: ‘I grew up thinking Look at the art, not the artist. The artist’s marital problems, drug problems, wild nights out – they mean nothing. It’s the books, the films, the records that I connect with emotionally’ (in Blume 1999). Whether Glamorama was a criticism of the shallow celebrity world or part of that same world was one of the most debated aspects in the reviews. According to Kakutani, Ellis spent too much time chronicling a world that he claimed was shallow, mercenary, cynical and meaningless, ‘a world he glamorizes as much as he debunks’ (1999). In the same line, for Mendelsohn ‘Ellis goes to an awful lot of trouble to make you know how disgusted he is by the superficiality of contemporary culture, and the result is fiction that is – well, disgusting and superficial’ (1999: 8). Ellis’s willing participation in advertising campaigns and documentaries led Mendelsohn to conclude that his novels were advertisements for himself. Thus, Glamorama would become another artefact of the culture it claims to criticize. For this critic, the only people who would enjoy these novels would be those whom the novel clandestinely celebrates: the actors, models, celebrity writers and so on. Henry Hitchings, for the Times Literary Supplement, certainly reached the same conclusion since he believed that the existence of the novel ‘validates and perpetuates the evils against which it ostensibly rails ... the people who will enjoy this novel most, almost impervious to the darkness of its design, will be the very people it attacks’ (1999: 19). Hitchings and Mendelsohn might have been partly right since in the pages of the New Yorker, at the time of Glamorama’s release, Donovan Leitch, the Manhattan perennial It boy, had proudly claimed that the book was based on his life (Wallace 1999: 30–1). Certainly, he was married to a supermodel, he was a club promoter, he played in a rock band and in a movie, just like Victor Ward in Glamorama. The fact that he was not ashamed of being a mirror image of such a superficial character may cast some doubt on the success of Glamorama’s message. In the same way, one of the few good reviews that the novel received came from the pages of Vogue, where it was acknowledged that the book was a wicked parody that would undoubtedly unnerve some, but it had all the positive aspects of Ellis’s fiction, ‘brimming with unsettling details, ironic dialogue, and black humor’ (Kourlas 1999: 96). Even the positive reviews included shafts of aggression directed towards Ellis. This was the case of Walter Kirn for New York, who stated that ‘Bret Easton Ellis would not know a good novel if he wrote one himself. The proof is that he has written one himself’ (1999: 49). In spite of this more or less positive initial statement, he quite incongruously explains that ‘[i]n a one-man race to the literary bottom Ellis completes in a single book, alone, a process of degradation that ought to have taken years and scores of books by a whole generation of

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writers’ (49). It seems that Kirn really enjoyed the first part of the book, where Ellis constructs a web of vacuous night crawlers and brand names. However, he detested the second part, where Ellis tries to ‘make a point’. Even so, his final words recommended reading the book since ‘[t]here’s enough high amusement in Glamorama, enough illegitimate literary fun, to more than make up for its tedious tilt toward meaning’ (50). The fact that the novel actually has a plot is something that was underlined in practically all reviews. Ellis’s previous fiction had been more a collection of vignettes and events that did not seem to lead anywhere. The Informers is a perfect example of this nearly plotless narrative based on images and random situations. American Psycho may be closer to having a plot but the killings multiply while leading nowhere. There was no development in Ellis’s previous characters either. Glamorama is a conspiracy thriller where probably too many things take place to make any sense but there is a development in the main character’s personality. When asked about the fact that he had introduced a narrative, the writer stated: It has more to do with the fact that when you’re young you really haven’t experienced enough to know that lives actually do have narratives, that there is an overall narrative arc to a person’s life. ... And that’s why I think the books I wrote in my twenties were really more about behavior and attitude and hopelessness. (In Clarke 1999: 92) Ellis’s use of a narrative and intended meaning had different interpretations. Unlike Walter Kirn’s dislike of Ellis’s search for meaning in the second part of the novel, Jeff Giles, from Newsweek, considered him a good, entertaining writer line by line but ‘if he knows what all this means he’s not saying’ (1998: 93). It seems he missed an interpretative effort on Ellis’s part, precisely what Kirn despised in the novel. Dennis Cooper, who is also considered a blank fiction writer, offered a third interpretation in Spin as he believed that Ellis’s noncommittal tone and his refusal to state the obvious – that his characters’ behaviour is inexcusable – was his greatest strength (1998: 100). To sum up, both Kirn and Giles despised Glamorama, the former because Ellis gave an interpretation of his intentions in his work, the latter because Ellis gave no interpretation at all, whereas Cooper believed Ellis gave no interpretation and that was what made Glamorama especially enjoyable. These contradictory reviews may illustrate one of the dangers of letting context overflow and overwhelm the interpretation and analysis of a novel. The authorial intentions are difficult to guess and understand and, although Ellis complicates matters by connecting his life to that of his characters, some reviewers would have done well to keep their eye more exclusively on the novel instead. The reception of Glamorama was distorted by Ellis’s reflection on his work. The novel was strongly criticized using the writer’s lifestyle and literary celebrity status as the main argument. Obviously, Ellis’s public persona has always played an important role in the way his work has been interpreted. His previous books,

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especially the controversial American Psycho, had established a set of expectations about how Glamorama should be interpreted which blinded some critics to other new aspects and approaches. On some occasions, the literary merit of Glamorama was denied or ignored to focus instead on more contextual aspects, which, although interesting as complementary studies, substituted for an analysis of the literary work itself.

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The Use of Celebrity Culture and the Novel of Manners

Glamorama opens with two very different quotations. One is from Krishna: ‘There was no time when you nor I nor these Kings did not exist’; the other is from Hitler: ‘You make a mistake if you see what we do as merely political’. The Kings that Krishna mentions seem, in this context, to be a reference to our contemporary celebrities, whereas Hitler’s reference takes us into a much darker sphere, represented in the novel by the terrorist plot and its consequences which go well beyond politics. The double quotation also mirrors the two thematic concerns of the novel since Glamorama is divided into six parts but it has two clear sections. In fact, it seems like two novels in one: Part 1 is written as a novel of manners, whereas Parts 2 to 6 seem to belong to the conspiracy thriller genre. The novel of manners depicts the shallow, absurd world of fatuous celebrities where appearances are all, though there is still a distinction between what is real and what is not. In the conspiracy thriller that emerges in Part 2 this distinction is completely blurred and the world of the hyperreal takes over, to the extent that a new reality is created out of fragments. The first part seems to reflect Guy Debord’s theories on the society of spectacle, whereas the second shows the nightmarish hyperreality described by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. As with Less Than Zero and American Psycho, the first paragraph of the novel self-consciously displays some of its main issues. Glamorama’s opening paragraph is a monologue by Victor, who is complaining about the design quality of the club he is about to open. There are some specks that no one seems to see except for Victor, who has a special eye for superficial, unimportant things. These specks are going to reappear throughout the novel, especially when the absurd, shallow atmosphere of the celebrity world comes to the fore. Victor sees specks in the same way as he sees celebrities but he cannot explain their meaning; this is for the reader to work out. The confusion of names and the interchangeability of people are also going to become leitmotifs throughout the novel. In the first paragraph Victor cannot remember the exact name of a designer: Yaki Nakamari, George Nakashima, Yaki Nakamashi, Yuki Nakamorti and Yoki Nakamuri are all attempts at remembering the name of the real designer, Yuki Nakamura. From the very beginning names of celebrities are

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easily interchangeable and unimportant in a world of undefined identities. Besides, names of real people are going to be constantly used and made to fit in with fictional events. Nevertheless, the most interesting theme that can be extracted at this early stage from this paragraph is the atmosphere of conspiracy which will suffuse the whole novel. The specks ‘don’t look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine’ (5). Everything that is about to happen is supposedly prepared by someone and whether we will learn who is behind the conspiracy or not seems to be already answered in a metafictional voice by Victor/Ellis himself: I don’t want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don’t leave out why, though I’m getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won’t get answered – now, come on, goddamnit, what’s the story? (1998: 5) Is this Victor speaking to Peyton and JD or is this Ellis playing with his image as a writer not willing to use conventional narrative techniques where the who, what, where, when and why should be answered? Ellis seems to be warning the reader that, although his novel may seem to have a plot, namely a conspiracy, this is a story where everything is connected but nothing adds up and where the authority of the narrative itself needs to be disrupted. To use Krishna’s words in the introductory quotation, this is our very celebrity-obsessed culture looking for ‘kings’, for guidance in a world that has no answer for a question like ‘why?’ In this chapter I want to focus on the way celebrity culture in general and the novel of manners genre in particular shape the first part of the novel.

11.1 Celebrity, Manners and Class Membership The world of celebrities is nowadays a very popular subject in the mass media and the arts. Many magazines such as TV Guide or Spy and TV programmes like Celebrities Uncensored have focused on stars, revealing that they are constructed according to a system and are rarely what they seem. This overarching social phenomenon, which includes TV reality shows such as Big Brother, American Idol or Making the Band and TV series like Entourage, has also been very popular in the arts. It has featured prominently in many novels, from modern classics such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926) and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), to the more contemporary Pat Cadigan’s Fools (1994), William Gibson’s Idoru (1996), Ben Elton’s Popcorn (1998), Jay McInerney’s Model Behavior (1998) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Tell-All (2010). There are also many films which have looked at the world of celebrities, classics such as Citizen Kane (1941), All About Eve (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954), or nonclassics like Fame! (1980), Basquiat (1996), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Celebrity (1998) and Zoolander (2001). Examples from the world of art would include

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AndyWarhol and Keith Haring and from the world of music, Madonna and Lady Gaga, who actively display their knowledge about fame. In this context, Ellis’s Glamorama is a very interesting case because of its ambiguous relationship with the celebrity world; it is a good example of an author using the celebrity system to promote his work while criticizing the same system in the novel itself. This in fact is basically the attitude of many people who are conscious of the fabrication process of celebrity but who still enjoy this process. For cultural critic Joshua Gamson, this is a sign that for many people it is not a question, simply, of believing or not believing the hype: quite independently of this, they may enjoy it or not (1994: 49). The cynical distance provided by this understanding of the system places the audience in a position of control in what a friend of Andy Warhol’s called ‘the Warhol attitude’: ‘You can have your cake and eat it, too. You can wallow in all the marvelous successes of modern-day American life and at the same time be superior to it because you’re mocking it at the same time that you indulge in it’ (in Gamson 1994: 52). Ellis’s attitude is directly related to Warhol’s and to the interpretative strategies of some celebrity-watching audiences. Gamson distinguishes five different kinds of audiences. First, we have the traditional audience type, who believes in the natural merit of celebrities and do not see the artifice. Second, we find the second-order traditional audience type, whose faith in the merit of celebrities remains unshaken despite revelations of artifice or the inside stories in magazines. Third, there is the gossiper game player type, who enjoys celebrities just as source of gossip and likes to evaluate and interpret them. Fourth, we find the detective game player type, who likes to deal with the movement between reality and fiction present in celebrities and wonder about the truth behind the star. Finally, there is the postmodernist audience type, who is a more complex and ambiguous case and within which we can place Ellis’s attitude (1994: 142–85). Postmodern audiences are sceptical but interested in the techniques of artifice surrounding celebrities. They do not believe the story of the naturally rising celebrity and prefer to concentrate on the story about how celebrity is manufactured. Gamson calls this attitude ‘engaged disbelief’ because the discovery of the artificiality of the system is what prompts their interest (1994: 147). Thus, even though this type of audience is aware of the commercial culture techniques, they embrace the celebrity world all the same. In fact, the pleasure for this type of audience comes from the recognition of the manipulation and the play of images involved. Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama reflects the world of celebrities in all its intensity and brutality and also shows their constructed nature and interchangeability. As we have seen, as a blank fiction writer Ellis belongs to a generation of writers fascinated with mass culture and willing to explore it. They live in a postmodern culture dominated by consumerism, the mass media and the reproduction of images: a world of empty spectacle, dumbed-down consumption and instant gratification (Bilton 2002: 4). Does this leave any room for

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criticism and distance? According to Fredric Jameson it does not since writers and critics are: ... so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable. (1991: 46) In this sense, Ellis’s ambiguous position towards celebrity culture and Glamorama’s mixture of satire with lavishing descriptions of the pleasurable aspects of celebrity life have raised doubts about the novel’s effect on readers. According to Annesley, the satirical impact of the novel is weakened by the lack of distance between the author’s narrative and the images of celebrity culture that are being interrogated (2006: 31). Like all Ellis’s novels, Glamorama is very ambiguous in being both complicit with and critical towards celebrity culture since Ellis attacks the superficiality of the celebrity world by vividly depicting it, describing all the glamorous parties, the fabulous dresses and the good looks. If we take James W. Tuttleton’s classic definition of the novel of manners it is hard to see Glamorama in any other light: [A] novel in which the manners, social customs, folkways, conventions, traditions, and mores of a given social group at a given time and place play a dominant role in the lives of fictional characters, exert control over their thought and behaviour, and constitute a determinant upon the actions in which they are engaged, and in which these manners and customs are detailed realistically with, in fact, a premium upon the exactness of their representation. (1972: 10) Glamorama deals with a given social group (celebrities and models) at a given time (the 1990s) and place (New York). The manners and social customs of this group certainly play a dominant role in the life of all the characters. In the case of Victor, these rules are so powerful that they shape his behaviour and all aspects of his existence. Celebrity culture conventions impinge upon Victor’s character to the extent that he loses all trace of free will or personality. In novels of manners characters are creatures of their age who act according to the rules of their time. For Jerome Klinkowitz, when shaping their identity characters ‘are challenged by the catalog of models which a self-conscious awareness of their culture provides’ (1986: 8). The code of manners stabilizes the group identity and differentiates those belonging to the group from those who do not. Victor is a minor celebrity who needs to act according to these norms to shape his identity and keep his group membership. Victor is completely immersed in the shallow world of celebrities where appearances are everything and only the beautiful count. This is an absurd world where celebrities have ‘their hair done at a salon that’s so chic it doesn’t

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even have a name or a phone number’ (287) and they go to places ‘so fashionable you can’t get in even if you’re on the guest list’ (274). By having Victor Ward narrate his experiences in the celebrity world we are given a firsthand view of its absurdity, but it is the reader, not the narrator, who may become aware of the commodification and superficiality of the characters in the novel. In a way, this is ‘the Warhol attitude’ mentioned earlier: enjoying the celebrity world by feeling superior to it, by seeing through it. In effect, Victor seems to be a great admirer of Warhol, whom he even quotes when talking to his official girlfriend Chloe: ‘Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence.’ She turns slowly to look at me. ‘Who, Victor? Who? Andy who?’ She coughs, blowing her nose. ‘Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith? Who in the hell told you this? Andy Rooney?’ ‘Warhol,’ I say softly, hurt. ‘Baby. ...’ (1998: 40) The fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol predicted for everyone in the future seem to have arrived almost too soon. There are too many celebrities to choose from and that also makes them passé too soon; not even Warhol’s name can last in this unstable world. Debord’s society of spectacle is now contemporary celebrity culture where all his fears have intensified and been fulfilled. According to Debord, one of the first consequences of the spectacle is that all that was once directly lived has become mere representation. Thus, our lives are made of detached images and of appearances. As Debord claims: ‘Understood on its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance’ (1967: 14). Marx spoke of the degradation of being into having, whereas Debord speaks of having into appearing. Therefore, social prestige is constructed through a series of images, or through the illusion of appearing to have the right look, style and social knowledge to triumph in a society that overvalues fame. The mass media play an important role in this construction of personality in the society of spectacle. Victor is a very representative case of a person obsessed with fame and appearances. Thus, he knows about the importance of publicity and public relations and the power of the mass media to create an image of the self. In a novel of manners it is to be expected that characters draw on the stimuli from the media but Victor goes a step further by using the media to prove how much he conforms to celebrity manners and deserves group membership. As a result, in Part 1 of the novel Victor has a Details reporter follow him so that she can write an article on ‘The making of a Club.’ From time to time Victor underlines sentences that he wants the reporter to write, such as his being a perfectionist (9) and his being semi-famous in South Beach (11). Publicity is all in this world and it can reach absurd extremes. For example, we learn that Victor has no money as he bought a glass-door refrigerator because Elle Decor did a piece on his place,

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which eventually did not run. In a world where life is presented as if it were a movie, architecture and space have become the movie set of life (Gabler 1998: 215). The illusion of a perfect setting is more important than the real apartment in which Victor lives. Curiously enough, one of his greatest achievements is being on the cover of the current issue of YouthQuake1 with the headline ‘27 and Hip’, a headline that could have been applied to Ellis himself, who was 27 when he published American Psycho and achieved celebrity status. Victor is so concerned about fashion and style, which are basic signs of value in celebrity culture, that his fashion statements make no sense at all. He believes that ‘in is out. Out is in. Simple, non?’ (15), and that ‘no trend is the new trend’ (53). These statements bring to mind Debord’s prescient words: ‘The sheer fad item perfectly expresses the fact that, as the mass of commodities become more and more absurd, absurdity becomes a commodity in its own right’ (1967: 44). Victor is trying to open his own club behind Damien’s back; Damien has hired him to organize the opening of his club, and when working out the style that this second club should have, Victor states that he wants something simple, ‘something unconsciously classic. I want no distinctions between exterior and interior, formal and casual, wet and dry, black and white, full and empty. ... I want a no-nonsense approach to nightlife’ (51). This is the senseless world which Victor inhabits. His set of values is just as absurd. He claims not to be a racist because he has a Malcolm X cap signed by Spike Lee (67); he thinks that receiving threatening anonymous notes is cool (105) and that cash machines can also be used as mirrors (16). In fact, according to his girlfriend, Victor’s best friend is a mirror (103, 178). His reasons for being famous are summarized in a few sentences: he is opening a club, he has modelled for Paul Smith, has done a Calvin Klein ad, is the guy everyone thought David Geffen was dating but was not, dates Chloe Byrnes and is on the cover of YouthQuake magazine (30). In American Psycho, people were defined through the brands they chose; in Glamorama people are defined through their celebrity status. Baxter Priestly, who is a friend of Chloe’s, is an ‘NYU film grad, rich and twenty-five, part-time model (so far only group shots in Guess?, Banana Republic and Tommy Hilfiger ads), blond with pageboy haircut, dated Elizabeth Saltzman like I did, wow’ (33). People are reduced to the covers they make and the people they go out with; in fact Victor’s two mottoes are a good summary of this life: ‘The better you look, the more you see’ and ‘We’ll slide down the surface of things’. Those who are out of the scene are not understood. This is the case of Lauren Hynde, a student in The Rules of Attraction and one of Chloe’s friends and Victor’s one-time college mate in Glamorama, who cannot understand a world where ‘all anyone is interested in is who’s fucking who, who has the biggest dick, the biggest tits, who’s more famous than whoever’, to which a confused Victor can only answer: ‘And you’re, um, not like into this? ... You’ve got like a problem?’ (87). Debord would claim that only the wealthy can enjoy the life of luxury and success in the society of spectacle and this is so because that wealth has been

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taken from the lives and dreams of the exploited. In Glamorama Victor clearly distinguishes between the actors of the society of spectacle and the spectators. In fact, he tries to keep the illusion of the democratic myth of celebrity because without the belief that anyone can be a star the whole system would collapse. However, the world of celebrities as a social group also needs to be protected. Otherwise, anyone could gain group membership. Accordingly, Victor tells a doorman who wants to become a celebrity: ‘You’re the next Markus Schenkenberg. You’re the white Tyson.’ I reach over and push his hand away. ‘Hey man, I’m Hispanic – ’ He keeps pressing the Door Open button. ‘You’re the next Hispanic Markus Schenkenberg. You’re the, um, Hispanic Tyson.’ I reach over and push his hand away again. ‘You’re a star, man. Any day of the week.’ (1998: 20) Victor’s attitude is quite cynical and he does not seem to believe in the democratic myth himself. In fact, on some other occasions he makes clear distinctions and does not hesitate to ask the driver of his car: ‘Is there like a divider or partition or something that separates me from you?’ (74). The idea of selecting the celebrities that will attend the opening is based on the rejection of those who are not well known. Damien even tells Victor: ‘If I see anyone and I mean anyone unhip wandering around this party tonight I will kill you’ (46). Victor’s main concern in the first part of the novel is to select the hippest celebrities who will attend the opening of the club. Thus, the first part of the novel is full of long lists of names of real celebrities, where real and invented people are listed and judged by the scale of fame that this society imposes: having won an Oscar or dating an Oscar winner become similar achievements in this shallow world.

11.2 Celebrity as Brand Name: The Construction of Identity The long lists of celebrity names drive home their importance in the system; in fact, celebrity names are used to measure everything. People are constantly compared to celebrities and the importance of different events is measured by the celebrities who attend them. In a fashion show hardly anything is said about the dresses and, instead, Victor focuses on the list of celebrities in attendance: ‘In the audience I’m able to spot Anna Wintour, Carrie Donovan, Holly Brubach, Catherine Deneuve, Faye Dunaway, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Ian Schrager, Peter Gallagher ... René Russo, Sylvester Stallone, Patrick McCarthy, Sharon Stone ...’ (1998: 121–2). Up to 25 people are mentioned in a single paragraph, implying that the quality of the show is directly related to the wellknownness of its audience. And it is not just shows that are measured in these terms: when describing the restaurant where Victor is having lunch with his father he lists the famous people present instead (77), and even a funeral is retold by repeating the list of celebrities who have attended it (76).

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For Victor, celebrities are also the paradigm against which everyone else may be measured and, accordingly, descriptions of people consist of a comparison between them and famous celebrities, a comparison sometimes taken to absurd extremes. For example, to describe the reporter who is following him, Victor says that she is ‘Uma Thurman if Uma Thurman was five feet two and asleep’ (6). The way he describes his employer’s goons is also remarkable: ‘One looks like a black Woody Harrelson and the other like a white Damon Wayans’ (22), something difficult to imagine taking into account that Woody Harrelson is white and Damon Wayans is black. Thus, anonymous people are described by using their hypothetical similarities to actual celebrities: ‘a youngish guy with a Caesar haircut looking like a thirtyish Ben Arnold’ (114). Celebrities do not only turn into names but also adjectives, or at least Victor uses them in that way, as when once he tells a friend she looks ‘very Uma-ish tonight’, referring to Uma Thurman, the actress (155). Names of celebrities are even used as verbs, in sentences like ‘ “As if” I Alicia-Silverstone-in-Clueless back at him’ (120). When celebrities become language signs, adjectives, verbs or nouns they lose all human qualities. In this sense, Daniel J. Boorstin sees human emptiness as the quality that makes a man or woman into a brand (1961: 48–9). For Klinkowitz in the novel of manners social practices are treated like signs in a linguistic system (1986: 7). In Glamorama celebrities are so empty that they can even become language signs, or, rather, signifiers with nothing to signify. The transformation of celebrities into empty names is seen in other very literal ways. Long lists of brand names, which have always been present in Ellis’s previous fiction, are here replaced by long lists of celebrity names: the new brand names of our culture. Victor organizes celebrities following an alphabetical order, turning celebrities who have nothing to do with each other and who have become famous for very different reasons into the same empty names. The list of Cs starts like this: Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford, Sheryl Crow, David Charvet, Courtney Cox, Harry Connick, Jr., Francesco Clemente, Nick Constantine, Zoe Cassavetes, Nicolas Cage, Thomas Calabro, Cristi Conway, Bob Collacello, Whitfield Crane, John Cusack, Dean Cain, Jim Courier, Roger Clemens, Russell Crowe, Tia Carrere and Helena Bonham Carter – but I’m not sure if she should be under B or C. (1998:8) As we have seen, these people lose all trace of personality and are reduced to empty names: being a model, an artist, an actor in Baywatch or an Oscar-winning actress become synonymous in the language of fame; they are turned into commodities as long as people can identify them. They only have exchange value (the amount of money they can produce by selling their image) and no use value (the inner worth of the person). Their exchange value runs parallel to their fame, which is computed by the number of parties attended, the covers they make or the people they go out with.

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There is a close link between the world of celebrities and the world of commodities. For Leo Braudy, consumer culture and fame culture are so linked that anyone with ambition must ‘present himself or herself in the familiar terms by which others are bought or sold by the world’ (1986: 595). Thus, to be famous is a form of sale: a new public persona is constructed, an image is created by publicists, public relations entrepreneurs and so on. This reification of people has been compared by critics to a kind of assembly line celebrity production (Gamson, 1994: 61). Similarly, in High Visibility Irving Rein et al. claim that celebrities ‘are manufactured, just as cars, clothes, and computers are’ (1997: 8–9, italics in the original). This is an argument that John W. Aldridge used against young celebrity authors who, like Bret Easton Ellis, shared the same literary education in creative programmes at university and produced the assembly-line fiction demanded by some readers. Likewise, the type of celebrity that Victor represents in Glamorama seems to be constructed according to the likes and expectations of an audience. Ellis uses so many names that some of them cannot be identified by the reader, especially as time passes and new celebrities are promoted while others are left in oblivion. In a review for the New Yorker Alex Ross noted that if the novel were studied in literature classes in the future, lots of annotations would be needed in order to identify who these celebrities were (1999: 87). Thus, the cruel transitory quality of the system is reflected in the very reading process. Besides, celebrities in Glamorama are not only transitory, they are also interchangeable and disposable, probably because they have been mass-produced using the same marketing techniques. Disposability is in fact the spine of the consumer culture system. Already in the 1930s the strategy of obsoletism was raised by advertising specialist Earnest Elmo Calkins: things do not wear out, they are displaced by more attractive rather than more effective things (in Ewen 1988: 242–3). This same motto has been applied to celebrities, who are constantly replaced by new figures. Like the yuppies in American Psycho, celebrities in Glamorama are also interchangeable. Victor is constantly taken for someone else and his own agent cannot distinguish him from some other clients. Some friends claim to have seen him in a CK show, others in the Alfaro Show or in South Beach. There are even photos that prove Victor’s presence but he still claims not to have been there. In a time of image reproduction saturation, the events that happen are only the ones that are reported, recorded or photographed. People believe the photos they see rather than Victor, who denies having been in such places. These confusions reach the realm of the hyperreal when at the end of the novel we learn that Victor really has a double who is actually replacing him. There are so many Victors in this world, so many empty names, that nobody notices the change. At the end we find Victor alone, about to be murdered in Europe while a new Victor is living his life in New York. His father, who is an ambitious senator in Washington, has apparently decided to replace his son with a new one he won’t be ashamed of.

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As happened in American Psycho, but in a different context, this is a world where personality is constructed out of fragments. As Ruth Helyer suggests, Victor’s double is instantly plausible because Victor’s language is easily quotable; after all, Victor has never owned a language of his own and talks through songwords (2009: 205). Moreover, style becomes another important means of constructing the new Victor since it offers a representation of the self defined by surfaces and commodities. Thus, to transform the double of Victor into an ideal son his style just has to be changed. For a photo shoot for George magazine, before-and-after shots of Victor are juxtaposed: Before: I’m holding a Bass Ale, wearing Prada, a goatee pasted on my face, a grungy expression, eyes slits. After: I’m carrying a stack of lawbooks and wearing a Brooks Brothers seersucker suit, a bottle of Diet Coke in my left hand, Oliver Peoples wireframes. (450) In this world reality is nothing, appearance is everything; being has turned into appearing to be. Postmodernism has thrown the very concept of personal essence into doubt since there is a constant construction and reconstruction of the self. There is no self independent of relations since the technologies of social saturation expose us to an enormous range of people and new forms of relationship. Thus, as social saturation proceeds, we become pastiches and selves are populated with the characters of others (Gergen 1991: 71). In celebrity culture, celebrities play the role of models which people try to imitate. Since individual essence disappears, the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed by means of very superficial aspects such as your choice of clothing, which is supposed to send the intended message. Victor’s lawbooks, Brooks Brothers seersucker suit, bottle of Diet Coke and Oliver Peoples wireframes send the message that this is a new improved Victor, who is less superficial and is now concerned with his intellectual nourishment.

11.3 From Pseudo-Events to the Hyperreal As the narration progresses, there is a significant evolution from the absurd world of New York and its vacuous celebrities to a world of the hyperreal where Victor is unable to distinguish what he imagines from what takes place. Since all events seem to be recorded, Victor starts to doubt his own existence. In the first part we find the world of spectacle and pseudo-events, where the media plays an important role in the construction of celebrities. Daniel J. Boorstin was the first critic to use the term ‘pseudo-event’ in his The Image: a Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1961). For Boorstin a pseudo-event is an event such as a press conference or a presidential debate, which is organized just to be reported. These events are not spontaneous but artificially constructed and their relation to reality is certainly ambiguous. Their origin dates from an increase in the

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demand for news in the early nineteenth century. In 1848 the Associated Press was founded and news became a sellable commodity, which was part of the graphic revolution. In fact, from the dry-plate photography of 1876 to the television in 1941 there was only a 65-year span. As the need for news increased, so did the pressure to create pseudo-events, especially with the advent of television and on-the-spot telecasting of news. After all, pseudo-events are more vivid, attractive, impressive and persuasive than reality itself. Pseudo-events flood the first part of the book, where there is an overabundance of cameras, especially in the club, and sometimes even mise-en-abyme structures are found. There are situations in which a crew is filming the making of a commercial as photographers take pictures of the video team (99), or when Victor is interviewed for MTV News and a Japanese man films the interview that MTV is filming while another Japanese man takes photos of the video crew (138).2 When Ellis was asked about his reasons for including these references to cameras, pictures and films throughout the narrative, he explained: But it also seemed very suggestive to me – the fact that we basically perform all the time in our daily lives and just taking that idea one step further. There’s so much surveillance in the world: in airports, banks, malls, and this alters the way we move and talk and interact with each other. It’s very subtle, but there’s a degree of acting going on in society. So I wanted to capture that, and that performance idea meshed with how dramatic the characters in the book act. (In Clarke 1999: 90–91) In the novel the sense of the real progressively loses its grip and a new life is constructed based only on the photos, cameras and videos that surround the characters. Apart from recorded events, films and TV programmes, other mass media also play an engulfing role in this culture. Magazines are very important, to the extent that what they say is sometimes more real than reality itself. Chloe has described her ideal man for a magazine and Victor is very concerned because it’s the opposite of him. Chloe tries to reassure him by saying that he read that in a magazine and that she is with him in real life, which does not convince Victor at all (102–3). Photographs also seem more real than actual events. In the first part of the book different people claim to have seen Victor in different shows and premieres. Victor denies having been to all those places but again there are pictures that prove it (60, 80) and people believe them more that anything Victor has to say.3 Even language is impregnated with an atmosphere of simulacra. Many of Victor’s sentences are titles or song lyrics which substitute for his own language, just as photos of Victor substitute for the real Victor. Temporal references are replaced by popular culture references such as fashion statements: ‘Jesus, that must’ve been the year everyone wore Levi’s with ripped knees’ (116) refers to some photos of his college years.4

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The first part of the novel is a world where the difference between reality and fiction is slightly blurred but people are still capable of seeing such difference. There are constant rumours spread, photos published, films recorded, but everything takes place in a real, feasible world. This is the society of spectacle described by Debord, where appearing to be is more important than being, and the world of Boorstin’s pseudo-events, where reality is sometimes constructed in order to be reported in the media. In this part, different media interact to construct Victor’s image but all this alternative world of image reproduction is firmly framed by the literary narration pattern and style. In the course of the novel this world of appearances and pseudo-events progressively changes and parts company with reality; we enter the hyperreal, a world where Victor is unable to distinguish what is real from what is not, since all events seem to be part of a film in progress, which leads to Victor’s doubts about his own existence. The anxiety over losing one’s identity after so much image reproduction, being interviewed for magazines and media attention is something Ellis himself admits to have suffered after the success of Less Than Zero: ... your identity – your real identity – is being consumed by this new narrative, this collective narrative, that’s taking place with the public as well as the press. The real you is dying and this thing that’s created is now going to be representative of you. And every time you meet someone, you know that they’re going to have this entire set of associations, mostly fake, about who you are, and that is a difficult thing to process. (In Pearson 2010) Victor’s sense of identity is lost as he enters the hyperreal. When looking for a chronicler of the society of spectacle under the postmodern condition, Baudrillard comes to mind, an author whose ideas reflect a society of surfaces whose referents have been lost, absorbed by the image. The first part of Glamorama may be closer to Debord’s more modernist critical ideas of the spectacle, whereas the other parts are clearly indebted to Baudrillard’s more postmodern grasp of the social condition. For Debord the world may have been reduced to images and commodities; for Baudrillard the object itself disappears altogether. Baudrillard perceived four historical phases in the evolution of the image-sign: first, the sign reflects a basic reality; second, it masks and perverts a basic reality; third, it marks the absence of a basic reality and, eventually, it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. It is its own pure simulacrum (1988b). Thus, reality has collapsed and vanished into a universal simulacrum. From the world of appearances described by Debord, we arrive at the world of the hyperreal where there is no longer a real to be recovered behind the illusion of it. In the world of Debord people could make the distinction between the real and the representation of the real but choose not to make it; in Baudrillard’s version such a distinction cannot be drawn anymore. The hyperreal is not just the result of the overflowing presence of advertising and

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television; the superficiality of the entertainment world, tabloids, films and computers also plays an important role.5 This world of simulation and the hyperreal is a logical consequence of the celebrity culture that is thoroughly described and parodied in the first part of Glamorama. As the story develops, all pretence disappears as we find what Gabler has called ‘lifies’: ‘... movies written in the medium of life, projected on the screen of life and exhibited in the multiplexes of the traditional media which are increasingly dependent upon the life medium’ (1998: 5). For example, the O. J. Simpson murder trial or the life and death of Princess Diana, which substituted for ordinary entertainment and finally became the new blockbusters. In this fashion, life becomes a movie played 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Audiences have always needed some point of identification: in the case of the movies the solution was stars; in the case of the life movie it is celebrity. ‘Once we sat in movie theatres dreaming of stardom. Now we live in a movie dreaming of celebrity’ (1998: 7–8). In lifies life conforms to the model of movies, which also become the standard against which to measure life itself. As a result, Glamorama becomes a movie in which celebrities and models are the stars. I have argued elsewhere that in the novel virtuality progressively replaces the society of spectacle and the way a cinema/prose fiction interface unfolds. Traditional narrative description is progressively transformed through references to mise-en-scene, mise-en-shot, editing and sound (Baelo-Allué 2010: 84–97). Thus, the language of film is put into the story and mixed with Victor’s own narrative voice that comments not just on what he does but on how his actions are recorded. As the story advances, the filmic references engulf the whole narration and Victor’s experiences in the real cannot be distinguished from those in the film. Not without reason Ruth Helyer calls Glamorama a cinematic novel (2009: 197). In fact, Victor’s voice is blurred and the narration turns mainly cinematic undermining the possibility of a stable narrative frame and situating him both within and outside the film or ‘lify’. In Part 5 Victor even loses his voice when his double replaces him physically in New York, while he is still in Europe, and takes over the narrative voice returning the narration to the literary world. It is only through his actions that the reader notices this is a different Victor. If Part 1 dealt with the power of the media to create pseudo-events and make people play roles, in Part 5 technology and the virtual have done away with the real Victor to replace him with a double that is the ideal son and much more suited to his father’s political ambition. After alternating between first, second, third person and omniscient narration, Part 5 brings a stable first-person voice that does not belong to Victor anymore. Henrik Skov Nielsen finds that the real originality of Glamorama does not lie in its cultural critique or in its descriptions of violence and sex but in the type of voice that is used and in the way the firstperson narrative changes (2006: 27). This change in narrative voice shows how the virtual takes over to the extent that it is hard to notice the change. In Part 6 Victor’s narrative voice returns as he realizes that his self has already disappeared into the virtual world (there is a new Victor) and he is also condemned

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to disappear in the narrative world since he is about to be killed. His voice will be finally excised as the virtual takes over. Glamorama is a step-by-step journey into the disintegration of the self: from celebrities pretending to be what they are not, to empty pseudo-events, to lives that become films, to identities that dissolve and are engulfed by the virtual and the fake. Ellis takes the spectacle and displays its pleasures and its dangers. Victor’s story is a cautionary tale, an empty man who speaks through and for the media and who realizes only too late that he has no future. The only real stars are those he sees in a mural on a wall at the end of the novel. The use of filmic language and the metaphor that everything is a movie has a double meaning: on the one hand it makes readers progress throughout the text keeping an ironic distance since we are not too sure if events are fictitious or not. On the other hand, it portrays what Baudrillard and Gabler have described as the all-too-visible, the lives that are lived as movies. Entertainment has overtaken reality, which is perfectly translated in the novel by means of the large number of real celebrities mentioned, especially in the first part, and through the recorded film that becomes indistinguishable from Victor’s life. This atmosphere of unreality is also achieved in the way the terrorists are capable of manipulating the media for their own ends. Bentley shows Victor how he can alter photos, manipulate videos and create computer files to incriminate Victor for crimes he has not committed. As Victor puts it: ‘he’s inventing a new world, seamlessly’ (357). For Gabler, plots are used to shape people’s lives, usually formulaic. Once the life genre is selected, one starts to adapt to the role that fits the plot: a young professional, a bohemian, a Mafioso, a drug dealer and so on. There are even life coaches (1500 in 1997) who are capable of replotting and reorienting their clients’ lives (1998: 231–2). In Glamorama there is also a plot or a genre that frames this atmosphere of unreality: the conspiracy thriller. Celebrities and the world of the spectacle have always been an important part of conspiracy culture: the deaths of Princess Diana and JFK have fostered the creation of different conspiracy theories.6 The analysis of the conspiracy thriller genre and its troubling implications in Glamorama will be the subject of the next chapter.

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Glamorama starts as a novel of manners about celebrity culture but as the plot unfolds it turns into a conspiracy thriller, or rather, a deconstruction of the genre. The novel plays with its conventions and transforms them in order to obtain new meanings. The thriller is an umbrella genre very difficult to define because of its amorphous generic boundaries. Much of the academic criticism dealing with thrillers focuses especially on film rather than literature. However, most conventions are shared by both types of representation. Traditionally critics dealing with the literary thriller have focused on the spy thriller as the archetypal form of the genre (Ralph Harper 1969, Jerry Palmer 1979). Other literary critics do not agree on the nature of thrillers. John G. Cawelti (1976), a well-known critic interested in popular genres, does not deal with thrillers as such but with different forms of crime fiction, mainly detective, the urban gangster and hardboiled fiction. Jerry Palmer (1979) includes hard-boiled fiction – but no detective or gangster fiction – in his account of the thriller and explains the novelties that hard-boiled fiction presents as a variant of the genre. On the other hand, film critic Charles Derry constructs his definition of the suspense thriller by opposing it to the classical detective, the hard-boiled detective, the police procedural, the gangster film, the bandit film and the caper film, genres that deal with the detective/criminal side. For him the suspense thriller rather deals with the victim/criminal side, foregrounding the innocent victim or the pursued criminal (1988: 57–62). As we can see from this brief introduction to the subject, the boundaries between crime genres are easily blurred and there is no clear consensus as to which films or novels may be considered thrillers and why. According to Derry the suspense thriller is: ... a crime work which represents a violent and generally murderous antagonism in which the protagonist becomes either an innocent victim or a nonprofessional criminal within a narrative structure that is significantly unmediated by a traditional figure of detection in a central position. (1988: 62) This genre has a connection with works of horror, espionage and crime; it is indeed an amalgam of several sub-genres that are closely related. It deals with

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important themes like life and death, justice, morality and courage. It uses thrills, the depiction of danger and violence, which provides the spectator with a certain catharsis, and uses suspense as one of its main mechanisms to trap the reader (1988: 19). Thrills and suspense seem key words for an understanding of a genre that is difficult to classify and whose definition should go beyond its thematic concerns.

12.1 The Conspiracy Thriller Glamorama can be read partly as a conspiracy thriller and partly as something entirely different. In fact, as has already been mentioned, one of the most interesting aspects of the thriller is its being an open genre that comprises many different characteristics. This blurring of generic features characteristic of the thriller has probably made it very attractive for certain contemporary writers who have been drawn to the genre’s many possibilities. Thus, authors such as Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Ishmael Reed, Philip K. Dick, Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson and Thomas Pynchon have used the mechanisms of the conspiracy thriller in some of their novels. In fact, Pynchon is seen by some critics as a specialist in the ‘highbrow conspiracy thriller’ (in Knight 2000: 61). Bret Easton Ellis partakes of this tradition in Glamorama. Conspiracy culture is a social phenomenon that has reached all realms of culture. It has left its mark not only on postmodern fiction but also on popular culture: the Hollywood thriller, gangsta rap, supermarket tabloids, The X-Files, and infotainment culture in general. Conspiracies have even become one interpretative means through which we understand historical events. Obviously, in the United States the importance of conspiracy thinking, both in real life and in fiction, cannot be underestimated. In literature, conspiracy is now central to contemporary fiction and has long been an important topic in contemporary literary studies in the United States. Conspiracy thrillers respond to the development of a conspiracy culture especially since the 1960s countercultural distrust of the authorities.1 In this sense, conspiracy theories and the thriller genre are linked in different ways. The role of the hero in a thriller and the role of the believer or follower of conspiracy theories in real life mirror each other. To a certain extent, conspiracy theory does in real life what conventional conspiracy thrillers do in literature; both tie all knots and reach all-encompassing conclusions. In general terms, a conspiracy theory defends the idea that anything that happens (especially negative events) is the result of a plan devised by an individual or a group. A very interesting definition of conspiracy is formulated by Fredric Jameson, who believes that: ... conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to

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represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content. (1988: 356). Conspiracies turn into a means of understanding history in a chaotic everyday life. For Jameson, they are a simple approach that the masses seem to need in order to come to terms with our global world. Maybe because the impression is that there are no longer any master narratives to explain the world and there is an overload of information, for many people conspiracy thinking becomes the only way out. Problems that seem to be beyond their control find a culprit through the rhetoric of conspiracy, the only possible way of finding neat explanations and closure in an uncertain, centreless global world. Glamorama is a conspiracy thriller that does not provide the expected neat explanations and closure. It can be understood as an anti-thriller since it consciously uses many conventions characteristic of the genre which are reworked and transformed in order to obtain effects opposite to those intended by the original genre. The basic pattern of the book complies with Jerry Palmer’s notion of the thriller genre as a hero fighting against and investigating a conspiracy or criminal mystery (1979: 53). In the case of Glamorama, the initial conspiracy is hatched by Victor’s father (Samuel Johnson), who is an American senator who wants to run for president. Victor is a problem for his father because of his dissolute life of pleasure and shallowness, which might affect his father’s chances to become president. Thus, ‘the Japanese’, who want Samuel Johnson elected, arrange with Palakon to send Victor to Europe so he cannot interfere with his father. At the same time, there is a group against Mr. Johnson’s election, whose leader is a model called Bobby, who will involve Victor in the terrorist group of models and who will threaten Mr. Johnson with disclosing Victor’s activities in the terrorist ring. In the end, and with Mr. Johnson’s unwilling compliance, Victor will be replaced by an ideal version of a president’s son. This new Victor will quit all addictions, parties and one-night stands to become a healthy law student. The real Victor will be left powerless in Milan, conscious that someone has replaced him and that he is to be murdered. The story is thus based on a conspiracy. According to Palmer the role of the hero is to restore the lost social order on society’s behalf, providing a rational control over mystery (1979: 23). This pattern in taken up in Glamorama but the whole structure is significantly altered through the role played by society in the story. In conventional conspiracy thrillers society is not to blame for the events that take place, which are usually the result of the actions of corrupt people alone. In Glamorama, as in all previous Ellis novels, the society depicted prior to the conspiracy is not naturally good. It is celebrity-obsessed New York at the end of the twentieth century, a superficial world where value is measured in terms of fame and beauty. Celebrities rule and in the process they lose all human traits or personality in this shallow world where everything has been commodified and reduced to empty images. As we saw in the previous chapter, celebrities

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are the paradigm against which everyone else measure themselves but they are transitory and interchangeable, as a result of being mass-produced and commodified. This is the engulfing New York atmosphere that Victor, our ‘hero’, inhabits and struggles to be part of. His main aspiration is to become one of them, to achieve fame and power. The New York of Glamorama combines corruption and glamour: the surface of celebrities, models and beautiful people hides a terrorist ring led by one such model. As in American Psycho, this is also possible because it is a society of appearances where personality is constructed through the clothes worn, the parties attended or the rumours launched. In Glamorama this type of personality construction and marketing has reached all realms, including, of course, politics. Thus, the conspiracy and its conspirators are not only part of society but they deploy society’s superficiality for their own benefit. The conspirators use New York society’s shallowness to accomplish their own ends, which makes the conspiracy an integrated part of society: the novel of manners meets the conspiracy thriller. Instead of being responsible for all evil or the cause of disorder in a perfectly ordered world, the conspiracy is presented rather as a logical consequence in a society that has extended the celebrity system to all possible realms. The role of the hero is one of the conspiracy thriller conventions that is most drastically subverted in the novel. For Palmer, the conventional hero of the genre is competent and shares the general moral perspective of the community, but he is forced to spend most of his time outside it, in the world of the underground. Thus, the world would be ordered were it not for the conspiracy (1979: 23–5). In the case of Glamorama, Victor does share the morality of the society in which he lives but the values of such society are the wrong ones, the type of values a hero should not share. Taking into account that the role of the hero is to fight the conspiracy in order to recover the naturally good society he is part of, Victor ends up a complete failure because his society is not good and because he is an incompetent hero, unable to act. In fact, there is a leitmotif sentence in the novel that the director of the film in Victor’s head keeps telling him, ‘It’s what you don’t know that matters most’ (233 and passim). Victor never knows enough to understand the emerging pattern, something a hero cannot afford. In fact, at the very beginning of the novel Victor acknowledges his ignorance quite openly: ‘I don’t know anything, JD. Nothing, nada. Remember that. I ... know ... nothing. Never assume I know anything. Nada. Nothing. I know nothing, not a thing. Never – ’ (7). His incapacity to understand will not change in the course of the novel. In the context of this superficial society all he can do is ‘slide down the surface of things’ (144 and passim), as he repeatedly chants on different occasions, which is just the opposite of a conventional hero’s attitude. For Cawelti, the aim of the hero is to ‘root out and destroy the evils that have corrupted the urban world’ (1976: 151). Thus, to discover hidden patterns and save society, the hero has to dig deep down into things instead of sliding down surfaces as Victor does.

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In the generic pattern offered by Palmer at the end of the narrative, the hero restores the lost order and displays his/her self-assertion over all other society members (1979: 52). In Glamorama we find Victor who, besides being unable to display any self-assertion, is bereft of a self to assert. At the end Victor is left powerless in Milan, not knowing who he is anymore, while an impersonator is in New York living his life. This ending is perfectly coherent in a society that has emptied people of personality, where people want to turn into celebrities, and celebrities are all the same. Victor’s father does not need Victor to really change and become the ideal son. He just needs Victor, or a double of Victor, to appear to have changed, since prestige is constructed just through the image. The importance of doubles is something the novel hints at, a heavy hint being the name of the music group in which Victor plays: The Impersonators – a group of ‘doubles’ – recalling a music group in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), that was called The Paranoids. Impersonation and paranoia are two subjects that play an important role both in Glamorama and in Pynchon’s literary world. For Alex E. Blazer Victor’s narcissism turns into paranoia when he creates two delusional worlds: that of the two films and that of the terrorist plot (2008: 180–1). Both create in him the illusion that he has lost his capacity to act as a hero and change the course of impending events. He experiences what Melley calls ‘agency panic’, which he defines as ‘intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control – the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful external agents’ (2000: 12). In Glamorama Victor’s agency panic is more than justified and is seen in the way he reads all terrorist acts as part of a film for which there is a script that cannot be changed. Victor’s incompetence as a hero and his lack of personality are probably the reasons why he is so easily assimilated into the terrorist ring. As its leader suggests: ‘We like you because you don’t have an agenda. ... We like you because you don’t have any answers’ (287). In a later episode, when Victor confronts Bobby (the terrorist leader) and asks him why he has been chosen, Bobby’s answer is even clearer: ‘Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. ... Because you think the PLO recorded the singles “Don’t Bring Me Down” and “Evil Woman” ’ (315). In a previous episode we have already discovered that Victor even thinks that the Israeli embassy is a club (279). Critics like Kurt W. Back see the present thriller as portraying shadowy organizations and ambivalent characters instead of welldefined intelligence organizations. For Back, the thriller reflects the dissolution of the self in modern society and has John Le Carré as one of its model writers. To exemplify the role of the dissolute self he focuses on the title heroine of The Little Drummer Girl, who: ... is recruited although she has no inclination for intelligence work or any particular sympathy for the cause she is to work for. She is so malleable and without a core that she adheres to her assignment and, in addition, accepts

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for herself the history that she is given. She appears as a real person, but without any steady self-concept. (1989: 232–3) This could be a description of Victor, who becomes a terrorist in spite of himself and because of his malleable character and who sees his self dissolved into the terrorist organization. The individual conflicts between murderer, victim and detective are left behind to describe action between larger social units. Back is referring to a very specific type of thriller that poses these questions and portrays empty characters without a trace of a personality. However, most thrillers still try to reinforce an individual self through the figure of a hero who ends up producing social change. Glamorama can be framed within a more postmodern type of thriller that tries to delve into the dissolution of the self and its implications.2 One of the differences between the classical detective story hero and the hero of hard-boiled fiction, or more generally of conspiracy thrillers, is that his role in the latter is not limited to the discovery and exposure of the crime and the criminal. At the end there is usually a confrontation or a violent encounter between detective/hero and criminal, thus the role of the hero is not only to expose the criminal but also to judge and execute him (Cawelti 1976: 142–3). Charles Derry even considers that the suspense thriller is in part defined by the inclusion of the chase, as important as the gunfight may be for the western (1988: 9–10). In Glamorama we have seen that Victor is a very passive character, unable to act of his own accord; he does not make things happen but things happen to him. The very few times Victor really makes a choice and acts he is spurred by a film crew that either reminds him that this or that action is in the script, or simply grabs him and pushes him into action. This lack of initiative is also reflected in the way chapter numbers are arranged. The first five parts of the novel have chapter numbers organized in a backwards structure, a metaphorical countdown that points to the inevitability of what happens and to Victor’s incapacity to change it. Part 6, when Victor finally becomes aware of what has happened and realizes that his double is in New York, is the only part where chapter numbers follow an ascending numerical structure. Victor finally advances towards the truth but, ironically enough, also towards his death. The confrontation between hero and villain is a characteristic thriller convention. In Glamorama, after Bobby has killed Chloe, the French crew puts Victor in a van and all of them head to the airport. On the way they are chased by a black truck and, after a shoot-out, they get rid of the truck while Victor remains just a witness throughout. In fact, once they reach the airport the director himself gives him a gun, while the property master straps a knife sheath around Victor’s calf. The crew directs him to the men’s room, where Victor and Bobby have a very violent fight: Victor manages to pull the trigger six times, destroying the wall, emptying the gun but not hurting Bobby, who violently beats Victor up. Once more the crew intervenes and a gaffer tosses Victor a clip

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to reload his gun. Victor screams at the crew to get Bobby’s gun. In the end, Victor uses the knife that the crew provided him with and, as Bobby tries to close his wound with his hands, Victor manages to shoot and kill him. Finally ‘The crew is high-fiving one another, preparing to clean up’ (436); they are filming a thriller and one of its basic scenes has been recorded. Obviously, Victor is lost in this world; he is incapable of acting and it is only the film crew that tries to keep the appearance of convention, in line with the whole narration where shallow appearances are all that matter. Victor is certainly not prepared to play the spy or infiltrated terrorist; in fact, he cannot even understand what is going to happen around him. As the narrative of the conspiracy thriller unfolds, there are usually clues that lead us to the villain and to the proper resolution of the mystery. The reader may feel frustrated by Victor’s incapacity to understand clues, to read the narrative signalled by the clues. We crave for a superior narrative level to explain what has happened, but a few hours before his girlfriend’s murder Victor himself tells her: ‘I don’t have a master plan yet’ (388). He still believes in a rewarding narrative that will leave no threads unfollowed, so when he accuses the double agent Jamie Fields of not following the rules, she has to clear things up for him: ‘There are no rules, Victor. ... What rules? That’s all nonsense’ (363). The convention of riddles and puzzles that usually populate conspiracy thrillers finds its ironic equivalent in the cryptograms that Victor finds painted on the walls of the house he shares with the terrorists. ‘Disappear Here’ is written, combining different capital letters and blocks of words. Thus he can also read variants like ‘DiSA Pp EAR HEre’ (416) or ‘DiSAp p Ear HERe’ (421). In a conventional thriller these different cryptograms would be messages for the hero to interpret and decode in order to advance in his struggle against the conspiracy. In Glamorama they are rather a nod towards Ellis’s first novel Less Than Zero, where ‘Disappear Here’ was a constantly repeated leitmotif. Victor cannot make anything out of the cryptograms and in his exploration of the house he finds Bentley, a fellow terrorist, who is tied up and has bombs on his arms, legs and chest. Victor cannot do anything to save his life and he witnesses how first his arm, then his left leg, his right leg, the other arm and finally his chest blow off. Victor cannot prevent Chloe’s murder either, even though it is obvious that Bobby is going to kill her. Worst of all, he cannot foil the bombing of a plane even though Jamie gives him a file called Wings with the information. He misinterprets the data and becomes aware of the risk only too late. In the world of terrorism and conspiracy thrillers, villains – both male and female – also play an important role. The main role of the villain is to create the conspiracy which is a structural necessity in the thriller. In Glamorama villains do not look like villains and, since appearances are everything, nobody believes Victor when he tries to accuse Bobby of being a terrorist. When he tells his fellow model Markus Schenkenberg – who is a real Swedish model – about Bobby, Markus’s reaction is one of disbelief: ‘He doesn’t look like a terrorist. He’s way too gorgeous. ... I know terrorists. That guy doesn’t look like a terrorist’ (317).

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Like Bateman in the yuppie world, Bobby doesn’t look the part because in the shallow society of the book he represents the idea of success: a well-known model, handsome and rich. In fact, the terrorist ring is formed by models because in that society they are the least likely to look like terrorists. Recruiting people was not hard because ‘everyone wanted to be around us ... everyone wanted to be movie stars ... and in the end, basically, everyone was a sociopath’ (309), since for Bobby models ‘are just reflections of our time’ (310). The superficial ethos of this society is captured in the role of models, who in turn may become terrorists because society will never suspect them. In this atmosphere hero and villain become all too similar; they mirror each other and share a set of values. Thus, Victor cannot unmask Bobby because they mirror each other. For Palmer, one of the differences between hero and villain is that the latter prefers objects to people (1979: 82). In Glamorama both prefer objects and disregard people; the difference is the extent to which they do so: to the extent of killing in Bobby’s case, to the extent of caring only for himself in Victor’s. His leitmotif throughout the novel is ‘the better you look the more you see’ (27 and passim). However, Victor is so concerned about how good he looks that he does not see much, certainly not enough to find the hidden conspiracy.

12.2 Violence and Pornography The terrorist actions and especially their consequences are described in Ellis’s unmistakable style. The very detailed blow-by-blow description of the bombing of the plane, the climax of the terrorists’ actions, is significant. Total destruction takes one minute, which is outlined in more than three pages. Passengers die in waves, some are sucked out of the aircraft, others have their limbs sheared off, some others are burned alive, while a few passengers have no marks on them but all their bones have been broken (438). This type of description is usually avoided in more conventional conspiracy thrillers and in mystery stories in general; as we saw in the account of the serial killer genre, the description of the victim’s suffering is usually hidden or softened so that readers focus on the mystery itself, on the discovery of the criminal, not so much on the victims, who have a minor role in the story and whom the readers hardly know. This convention is not followed by Ellis, who lavishes on us a long, detailed description of the horrible event, probably in a parody of the TV news reports where injured, mutilated and dead bodies flow nonstop: And the dying comes in waves. People are rammed backward, bent in half, pulled up out of their seats, teeth are knocked out of heads, people are blinded, their bodies thrown through the air into the ceiling and then hurled into the back of the plane, smashing into other screaming passengers, as shards of aluminium keep breaking off the fuselage, spinning into the packed

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plane and shearing off limbs, and blood’s whirling everywhere, people getting soaked with it, spitting it out of their mouths, trying to blink it out of their eyes, and then a huge chunk of metal flies into the cabin and scalps an entire row of passengers, shearing off the tops of their skulls, as another shard flies into the face of a young woman, halving her head but not killing her yet. (439) This blood-spattered description is condensed in just one sentence that leaves the reader breathless. Itself a parody of the mythic hero’s dismemberment, the fragmentation of the body in Glamorama mirrors another type of body fragmentation we have already seen. In the shallow world of image reproduction models and celebrities have lost all traces of human identity or personality to become the sum of their body parts: In the office photos of pecs and tanned abs and thighs and bone-white butts are plastered over an entire wall along with an occasional face – everyone from Joel West to Hurley Thompson ... to body parts that could or could not be mine ... they’re all replaced, all the guys so similar-looking it’s getting tougher and tougher to tell them apart. (63) The body reaches the height of impersonality when it is reduced to bones, limbs and heads scattered in the debris produced by a bomb. According to Alex E. Blazer, bodies are destroyed in Glamorama as a result of ‘a fundamental anxiety regarding body image in a world devoted to image consumption’ (2008: 183). It is the dark side of the commodification of the body: from narcissistic pleasure to abject pain. In fact, there are two types of body fragmentation – one metaphorical (in Victor’s mind), the other literal (seen in the killings) – which in Glamorama mirror each other. The description of the plane bombing is rounded off by a long list of consumer objects found in the debris of the plane, which helps depict the victims: ... cell phones and laptops and Ray-Ban sunglasses and baseball caps and pairs of Rollerblades tied together and camcorders and mangled guitars and hundreds of CDs and fashion magazines (including the YouthQuake with Victor Ward on the cover) and entire wardrobes of Calvin Klein and Armani and Ralph Lauren. ... (441) This fragmented list of unrelated objects reproduces the fragmented list of body parts. The fragmentation and reification of people as human beings had already been shown in the novel, and now we witness the literal fragmentation through their body parts and their possessions. The encyclopaedic listing of objects and brand names was also used in American Psycho to depict a society of people obsessed with objects and consumerism. The image gains greater strength in this passage, where we see that all that is left of these people are their objects.

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Violence has always been an important subject in Ellis’s books. In American Psycho we saw the lurid descriptions of violent murders committed by Patrick Bateman, where blood and gore were narrated in a toneless impersonal prose. In the case of American Psycho, violence was inextricably linked to consumerism and the commodification of people. Violence in Glamorama is associated with terrorism and in a way with fiction, or at least with the blurring of the limits between factual reality and fiction that plays such an important role throughout the novel. The first description of a bombing and its consequences is seen well into the book when Victor arrives in London looking for Jamie Fields. In this episode a street in Notting Hill is first described: ‘In a row: a new Gap, a Starbucks, a McDonald’s’ (237). The three chains are representative of the globalization of American capitalism in the world, also a central issue in Glamorama. Global capitalism has produced an uncertain centreless world that has made people crave for clear-cut explanations and closure, precisely what conspiracy thinking provides and what Glamorama tries to deconstruct. This atmosphere is thoroughly described in the scene: a group of teenagers in the Gap, someone who looks like Bono walking a dog, a businessman reading the Evening Standard, a nanny wheeling a baby carriage, a Japanese tourist, some girls coming out of Starbucks and a man on a motorbike. Jamie Fields plants a bomb, all the buildings start exploding and so we witness how every single person mentioned dies a horrible death. The only difference between this and the plane bombing is that suddenly a director yells ‘Cut’ and we learn it is a movie: Jamie is an actress and all the blood and gore were fake. In a later episode Tammy plants another bomb, this time in Paris (294–6). In this case from the start the action is described as a movie. A film crew is recording everything from neighbouring rooftops with telephoto lenses. Once the bomb explodes the film crew packs and disappears to show up weeks later at another spot, for another bombing. In spite of appearances, this time the bombing was not a fictional representation, not part of a film. This time the events really took place and people really died. Glamorama is full of these tricks where, within the literary world, reality and fiction remain indistinguishable. Again, this is the logic of conspiracy thinking: the plausible and the paranoid are becoming very difficult to distinguish because, on the one hand, there is restricted access to real information, and on the other hand, there is an overload of data which may not be true (Knight 2000: 25). Conspiracy thinking serves as a tool to interpret reality but it is useless in the face of violence. The violence in the novel emerges from the terrorist actions. The terrorists do not have a clear agenda and victims have their lives destroyed forever. For Walter Benn Michaels (2003) the way Ellis approaches terrorism in the book is a perfect reflection of what terrorism has become; it cannot be linked to any particular political position. Consequently, the war on terrorism remains indifferent to the reasons (if any) that terrorists may give for their acts. Terrorism is not a war against a nation or ideology anymore, and this irrelevance of belief puts it on postmodernist ground. The response after the attacks on the World

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Trade Center marks the complete triumph of postmodernism, or rather posthistoricism (2003: 105–6, 113). In conventional conspiracy thrillers the conspirators have a political agenda: they may fight against communism, for example. In Glamorama there is no reason for Bobby’s action, or at least no reason is given. When Victor asks for an explanation, Bobby claims: We plant bombs. The government disappears suspects. ... The CIA has more blood soaked into its hands than the PLO and the IRA combined. ... The government is an enemy. ... Twenty-five thousand homicides were committed in our country last year, Victor. (314–5) Bobby’s hatred for the government seems clear but his own agenda is not, nor are his reasons for planting bombs all over Europe. The terrorists do not really have an ideology or political agenda. Thus, the deaths are even more senseless and the reasons behind them are impossible to fathom, since they do not exist. Just as violence plays an important role in conspiracy thrillers, so sex is also an important area where the hero’s appeal can be shaped and his heterosexuality reinforced. In these stories sex has a double role; it is not just a source of pleasure but also the realm of temptation, entrapment and betrayal. Women do not just play the victims, they also become villains who use their sexuality in order to trap the hero and later betray him (Cawelti 1976: 153–6). Moreover, sexuality in these novels is based on short encounters because the hero has to remain alone. After the sexual encounter a relationship is never developed because either there is a loss – the woman dies or is killed – or there is a betrayal; in any case the hero is left alone. This betrayal helps to darken the conspiracy and further entraps the hero in its net. In Glamorama Victor is alone because he fails in his relations with women. On the one hand, we have his official girlfriend Chloe, who leaves him after discovering his unfaithfulness and who is killed in the end. Sex as betrayal is very important in Glamorama and it also becomes a way of underlining the hero’s incompetence. In an episode on the QE2, Marina – a girl Victor meets and tries to seduce – finally accepts Victor’s proposition. When they meet it is very foggy and Victor notices that she is wearing a hooded Prada jacket that covers her face; she looks taller than usual even though she is wearing Nikes, she is wearing a wig and her voice seems raspy (220). All these facts do not make Victor suspicious, not even when she does not let him touch her as she gives Victor a blow job. Later we will discover that it was Bobby in disguise and that he stole the hat Victor had to bring with him to Europe. Once in Paris the scene is repeated with Jamie Fields, who keeps Victor’s semen to frame him for a murder (263–4). The commodification of sex is seen in the pornographic passages in the novel. We have already seen Ellis’s inclusion of pornography in American Psycho and the effects that it produces in the novel. Pornography is a form of public spectacle; according to Nead, it ‘takes what has become the most profound and

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private aspect of individual being and transforms it into a public commodity, exposed to the public gaze’ (1992: 100). This use of pornography is coherent with Ellis’s more general intention in Glamorama, where a society obsessed with fashion, spectacle and commodification is depicted in detail. Thus, Victor’s obsession with visibility, fame, consumer culture and image reproduction finds its peak in the hyperreal and in the acting out of his sexual fantasies in the form of pornography. Sex is also a form of simulacrum. As Helyer points out, it is ‘a copy of a copy ad infinitum – perhaps the archetypal simulacrum, capable of sustaining (déjà vu–like) endless memories, and layers of adaptation which have no actual events to refer back to’ (2009: 201). Pornography is the shape sex takes when it becomes commodified and in the novel is shown in a particularly long episode – more than three pages long – that acquires real centrality (334–40). In this scene Victor, Bobby and Jamie have sex together in a threesome where all sexual positions are rehearsed: masturbation, fellatio, anal sex and cunnilingus. Jamie has four orgasms and is depicted as the insatiable woman of pornography who cannot get enough. The climactic moment in this scene is not so much Victor’s and Bobby’s heterosexual encounters with Jamie as Victor and Bobby’s anal sex: it breaks the taboo of male-to-male sex and deconstructs the thriller convention of heterosexual heroes, who prove their virility through their heterosexual encounters. Pornography in Glamorama is part of the society of spectacle where the passivity of character found in Less Than Zero and the narcissism of American Psycho reach their peak. When asked about his use of pornography in Glamorama, Ellis explained: I’m interested in how pornography affects a reader. It’s such a consumer item. It does what it’s supposed to do. Like toothpaste or coffee. You want to be aroused and climax, you purchase pornography. Since it’s such a consumer good and because the book is so full of consumer goods, why not throw in some porn amidst all the clothes and all that useless hipness? (In Clarke 1999: 93) The reification and the depiction of the spectacular body reaches its height in a world where all aspects of life are portrayed as participants in the society of spectacle, where even the intimate aspects of life follow a certain convention – that of pornography – and are accordingly represented. Thus, personality, sex and the body are objectified in the novel. The reification of personality is seen through celebrities, people who have all become alike, losing all human traits to become pawns in the world of spectacle. The reification of sex is seen through sexual encounters described with the flat, repetitive and monotonous language of pornography; the ultimate spectacle. Finally, the reification of the body is seen through the depiction of terrorism: the destroyed body also becomes empty spectacle, the ultimate allegory, the fireworks of empty surface provided by the spectacle.

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12.3 The Flux of Interpretation In Glamorama some conventions are artificially created by means of the film crew prop; other conventions are exaggerated to the extent that our suspension of disbelief is seriously challenged. In a conspiracy thriller things are never what they seem, a convention that reaches extreme proportions in Glamorama: there is not a true version of what happens because reality is constantly manipulated and reinterpreted. We have to take into account that conspiracies are based on hidden connections, which leads to the belief that ‘everything is connected’, as we can read in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973: 703) and in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997: 825). Thus, the interpretations and connections can never come to a standstill. Baudrillard describes our time as a ‘the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication’ (1983: 127). The belief that everything is connected leads to a constant, never-ending flux of interpretation, which opposes the conspiracy thriller to detective fiction and other forms of murder mystery. In this type of fiction events are tied to causes and the discovery of ‘whodunnit’ solves the puzzle. In conspiracy culture interpretation is more complex. There is no final guarantee that the theory is right because it may be what ‘they’ – the conspirators – want us to believe. Thus, there is no clear end to the conspiracy. In conventional conspiracy thrillers there is usually a final explanation that ties up all the plot’s loose ends. According to Parker, in the creation of a conspiracy ‘[p]hotographs, documents, eye witness accounts and so on are used to demonstrate that a particular explanation successfully draws together a series of events and causes’ (2001: 192). In Glamorama this process goes a step further when Victor’s whole world is created with fake photos and videos of him, and with eyewitness accounts of people having seen Victor in different places. In a conventional thriller everything changes its meaning in order to reach the truth, a truth that cannot be altered anymore, where we really understand everything, a truth we can finally trust. However, in Glamorama ‘truth equals chaos’ (401); in fact meaning and truth cannot be finally attached to anything, which leads to Victor’s final desperation: ‘So you’re telling me we can’t believe anything we’re shown anymore? ... That everything is altered? That everything’s a lie? That everyone will believe this? ... So what’s true, then?’ I cry out. ‘Nothing, Victor,’ Palakon says. ‘There are different truths.’ (406) Victor craves for an either/or kind of logic, but the logic in Glamorama is based on both/and premises. Thus, the successive versions of events that populate the novel lead nowhere because the sense of an encompassing truth is lost on the way.

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Apart from the fact that the terrorist ring can create computer files, photos, videos and even doubles to manipulate society, we are also overwhelmed by the number of confessions and versions of the truth that Victor has to interpret, which may account for his inability to act and play the hero. Victor’s reflection that ‘Confusion and hopelessness don’t necessarily cause a person to act’ (403, italics in the original) applies perfectly to the situation he lives. In a first version offered by Palakon, he himself confesses to be working for Victor’s father, who wants to run for president and has asked Palakon to keep Victor busy, which is why Victor was sent to Europe to look for Jamie Fields. Jamie works for a counterorganization that has infiltrated Bobby’s terrorist group and she was supposed to receive the hat that Victor had to bring, which was for Jamie’s group. In the hat there was a prototype for a new form of plastic explosive (Remform),3 something that Victor’s father did not know. Palakon’s group only wanted to know if Remform could be spotted, but it was stolen on its way to Europe. Palakon denies knowing Bobby or having reached any agreement with him (399–407). Of course this is just one version of the truth because, before dying, Jamie has a different one to offer. Palakon works for and against the Japanese, who supply the money and back Victor’s father’s bid for president. Palakon also works for and against Victor’s father, who wanted Victor out of the country. The people against him also wanted Victor involved in a terrorist organization so Palakon and Bobby made a deal. Bobby blackmails Victor’s father because he has information about Victor that could ruin his chances. Marina Cannon, the girl Victor met on the ship, wanted to warn Victor, and the Wallaces were there to prevent it. Jamie is a double or, rather, triple agent working against Bobby, which is why she had to work for him. She works for the group Marina worked for and for Bobby’s and for Palakon’s. Jamie explains that people are not what they seem and that Lauren Hynde wasn’t Lauren, since the real Lauren died in December 1985 in a car accident. Jamie’s last words are that neither is she Jamie Fields (421–7). A conspiracy of this sort is difficult to untangle and Victor is obviously at a loss and does not know whom to trust. In Milan he is under guard in a suite where he has ‘so many theories. I’m still piecing together clues – there’s only a blueprint, there’s only an outline – and sometimes they come together. ... Davide has one big theory that explains everything’ (471–2). In this quotation we can see how Victor is suffering from one of the dangers of conspiracy thinking. Instead of reaching an all-encompassing explanation for all events, he is overwhelmed by the quantity of possible interpretations and cannot make up his mind. For years the same kind of logic was enacted in The X-Files series on TV: the idea that everything one knows is wrong and that evidence may be reframed when more information is obtained or a new interpretation emerges. In chaos theory this is known as ‘complex dynamics’.4 Order emerges out of chaos but in nonlinear ways, which end up leading to further chaos. The gaps in a theory are explained

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with another theory, whereas misleading clues may be left out on purpose. The result is the overabundance of interpretations because there are so many conspiracy theories to explain the same event. Baudrillard describes this in very graphic terms: Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a policeinspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof – indeed the objectivity of the fact – does not check this vertigo of interpretation. (1988b: 174–5) The logic of the conspiracy is not the logic of facts but the logic of simulation that leads to the impossibility of real interpretation.5 Peter Knight has traced a development in the nature of popular conspiracism, which has evolved from an obsession with a fixed enemy – a secure form of paranoia – to a more general and insecure suspicion about different conspiracy forces, which makes people fall into an infinite regress of suspicion (2000: 4). The logic of conspiracy can be applied to all types of events and it is a type of logic that, as Melley argues, appeals to both marginalized groups and the power elite (2000: 7). These two ways of understanding the rhetoric of conspiracy bring forth very different reactions in its believers. On the one hand, it is a comfort in an age of uncertainties: complex events are explained and fully understood. An example of this type of conspiracy thinking is seen in the worldwide bestseller The Da Vinci Code (2003). On the other hand, a conspiracy may also provide a never-ending logic; since new clues reframe previous ones, it is impossible to attain a version of reality that cannot be disproved, resulting in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Glamorama displays this second type of conspiracy thinking, clearly aimed at disrupting readers and making them see the superficial celebrity-obsessed society that New York was becoming. Many contemporary authors have favoured this second form of conspiracy thinking. For example, many of Pynchon’s characters also feel that they have found a massive conspiracy but are unable to confirm it because the either/or argument cannot be solved. In Glamorama Victor finds himself in a very similar position since he feels that a master plot is unfolding but he cannot make anything out of it. The hero of a reassuring conspiracy should be capable of linking clues, not so the hero of a never-ending conspiracy. In this sense, Norman Mailer believes that since the assassination of John F. Kennedy ‘we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia’ (in Melley 2000: 26). These two attitudes are often confronted in literature as the paranoid tries to convince the apathetic characters. In Glamorama things go a step further as the character that should uncover the conspiracy and play the role of the hero is not only the paranoid one but also the apathetic one, which

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leads to his inability to act, underlining the idea that it is impossible to interpret reality when this reality is not stable anymore. For Jane Parish, conspiracies are constructed as answers to specific questions like What? Where? and When? – a search for a lost truth (2001: 7). This is precisely how Glamorama starts, posing these very questions: I don’t want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don’t leave out why, though I’m getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won’t get answered – now, come on, goddamnit, what’s the story? (1998: 5) And in a way this is also how it ends. What follows is the last chapter in full, the very end of Glamorama: I’m drinking a glass of water in the empty hotel bar at the Principe di Savoia and staring at the mural behind the bar and in the mural there is a giant mountain, a vast field spread out below it where villagers are celebrating in a field of long grass that blankets the mountain dotted with tall white flowers, and in the sky above the mountain it’s morning and the sun is spreading itself across the mural’s frame, burning over the small cliffs and the low-hanging clouds that encircle the mountain’s peak, and a bridge strung across a pass through the mountain will take you to any point beyond that you need to arrive at, because behind that mountain is a highway and along that highway are billboards with answers on them – who, what, where, when, why – and I’m falling forward but also moving up toward the mountain, my shadow looming against its jagged peaks, and I’m surging forward, ascending, sailing through dark clouds, rising up, a fiery wind propelling me, and soon it’s night and stars hang in the sky above the mountain, revolving as they burn. The stars are real. The future is that mountain. (1998: 482) This final passage is worth reading in some detail because it helps to understand the whole novel. The mural that Victor describes represents the rhetoric of knowledge. Villagers – society – play forgetful on a grass field, oblivious of what may be behind the high mountain that dominates the scenery. That mountain is actually the conspiracy that hides the truth, the real course of events. Conspiracy theories provide the bridge strung across a pass through the mountain that may lead you anywhere you want. Behind the mountain of confusion the answers can be found because behind that mountain there is a highway, which is a very effective metaphor for cause-and-effect logical thinking, a straight line that leads somewhere. This is the same logic found in detective fiction when at the end the culprit is discovered, or in popular TV series such as CSI, where the forensic unit links all the clues and discovers how everything happened, or in House, where a group of doctors follow up the symptoms which

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lead to the discovery of a rare illness. This is even the same logic that conventional conspiracy thrillers provide when at the end the final definite conspiracy is discovered and a wave of relief washes over readers/viewers. However, this is not the logic of Glamorama or of other postmodern representations of the subject. Victor is left imagining a highway full of billboards with answers to questions like who, what, where, when, why on them, precisely the same questions that opened the novel and that Victor feared wouldn’t find an answer. The protagonist ascends and falls as he imagines his approach to the mountain but he never reaches it, not even in his imagination. The future is that mountain but the novel has already come to an end. The postmodern infinite regress of suspicion reaches its ultimate consequence since readers are left disoriented as they understand that the conspiracy – which cannot be fully grasped – has triumphed and Victor’s self and his autonomy have been erased, echoing a deep postmodern fear. A fake Victor is in New York and nobody notices; we are the villagers playing on the field, unable to understand what the mountain really means.

Part 5

New Paths?

13

Lunar Park (2005): The Turning Point?

In August 2005 Ellis published Lunar Park, which was released seven years after the publication of Glamorama. Lunar Park was both the culmination of many of the topics and tropes characteristic of his style while it also seemed to mark a new direction towards less ‘blankness’ and greater sensitivity in his prose and subjects. Through an introductory analysis of the reception, use of popular culture and intermediality in Lunar Park, I will analyse the way these aspects have evolved up to the publication of his latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, in June 2010. In both novels Ellis displays an awareness of his public image and plays with the criticism he has received for his previous novels. As the story unfolds in Lunar Park, he exhibits a seeming sincerity and closeness unknown in a blank fiction author. Like Glamorama, Lunar Park has two different sections: one is a mock autobiography of Ellis’s career and his new life in the suburbs, and one is about a haunted house, a possessed Terby doll running amok, hairy monsters, Ellis’s father’s ghost and even the return of Patrick Bateman to re-enact his killings. Ellis himself considers that there is a Philip Roth part and a Stephen King part in the novel (in Pearson 2010). Obviously, since the main character in the novel is called ‘Bret Easton Ellis’, Lunar Park relies heavily not just on Ellis’s style and topics but also on his public biography and celebrity author image. In the first chapter of Lunar Park it is hard to distinguish the autobiographical details from the fictional ones as the author plays with well-known facts about his life by exaggerating, disguising or simply re-inventing them. The book is framed by an introduction which is, in my opinion, one of the author’s best pieces of writing. It serves to contextualize the life and publishing career of a American author called ‘Bret Easton Ellis’, who is going to tell us about something horrible that happened to him and his family. Before getting to the actual story, the fictional Ellis1 goes through the first lines of all his novels (including Lunar Park) and mentions the reviews they received, many of which have already been dealt with in this book. In a recent interview he explained that he reads the reviews of his novels and is familiar with the hostile reception they receive (in Pearson 2010). In Lunar Park he also exaggerates his success as a writer and tells the reader about his dissipated life when he was part of the literary brat pack. In a hyperbolic tone, he even claims to have dined at the White House in the summer of 1986, invited by Jeb and George W. Bush, who were his fans.2 On

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page ten a clearly fictional character is introduced, Jayne Dennis, a young model and serious actress who had an affair with the fictional Ellis when he published The Rules of Attraction. He returns to real biographical facts when he comments on the publication of American Psycho, even quoting some of its reviews. Then he combines a real event, the death of his father in 1992, and a fictional one, the fact that Jayne returned to his life and got pregnant, which the Ellis in Lunar Park could not accept at the time. He also fully describes the world tour designed to promote Glamorama, which proved disastrous because he was hooked on heroin. His life changes when he decides to move to the suburbs with Jayne, his son Robby (apparently named after Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis) and his stepdaughter Sarah. He quits drugs, starts a new novel and gets a job as a creative writing teacher. At this point the narrator introduces Lunar Park as a true story of what took place in his life from the thirteenth of October to the tenth of November. Publishers Weekly tried to separate the fictional biographical events from the real ones in the novel but they are so entangled that at times it is nearly impossible to tell the difference (Holt and Abbott 2005: 22–3). This blurring was enhanced by the publishing campaign of the book, which included the creation of a number of fake websites launched by Farah Miller, manager of new media at Alfred A. Knopf, and which contributed to the confusion. For example, there is a web page dedicated to Jayne Dennis (http://www.jaynedennis.com/) where we learn about her career, her affair with Keanu Reeves and her marriage to Bret Easton Ellis. There is also a profile of Robby (Ellis’s fictional son) at http:// myspace.com/lunarpark/. There are even some FBI files regarding Ellis and his role in the events that took place in the house at http://www.lunar-park. com/fbi/index.html, which is part of the official UK website of the novel. Moreover, Knopf designed a web page about Ellis and Lunar Park which was divided in two columns: on the right side Ellis, the protagonist of Lunar Park, was interviewed; on the left side Ellis, the author, was also asked the same or very similar questions (http://twobrets.com/). As we can see, the internet promotional campaign clearly aimed at further confusing real and fake events. On top of all this, the author claimed that he would be doing the book tour in character as the Bret Easton Ellis of the novel but, after two interviews, he became exhausted and changed his mind. The rest of the novel is the chronological story of the different strange events that take place in the new life of the fictional Ellis, who cannot fully adapt to the suburbs. He is unable to be a responsible father for Robby and Sarah, he takes drugs and drinks again, he even tries to have an affair with Aimee Light, a postgraduate student who is writing a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis’s literary work. In addition, the killings in American Psycho are re-enacted and the Clay of Less Than Zero reappears. The ghost of his dead father haunts him; the house keeps ‘peeling off’ and rearranging the furniture to look like the house Ellis lived in with his family in California; Sarah’s doll (a bird called Terby) comes to life and a hairy monster tries to attack them. This section is charged with supernatural

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events, resembling a Stephen King novel where Ellis’s fictional creations reappear as he tries to exorcise his relationship with his dead father – a very violent man obsessed with status.3 In this sense, the ending is very lyrical and represents a means of coming to terms with his father’s memory.

13.1 The Reception of Lunar Park In general terms, the novel was well received and even surprised some critics who saw hints of a change in his style. The level of violence and sex was certainly reduced; he used the past tense and allowed characters to evolve and learn from their actions in a chronological plot. According to Kirkus Reviews: ‘Even his harshest critics may now have to acknowledge that this versatile, resourceful writer has formidable skills’ (Kirkus Reviews 2005). By contrast, the Boston Globe said: ‘It is by far the worst novel he has ever written. It may be the worst novel I’ve ever read’ (Almond 2005). This was by far the most negative review the book received. In contrast, for Seattle Weekly it was ‘his best and most enjoyable read since Zero [Less Than Zero]’ (Miller 2005), and for the Daily O’Collegian it was ‘also his best’ (Parkey 2005). In the New York Times there were three articles concerning Ellis and Lunar Park: a neutral profile of the author (Wyatt 2005), a positive review (Maslin 2005) and a negative one (Scott 2005). This is especially interesting since it was the New York Times that published one of the most controversial and negative reviews of American Psycho: Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?,’ which the fictional Ellis even mentions in Lunar Park. For the real Ellis, the fact that he has attracted such a degree of attention from the New York Times proves that ‘if you are around long enough, people tend to take you seriously’ (in Birnbaum 2006). At the moment, Ellis is clearly taken seriously – at least judging by the number of reviews and profiles published – but reviewers still do not agree on Ellis’s literary quality. The book was set against his career and analysed as either a departure from or a continuation of his previous work. As we have seen, for Steve Almond it was certainly a negative continuation: ‘Ellis has made a career out of lazy nihilism and gratuitous viscera, and “Lunar Park” marks the apotheosis of that career’ (2005). The Washington Times offered a nuanced version of a similar position by claiming that although drugs, violence and brand names took centre stage, the sex was generally absent (Balitas 2005). However, for the Los Angeles Times there was ‘less name-dropping, more plot’ (Nimura 2005: R3) and for Bookreporter it was Ellis’s least graphic and gruesome work (Handwerker 2005). Janet Maslin, in a generally good review for the New York Times, underlined the way the novel culminated with an exquisite closing passage which ‘does not come from the Bret we used to know’ (2005: E8). The different opinions can be explained because Lunar Park is both a continuation and a departure in the author’s career. The fictional Ellis is hooked on both illegal and prescribed drugs and, although his sexual desire for his wife is nearly absent (they even attend couples

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counselling for that reason) he does try to get off with a young postgraduate student. There are some heated sexual encounters, although they are never really consummated. The violence is more subtle and secondhand. There are horrific murders but they are just a copycat repetition of those in American Psycho: someone is reenacting the crimes. Thus, they sound more remote and are never described by a first-person narrator. The use of brand names is still present but greatly reduced, even though their use is extended to the children who seem to follow their parents’ habits regarding labels. For example, Robby has Tommy Hilfiger shirts, Puma socks, a pair of Nikes, a Prada wallet, a Stussy camouflage eye patch, a Lacoste sweatband and Hugo Boss cologne (2005: 88–9). However, and in spite of some specific passages, their presence is not pervasive. Thus, though many of Ellis’s blank fiction features do not completely disappear in the novel, they are significantly reduced. Regarding other changes, Lunar Park is basically a chronological account of a series of events that take place in the life of a writer called Bret Easton Ellis. In Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho there was a series of images and events that did not seem to lead towards closure, as we have seen throughout this book. In Glamorama there was a developing plot but it got so convoluted that it could not be considered a traditional chronological story. Lunar Park offers, at least superficially, a chronological plot where events mount up and eventually reach a climax that makes the characters evolve. The fictional Ellis and the children start out like the characteristic passive blank characters in the author’s previous novels. However, as the story advances, they develop and learn to share their inner feelings, especially Ellis, who has to accept that he has repeated many of his own father’s mistakes and has to come to terms with his memory. In fact, it is remarkable that Lunar Park ends with a lyrical passage in which the ashes of Ellis’s father fly over the ocean and through time bringing up different memories of his past family life. This is the passage that the New Yorker considered ‘a rhapsody of grief and reconciliation’ (2005) and that Janet Maslin thought did not come from the Bret Easton Ellis we used to know (2005: E8). The fact that Ellis was using a language of feeling for the first time did not pass unnoticed by reviewers, but again, opinions differed. According to A. O. Scott, this language of feeling caused Ellis ‘palpable embarrassment’ since he did not master its use (2005), whereas Maslin believed that he had successfully fused ‘hilarious self-parody with a spiritual neediness, that, unlike the book’s particulars, is real’ (2005: E8). In a way, both are right and at first it is hard to take at face value the characters’ display of feelings, especially considering the parody and self-mockery that the fake autobiography provides. The first section is hilarious but it is not until the relationship between the fictional Ellis and Robby develops that feelings become an important part of the novel. The author’s ear for dialogue and social criticism, which has marked his career since Less Than Zero, is somewhat dissolved in the gothic, Stephen King– like sections of Lunar Park, but it is at its best when he describes family life in

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the suburbs. For Elizabeth Hand, in the Washington Post, the scenes in which Ellis evokes upper-middle-class life were the book’s strongest (2005: T06), and in the Washington Times Balitas singled out the party scenes as being especially well written (2005). Christine Thomas, for the San Francisco Chronicle, highlighted Ellis’s perfect evocation of a ‘diagnosis-happy, pharmaceutical-ridden, therapy-addicted, perfectionist society’ (2005). In the novel, the author satirizes suburban life, the parents’ polite conversations and, especially, the upbringing of children, who have bodyguards, dizzy spells (due to the pressure of elementary school), eating disorders, consume lots of prescribed drugs and attend Pilates classes ... for two-year-olds (2005:133). This is a fictional future in which, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, terrorist actions take place on a daily basis in the United States and bombers blow themselves up in Burger Kings and the subway, causing the death of thousands of civilians. The family has decided to flee from the city (where most terrorist attacks take place in the novel) to live in the suburbs. The media has spread fear by covering school killings, the disappearance of children and terrorist attacks, which has led to a scared society hooked on prescribed drugs. Robby and Sarah are on a series of medications: ‘stimulants, mood stabilizers, the antidepressant Lexapro, the Adderall for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and various other anticonvulsants and antipsychotics that had been prescribed’ (2005: 28). Robby has anxiety attacks from the age of six and his six-year-old half-sister Sarah is so lost in medications that she has trouble pulling on a sweater (254). The dog – which is bipolar – has hydrotherapy, acupuncture and a massage therapist. It has visited a canine behaviourist who prescribed the dog Cloinicalm and canine Paxil, which, according to the fictional Ellis, was ‘the same medication Sarah was on, which we all thought was extremely distressful’ (32). Sarah eats candy by throwing her head back, imitating the way Jayne takes prescription pills in the bathroom (107). Ellis and Jayne have sessions with Dr. Faheida to tackle their problems as a couple and with Dr. Kim to help Ellis connect with his son. The children’s free time is spent on the mall and playing computer games. Eleven-year-olds have cell phones and their parents say ‘No – the kids are booked solid’ (62). As we can see, the author’s satiric powers are at their best when portraying suburban family life in Lunar Park. The issue of Ellis’s position in the high-low culture debate also came up in the reviews of the novel, since it combines metafictional touches (like the inclusion of the author in the book) and some clearly generic features mainly from the horror genre. As in American Psycho, those reviewers wanting to criticize the book tried to bring it closer to the lower section of the cultural spectrum. For Almond: The success of his oeuvre stands as a testament to the declining standards of intellectual depth and compassion in America. They are the literary equivalent of the tabloid stories that are now a staple of the mainstream media. ... It is a shameless exploitation, a pornography of violence more sickening than the various necrophiliac TV dramas that clog prime time. (2005)

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Nimura compared it with a ‘high-camp horror film’ (2005: R3), while to Hand the second section resembled ‘a middle-aged yuppie rehash of a Hammer Horror film’ (2005: T06). For Gary Shteyngart it was like a literary adaptation of Ghostbusters II (2005). It was the section in which the novel turns into a supernatural story that received the harshest criticism: in the New York Times Janet Maslin found these references ‘embarrassingly literal-minded’ (2005: E8) and to David Amsden, for New York magazine, the prose and horror-story plot ‘grow increasingly ramshackle and overstuffed’ (2005: 166). For many, there was an excess of ghosts and supernatural events; according to Jennifer Reese, in Entertainment Weekly, ‘Ellis seems so eager to shock and entertain that he can’t choose a single, elegant ghoul – or even two – to make his case. Like his early work, Lunar Park is a victim of sophomoric overkill’ (2005). Along the same line, Elizabeth Hand in the Washington Post considered that Ellis should have chosen a single supernatural trope instead of so many hoary genre elements (2005: T06). In a way, it is difficult not to agree with these reviewers. The horror scenes are much better done in Stephen King’s novels and horror films than in Lunar Park; a doll that comes alive, a hairy monster, a haunted house, a skeleton ... are all too clichéd to be taken seriously. It is also true that in some ironic comments Ellis acknowledges he is consciously creating a horror story. For example, there is a scene in which he tries to convince himself that the Terby (Sarah’s bird doll) did not kill a cat and claims that it was simply a prop from a horror movie (2005: 207). Also, when he hires a group of ghost-hunters to get rid of the ghosts in the house – an obvious reference to the series of Ghostbusters movies – he ironically explains that the house was not built on an ancient Indian burial ground, a clear reference to the film Poltergeist (258). The skeleton that appears in the house, whose skull lights up with Ellis’s father’s face and Clayton’s too, is described as fake, ‘like something I had seen in a movie – a prank to scare the children. The living room might as well have been a screen and the house a theatre’ (272). However, these passages are exceptional and the others seem to genuinely aim at producing a frightening effect. It is only at the end that we understand why the ghosts are all so clichéd and childish: they were created by Ellis’s imagination when he was a child. In this sense, for the New Yorker the novel was both deliriously self-referential and moving at the same time but it remained unclear whether the horror narrative was supposed to shock since it derived from the stories Ellis wrote as a terrified child (2005). At the end of Lunar Park we learn that the Terby comes from an illustrated book he wrote when he was seven (282), and the hairy monster from another illustrated story he wrote when he was twelve (250). He had written both stories when he was frightened of his father and trying to find his way in the world. Even the return of Patrick Bateman has to do with his father since the narcissistic, status-obsessed serial killer character was inspired by his personality. It is the final acceptance of his father that makes all the ghosts go away. In the end, he identifies with him when he returns to his lonely bachelor life in Manhattan

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and realizes what he has learned from his father: ‘... how lonely people make a life. But I also realized what I hadn’t learned from him: that a family – if you allow it – gives you joy, which in turn gives you hope. What we both failed to understand was that we shared the same heart’ (304). This final realization and the closing lyric passage in which the fictional Ellis and his family scatter his father’s ashes seem to mark a change in his career. The blank fiction narration in his previous novels, where feelings were not allowed, seems to have given way to a different style, equally ironic but more charged with emotions.

13.2 High and Low Culture The literary influences in the novel are very varied and come from different cultural realms. As we have explained, Stephen King was as a major influence on the book, especially his novels The Dark Half (1989), Cujo (1981) and The Shining (1977). The Dark Half deals with an author called Thad Beaumont who has always used the pen name George Stark, but decides to drop it and use his own again. However, someone passing for Stark starts killing people. This plot line resembles the Lunar Park section in which Patrick Bateman returns and starts killing again. Another interesting influence is King’s Cujo, in which a St. Bernard dog gets infected by a brain-destroying virus that makes it so aggressive it kills several people. The scenes in which Victor, the lethargic family dog in Lunar Park, is possessed by the Terby and furiously attacks Ellis seem to be clearly inspired by the Cujo story. The other important Stephen King novel behind Lunar Park is The Shining, the story of a family that spends the winter months in isolation at the Overlook Hotel after the husband, ex-alcoholic Jack Torrance, signs on as winter caretaker. The place is possessed by ghosts and spirits that will push Jack back to drink, turning him into a murderer ready to kill his family. In Lunar Park the suburban haunted house plays a similar role, leading the Ellis of the story to drink and consume drugs again. There is even a scene in The Shining when the ghosts in the hotel provide Jack with alcohol so that he can get drunk, which is repeated in Lunar Park: ‘When I laid the phone back on the desk I noticed a bottle of vodka that had not been there when I walked into the room. The writer did not need to tell me to drink it’ (2005: 231). There is even a direct reference to The Shining when the fictional Ellis wants to make it up with Jayne and she answers: ‘You screwed that up sometime last night between your second gallon of sangria and the pot you smoked and then racing around this house with a gun.’ A desperate sadness passed over her face before she turned off the lights. ‘You screwed that up with your big Jack Torrance routine.’ (2005: 166, my emphasis) Both Jack and Ellis are constantly taking drugs, Excedrin in Jack’s case, Klonopin and Xanax in Ellis’s. Both had a father who abused and battered his

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family, and both have difficult relationships with their children, Danny in Jack’s case and Robby in Ellis’s. There is even a similar use of parenthetical comments in italics to give voice to the ideas that haunt them. Ellis himself has declared that in the novel he pays homage to Stephen King and the comics he used to read as a child, like Vault of Horror or Tales from the Crypt (in Amazon.com 2005). In a previous interview with Jaime Clarke he also confessed that when he was about 12 he read Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot more than a dozen times (1999: 72). Stephen King reviewed Lunar Park for Entertainment Weekly and humorously started by mentioning how he learned about Ellis’s homage. Apparently, a clerk in a Boston bookshop told him, ‘Dude! Bret Easton Ellis is blaming his new book on you!’ (2005). However, King found the book itself very powerful: ‘Here is a book that progresses from darkness and banality to light and epiphany with surprising strength and sureness’ (2005). There were other popular sources for Lunar Park mentioned in its initial reception. Stephen King suggested that the emails Ellis receives had a spooky Blair Witch Project–like home movie attached (2005). Rolling Stone pointed out that the blurring of reality and fiction seemed inspired by the songs of Eminem and TV shows like Fat Actress and Curb Your Enthusiasm4 (Grigoriadis 2005: 36). Nevertheless, references in Lunar Park are not limited to popular culture. As Brandon Stosuy wrote for the Village Voice, the novel ‘is a ghost story and a Charlie Kaufman showdown between the writer and his everyday self, written under Philip Roth’s influence and as homage to childhood hero Stephen King’ (2005). In the same line, the sections where suburban life is satirized seem to come from the film American Beauty (Scott 2005) but also from Don DeLillo’s suburban-family novel White Noise (Bernhard 2005), while the suburban novels of Richard Yates, John Cheever and John Updike were also mentioned as influences (Stosuy 2005). For Stephen King, it was ‘John Cheever writes The Shining’ (2005) and for Vanity Fair the novel combined in ‘equal parts John Cheever and Stephen King, and ... his own, distinct brand of social satire’ (E.S. 2005: 36), again showing the dissolution of genres achieved by Ellis in Lunar Park and his previous novels. Regarding his metafictional comments and the including of the author in the narrative, the most frequently repeated antecedent mentioned by reviewers was the work of Philip Roth (Hand 2005: T06; Wyatt 2005: 2.25). Roth created a fictional version of himself called Nathan Zuckerman who has appeared in several of his novels, especially in Zuckerman Unbound (1981), where he is an established novelist that must face the controversy originated by his novel Carnovsky – a stand-in for Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). In Operation Shylock (1993) the narrator, who is called Philip Roth, discovers that he is being impersonated by someone who has appropriated his identity and celebrity to spread an ideology defending the return of Israeli Jews to their countries of origin. The real Roth’s nervous breakdown following a difficult knee operation in the late 1980s and his marriage to English actress Claire Bloom are part of the story. There are

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several minor characters who are actual people, such as John Demjanjuk and Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. In the same way, Ellis introduces writer friends such as Jay McInerney, actors like Keanu Reeves or people from the publishing industry like Amanda Urban (Ellis’s agent) and Paul Bogaards (his publicist at Knopf) among many others. This linked the novel’s style with John Barth’s metafictional games (Balitas 2005), while a more contemporary connection was established with Chuck Palahniuk because both fuse ‘grisly, whimsical horror gambits with what turns out to be a hidden and fulsomely sentimental side’ (Maslin 2005: E8) and share a ‘straightforward prose and twisting plot lines’ (Stone 2005: 66). To these comments I would add that both have written books with controversial subject matter, blank prose and unreliable narrators. There is a further literary reference in the novel, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The family house is located in Elsinore Lane – an obvious reference to Elsinore castle where Hamlet’s story unfolds – which is very close to Ophelia Boulevard and there is a Fortinbras Mall. There is also a Horatio Park where Robby and Bret had a picnic in the summer, a Voltemand Drive and an Osric Motel where the mutilated body of Aimee Light is found. In fact, one of the opening quotations of the book is taken directly from Hamlet and there is a scene in which the Ellis character sees the ghost of his father who says Robby’s name. His father returns to warn him about Robby and the way Ellis is making the same mistake he made. All these references seem to stress that this is basically a story about a father and a son. On the one hand, in the novel we have the story of Ellis and his dead father, who was physically and verbally abusive to his family, and, on the other hand, we have Ellis and his son Robby. Ellis’s failure as a father in the story is similar to his own father’s failure with him and their stories seem to mirror each other. Robby confesses that he is scared of Ellis because he is angry all the time, while in a later scene Ellis remembers that he was also scared of his father all the time (2005: 223, 250). Robby’s final disappearance, similar to Ellis’s own when he decided to leave Los Angeles and study in New Hampshire, makes Ellis realize everything he has in common with his father and finally forgive him. Under the heading of literary sources there is a final book worth mentioning as an intertext in the novel: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. In the novel Ellis is a man who is not ready to grow up. His marriage and his attempt to live in the suburbs with his family result in failure because he is not ready to leave behind his bachelor life of drugs and sex. In the Halloween party that he throws at the beginning of the story Ellis asks his friend Jay McInerney5 if he thinks they have ‘grown up’. McInerney answers: ‘Well, you’re wearing a marijuana T-shirt at your own Halloween party, where you just were making out with a coed in the bathroom, so the answer to that, my friend, is definite nope’ (45). The temptation to return to his bachelor life is always present because he does not feel integrated in his new life: There was no place for me in his world or in that house. I knew this. Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? ... The idea of returning

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to a bachelor’s life, and the condo I still kept on East 13th Street in Manhattan, was sliding towards me with an acid hiss. (173) On the other hand, Robby’s own story re-enacts that of Peter Pan. He is a ‘tweenager’, not a child anymore but not yet a teenager so he is somewhere between the world of adults and that of children. As the story unfolds, we learn that boys are disappearing and they are all Robby’s age; this is the Peter Pan story, where several ‘lost boys’ disappear and live on an island with Peter Pan, who gives them eternal childhood away from parents and adult worries. There are some other obvious references, like the name of the girl who looks after Ellis’s children when they go to a neighbour’s party. She is called Wendy and reads to the children ‘the story about those stranded boys on that lost island. ...’ (134). Nadine Allen (one of the neighbours) has her own theory about the whereabouts of the boys that disappear: she thinks they are going to Neverland. In fact, when Ellis tries to break the code in Robby’s computer he finds out that the code is precisely ‘Neverneverland.’ Thus, both Ellis and Robby are unwilling to take the next step in their development as people and feel the need to escape from their own fears and pressures as adults. As we can see, Lunar Park uses references from very different cultural areas. Ellis pays homage to Stephen King and horror films and novels, but he is also influenced by metafictional traits that echo Philip Roth, by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and by Barrie’s Peter Pan. In any case, some of the most important intertexts are precisely Ellis’s previous novels. We have already mentioned that he has created a fictional universe and his characters reappear in various different works: in Lunar Park the Clay of Less Than Zero reappears as an incarnation of the real young Ellis who wrote the novel when he was still a student at college; Mitchell Allen, who was a bisexual supporting character in The Rules of Attraction, also has a role as Ellis’s married neighbour; Paul Denton, a character in The Rules of Attraction and who briefly appeared in American Psycho, is also mentioned as a former classmate; and Patrick Bateman also seems to have returned ready to kill again.

13.3 Mock Autobiography and Fiction We have already mentioned that the novel is a mock autobiography in which Ellis is the main character. In fact, the author’s career and public persona become intertexts in the novel. If we take into account that the author had previously been accused of being a narcissist and had always been identified with the characters in his novels, it is especially interesting to see the way his presence as a character in Lunar Park was received. The fashion in which he seems to apologize for his own excesses and for American Psycho did not convince Nimura of the Los Angeles Times: ‘Trusting readers may accept this public therapy session as sincere, but it feels more like another chapter in the book of Ellis’ egomania’ (2005: R3). For Scott, in the New York Times, the novel was ‘the portrait of a

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narcissist who is, in the end, terminally bored with himself; that it may also be a self-portrait doesn’t make it any more true’ (2005). To Misha Stone, from Library Journal, Ellis seemed to have matured in Lunar Park as he acknowledged that his best subject had always been himself (2005: 66), while Vanity Fair entitled its review of Lunar Park ‘Bad-Boy Blues: Bret Easton Ellis Grows Up’ (E.S. 2005). As these reviews point out, the fact that Ellis openly became a character in the novel could be interpreted either as a narcissistic move and proof that he had always been the main character in his books, or as a mature way of mocking those critics that tend to assume that Ellis has been writing hidden autobiographies all along. I believe the latter seems closer to the truth since in the book Ellis in effect mocks all the preconceptions about the real Ellis, as his personality is a construct made up of the personalities of key characters from his previous books. In this sense, I agree with David Amsden’s belief that the narcissistic, self-conscious and self-indulgent passages were the best in the book. In fact, he even complained that ‘[t]he sucker [Ellis] wasn’t self-indulgent enough’ (2005: 166). It might well be, too, that the novel would have benefited from less horror and more mock narcissism since it is the latter that Ellis has mastered. In Chapter 10 we saw how some critics compared Ellis with Victor in Glamorama and how both were considered equally shallow and celebrity-obsessed. The Ellis in the novel starts behaving like Victor in Glamorama. At the Halloween party he throws he claims that: ... the party had been my workplace. It was my open market, my battleground, it was where friends were made, lovers were met, deals were struck. Parties seemed frivolous and random and formless but in fact were intricately patterned, highly choreographed events. In the world in which I came of age the Party was the surface on which daily life took place. (33) This attitude towards parties coincides with Victor’s, whose main role in Glamorama is to organize one of them. Victor’s usual confusion of names is also replicated by the fictional Ellis, who repeatedly confuses the name of his couples counsellor, Dr. Faheida, with Dr. Fajita. In the same way, when Nadine Allen mentions that the boys are going to Neverland, a clear reference to the Peter Pan story, Ellis thinks she is talking about Michael Jackson’s mansion. Even Victor’s unsuccessful attempts to read hidden clues in his quest find a parallel when Ellis tries to read the peeling wall in the house as a code with a hidden message. One of the codes Victor found in Glamorama was a series of cryptograms painted on the walls: ‘DiSA Pp EAR HEre’ and ‘DiSAp p Ear HERe’ (1998: 416, 421). ‘DIssapEAR HEre’ is also a graffito Ellis finds in Robby’s room, across the giant photomural of a deserted skate park, in massive red lettering. As we have already seen, the sentence was originally a leitmotiv in Less Than Zero, from which it has been borrowed. The song ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ also seems to have become a leitmotiv in Ellis’s oeuvre. It was briefly mentioned in Less Than Zero as a song Clay

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remembers his grandmother humming to herself (1985: 163). Clay’s grandmother is a positive character, one of the few members of his family that he has really loved and her death is an important memory in his life. In Glamorama the song also appears as a tune that Victor sometimes hears as background noise, probably a reminder of a better, simpler, less shallow life. In Lunar Park the song is playing over the video of the last minutes of his father’s life which Ellis receives as an attachment. In the passage we are told by an emotionally moved Ellis that it used to be his grandmother’s favourite song, which humanizes the memory of his father (2005: 176). Finally, Victor’s constant feeling that everything is part of a movie, as we saw in Chapter 11, is also mirrored in Lunar Park. There are sections in which Ellis believes that Robby is putting on a performance and that he is given a cue to move (160–2). He even says, when Robby stops mid-sentence: ‘He momentarily forgot his lines. He began improvising’ (221). This points at the fact that the Ellis of Lunar Park may be as unreliable and schizophrenic a narrator as Victor in Glamorama. Bateman’s belief in his being irresistible is also part of the Ellis in Lunar Park. For example, when he mentions his love story with Jayne he says: ‘She was still in love with me. I moved on’ (16). About Aimee Light, whose thesis about Ellis is called ‘Destination Nowhere’,6 he says: ‘She was enamored of me but coolly’ (38). These sentences seem to echo those by Bateman in American Psycho: ‘My secretary, Jean, who is in love with me. ...’ (1991: 64), and ‘Cheryl, this dumpy chick who is in love with me. ...’ (1991: 68). Ellis in Lunar Park also throws out sentences such as ‘You’re very sexy, baby, but I’m equally hot’ (2005: 81). Sean in The Rules of Attraction has a characteristic sentence: ‘Deal with it. Rock’n’roll’, which he repeats on many occasions in the novel. In Lunar Park Ellis says: ‘I did not give a shit how Sarah would react once she noticed her doll was gone. She was going to have to deal with it, rock’n’roll’ (213). Less Than Zero is the other important intertext. The Ellis of Lunar Park sometimes behaves as shallowly and passively as Clay in Less Than Zero. For example, there is a scene in which Jayne complains that in the Halloween party there were people ‘fucking’ in the shower and snorting coke in the kitchen. Ellis answers: ‘People were in the kitchen last night?’ (58). This echoes a scene in Less Than Zero in which Trent tells Clay not to go into Kim’s room because Julian, Kim and Derf are ‘fucking’ there, to which Clay just asks ‘Derf’s here?’ (1985: 35). When Ellis returns to his family’s house in Los Angeles we learn that he has a framed Elvis Costello poster on the wall, just like Clay in Less Than Zero. In Lunar Park he goes with Jayne to a restaurant called ‘Spago’, which makes him remember a scene in the past when he went to that same restaurant in Los Angeles with Blair and told her that he had been accepted by Camden College. This is a memory taken from Less Than Zero. However, the Ellis in the novel is much more complex since he evolves out of these characters. For example, when he realizes that his father wants to tell him something and becomes aware of how much he wants to be part of the family, he thinks: ‘But now he was back, and I understood that there was another

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world underneath the one we lived in. There was something beneath the surface of things’ (172). This is a clear reworking of Victor’s favourite sentence in Glamorama: ‘slide down the surface of things’. The Ellis in Lunar Park is discovering that there might be something below the surface, beyond the parties that he so clearly embraced at the beginning of the novel. As we have seen, in Less Than Zero Clay has everything he can have so he is obsessed with finding new sensations. Thus, he decides to watch Julian prostitute himself because he wants to see the worst. In the course of Lunar Park Ellis starts to see the worst and repents. ‘The writer’, which is a voice that Ellis hears and talks with, is there to remind him: ‘Hadn’t you once wanted to “see the worst” ? the writer asked me. Didn’t you once write that somewhere? I might have. But I don’t want to anymore. It’s too late, the writer said’ (2005: 252, italics in the original). There is even a passage in which Clayton phones and tells him: ‘I want you to realize some things about yourself. I want you to reflect on your life. I want you to be aware of all the terrible things you have done. I want you to face the disaster that is Bret Easton Ellis’ (231). The tone of repentance and revision even reaches American Psycho. The fictional Ellis claims in Lunar Park that the writing of the book was an extremely disturbing experience and that ‘I was repulsed by this creation and wanted to take no credit for it – Patrick Bateman wanted the credit. ... But even years later I couldn’t look at the book, let alone touch it or reread it – there was something, well, evil about it’ (13). When in the novel someone starts to repeat Bateman’s crimes, Ellis remembers that when the book was published the National Organization for Women (NOW) claimed that someone could copy the crimes and that he would be responsible for them since they would have been inspired by the novel. He tries to defend himself by claiming that he has changed: I had moved past the casual carnage that was so prevalent in the books I’d conceived in my twenties, past the severed heads and the soup made of blood and the woman vaginally penetrated with her own rib. Exploring that kind of violence had been ‘interesting’ and ‘exciting’ and it was all ‘metaphorical’ anyway. ... I was ‘transgressive’ and the book was really about ‘style’ and there was no point now in reliving the crimes of Patrick Bateman and the horror they’d inspired. ... Besides, Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator, and if you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had occurred. (122) He also adds that ‘[t]he book had made me wealthy and famous but I never wanted to touch it again’ (122). This is an idea that the real Ellis has also repeated in different interviews (Wyatt 2005; Bernhard 2005), even claiming for the Village Voice that ‘[w]hen I reread American Psycho, I was horrified. ... You mellow out a little (with age). You become – for better or worse, depending on the writer – more sincere, more real, and try not to hide behind conceptual ideas’ (in Stosuy 2005). As we can see, both the real Ellis and the Ellis of Lunar

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Park seem to share a similar position regarding this point and seem to be evolving towards more sincere and less violent narratives. In any case, it would be unfair to claim that Ellis suddenly rejected his previous career in Lunar Park. The novel has some very humorous scenes in which Ellis’s satiric powers are seen at their best when playing with his public image. The Ellis of the novel may be a mixture of all the characters in Ellis’s novels but it is also a representation of the celebrity author that has been created through gossip columns, reviews and his enfant terrible public image. Regarding his ambiguous sexual orientation, the Ellis in Lunar Park claims that he enjoyed the fact that people were interested in who he was sleeping with: ‘I was a mystery, an enigma, and that was what mattered – that’s what sold books, that’s what made me even more famous. Propaganda designed to enhance the already very chic image of author as handsome young playboy’ (19). He also throws out sentences like: ‘Look, being America’s greatest writer under forty is a lot to live up to. It’s so hard’ (48). Moreover, he embraces and mocks the accusations that he enjoys too much what he claims to be criticizing – like conspicuous consumerism or celebrity culture. For example, the supervisor of Aimee Light’s thesis on Ellis does not like the idea that she is wasting her time on an author who, he believes, is part of the problem, part of the culture he claims to criticize. To which Ellis answers ‘Jesus, what an asshole’ (80) as he fondles Aimee’s breasts. The novel Ellis is writing also in Lunar Park seems to be a compilation and an extreme exaggeration of everything that has been criticized in his novels. It is called Teenage Pussy and is about Michael Graves and his erotic bachelor life in Manhattan. The fictional Ellis considers that the title is very commercial and controversial, and Knopf is going to label it a ‘pornography thriller’ in their catalogue. His idea is to make it ‘elegantly hard-core and interspersed with jaunty bouts of my trademark humour’ (68). The novel could be read as a satire of ‘the new sexual obnoxiousness’ or as the story of a man obsessed with sex.7 He is going to include camera crews, overdoses, anal sex ... which were all present in Glamorama. In sum: [t]he book was all about the hard sell (the million-dollar advance guaranteed that) but it was also going to be poignant and quietly devastating and put every other book written by my generation to shame. I would still be enjoying the success and notoriety while my better-behaved peers were languishing on ‘Where Are They Now?’ Web sites. (70) Ellis’s self-parody is hilarious sometimes and the way he plays with his celebrity image brings us full circle to his present status as a celebrity author, again between the high and low culture spheres. In Lunar Park Ellis has intensified his drawing on all cultural spheres. Horror films, TV reality shows, horror comics and Stephen King novels are important influences and so are authors like DeLillo, Cheever, Yates, Updike, Roth and

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even Shakespeare. The genre resulting from this wide variety of high and low sources and intertexts is a mock autobiography with gothic leanings in a metafictional general tone. Just as Ellis has played with the conventions of the coming-of-age genre in Less Than Zero, the serial killer genre in American Psycho and the novel of manners and conspiracy thriller in Glamorama, so he disrupts the conventions of both the gothic and autobiography in Lunar Park. In the genre of autobiography the veracity and objectivity of the events is usually assumed and readers tend to believe that these events correspond to the real life of the narrator. Leigh Gilmore has explained how in the last few decades this concept has changed and a new autobiographical genre has developed, especially when the events narrated are traumatic and cannot be easily verbalized: ‘when selfrepresentation and the representation of trauma coincide, the conflicting demands potentially make autobiography theoretically impossible’ (2001:19). In this type of autobiography, also known as autofiction, fictional and real events intermingle as the author struggles to deal with the urge to deny traumatic memories and the need to narrate them. The story of Ellis and his fictional son helps the author work through his traumatic relation with his father. In the story his repressed memories come back in the form of videos, emails, songs, ghosts and horror toys. Only when he understands and remembers is he able to come to terms with his father’s memory. In traditional autobiographies the identity of the subject was seen as unified and stable. In autofiction the self is fragmented and in the process of construction and development. The construction of identity is a recurrent motif in Ellis’s fiction since all his blank characters are constructed out of mass culture references. The Bret Easton Ellis of Lunar Park is made up of other characters in the author’s fiction and out of his own public image. Thus, this character displays a double emptiness: it copies the personality of characters that were made out of mass media references and draws on the gossip that has also constructed the public image of Bret Easton Ellis. This is the quintessential character of blank fiction. Thus, both the borrowing from all cultural categories and the blurring of generic boundaries through intertextual and intermedial references turn Lunar Park into a characteristic piece of Ellis’s writing. However, there is an important difference: the Bret Easton Ellis character evolves out of the blankness to become aware of his shallowness and passivity. A sense of identity is achieved in a novel whose final tone of forgiveness and repentance seems to be a departure from his previous blank fiction writings, which, in turn, makes the novel both a continuation of and a deviation from his track record.

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After fictionalizing his own career and being haunted by ghosts from his own oeuvre in Lunar Park, Ellis comes full circle and returns to the literary style, location and characters of his first novel, the original ‘scene of the crime’. Ellis’s last two novels, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms, have contributed to the reinforcement of Ellis’s literary universe and of the author’s trademark style. However, this spiralling approach also runs the risk of becoming too suffocating for creative energy to flourish. For example, Janet Maslin in the New York Times finds Imperial Bedrooms ‘a work of limited imagination that all too deftly simulates the effects of having no imagination at all’ (2010). Janelle Brown in the San Francisco Chronicle also fears that ‘Ellis is either so deeply enmeshed in his own creepy little insular worlds that he can’t write his way out of it, or else he is such a genius that he’s created an entire parallel universe that folds and unfolds on itself like some kind of Escher print’ (2010). Ellis is trapped in what seems to be both a suffocating world and a creative alternative universe. One of the epigraphs of Imperial Bedrooms points in this direction: ‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself’, which suggests both authorial and character trap in the novel. The quotation comes from Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye (1953) and links Imperial Bedrooms to hard-boiled and noir fiction, establishing the genre that frames the novel. This genre seems to fit Ellis’s style perfectly since it usually portrays crime, violence and sex in an unsentimental way. In Imperial Bedrooms Clay has become a successful screenwriter who is helping cast his new film, The Listeners, which is remarkably similar to The Informers, the adaptation of Ellis’s collection of short stories which was being produced as Ellis wrote Imperial Bedrooms. In Los Angeles Clay will again meet Blair, Julian, Trent and Rip; he becomes obsessed with Rain Turner, an aspiring actress who he will trick into believing she can get a role in his upcoming film in exchange for sex. The murder of a Hispanic actress and a film producer trigger the hardboiled plot as Clay suspects someone is following him. The return of the characters from Less Than Zero is already suggested in the other epigraph that opens the novel. It is taken from Elvis Costello’s song ‘Beyond Belief’, one of the tracks of his album Imperial Bedrooms (1982). The choice of title connects it with Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, also named after a track on Costello’s debut

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album My Aim Is True (1977). The quotation implies that history is going to repeat itself as we revisit the characters in Less Than Zero 25 years later. If Less Than Zero ended with Clay leaving Los Angeles, escaping from what he had seen during his Christmas break, Imperial Bedrooms starts with Clay returning to Los Angeles where circumstances will entrap him and make him stay. The popular culture references have returned in an updated form. There are no pay phones, MTV or Betamax cassettes but there are Apple computers, iPhones and the internet. There is still dope and cocaine but also Xanax and Ambien (the main drugs in Glamorama and especially Lunar Park). Twenty-five years later Viagra, dyed hair and plastic surgery are also necessary since what forty-something Clay sees in the mirror is now ‘an old-looking teenager’ (60) who pretends to be younger than he really is. Even though in an interview for the New York Times Magazine Ellis has claimed that he is less interested in what his characters are wearing and more interested in who they are (in Widdicombe 2010), there are Versace bags, Tom Ford suits and Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses, together with the more current references to James Perse T-shirts and Band of Outsiders suits. As in American Psycho, the characters drink Fiji, not water; Grey Goose, not vodka; Patrón, not tequila. Song lyrics are still important in narrative terms since the characters have the same difficulty in expressing themselves that they had in Less Than Zero. Clay mentions every song he hears and how ‘songs constantly floating in the car keep commenting on everything neutral encased within the windshield’s frame’ (32). The song ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’, heard at a meeting that Clay, Rip and Spin have with the drug dealer Dead in Less Than Zero (1985: 127), reappears in Imperial Bedrooms and transports Clay ‘into someone both young and old. Sadness: it’s everywhere’ (2010: 15). One of the many songs mentioned in passing is ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’, a song associated in Ellis’s universe with the nostalgia for better times: it was Clay’s grandmother’s favourite song in Less Than Zero, the song Victor constantly hears in Glamorama and that returns in Lunar Park as part of the haunting of the fictional Bret Easton Ellis. The billboards that Clay had seen in Less Than Zero and that played such an important role in the novel have now become digital and they seem to talk to Clay and say No (62). ‘Disappear Here’ was an obsessive sentence for Clay in Less Than Zero, a sentence that in Imperial Bedrooms becomes a type of warning when he finds it written in red on the mirror (104). It is significant that when he finally sets Julian up and Rip’s men kidnap him, ‘the men pull him back and then he disappears so quickly it’s as if he was never here at all’ (154). The final paragraph of the novel also contains several references to Less Than Zero, such as the repetition of one of the opening quotations of the novel, ‘This is the game that moves as you play,’ and the final sentence, ‘I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people’. The latter sentence is a reworking of the famous opening of Less Than Zero: ‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.’ As in Glamorama, but to a lesser extent, certain celebrities are mentioned: Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and Josh Hartnett, for example. The book reflects the

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excess of the film industry in Los Angeles where exploitation is a key concept and where aspiring actors are ready to do everything it takes to get a role in a film. In such an atmosphere it seems logical that most of the teenagers of Less Than Zero are now part of the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood industry. As a scriptwriter Clay is an active part of this exploitative system and always makes sure he has some producer credit so that he can bed as many actresses/actors as possible. Clay’s narcissism and self-obsession has not changed; if anything it has increased. ‘What about me?’ was the question he insistently asked his psychiatrist in Less Than Zero; in Imperial Bedrooms Clay asks Rain Turner and Trent that same question in the revealing final conversation that they have. ‘What about me?’ is not the only question that recurs. In Less Than Zero Clay decides that he needs to see the worst and witnesses Julian prostituting himself to pay a drug debt. In Imperial Bedrooms this need turns into a question he hears: ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ (59) ‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’ (120). The latter question sounds like an echo to Clay and in the end we find out that it is a line from a film script he wrote some time ago (159). Films and scripts play an important role in the novel; in fact, Imperial Bedrooms has so much dialogue that it looks like a screenplay or a novel ready-made for adaptation (Theroux 2010; Katz 2010: 161). In an interview for Vice Magazine Ellis claimed that the story tells itself since it is narrated by a screenwriter and has ‘a movie-ish feel to it’ (Ellis in Pearson 2010). The film rights of Imperial Bedrooms revert to Twentieth Century Fox because Ellis uses characters that they own from the Less Than Zero adaptation and there is already some speculation that Fox Searchlight may be planning to adapt the novel. Curiously enough, the novel opens with ‘They had made a movie about us’ (3) which is a reference to the 1987 film adaptation of Less Than Zero. This sentence is very effective because it acknowledges the existence of the film, introduces it in Ellis’s literary universe and works as an invitation to produce a sequel. In terms of literary style Imperial Bedrooms returns to the minimalism of Less Than Zero and to the use of the present simple and present continuous tenses. The chapters are extremely short and so are some sentences: The blue Jeep is parked on the corner of Elevado and Doheny. From inside the Jeep a cell phone glows. I realize the hand not holding the vodka is now clenched into a fist. The fear returns as I gaze at the Jeep. And then a flash of light: someone lit a cigarette. From behind me the phone rings. I don’t answer it. (13) On other occasions the sentences seem extremely long but are actually made up of short sequences linked by ‘and’, thus constituting one-sentence chapters: Dr. Woolf leaves a message ... and the next morning I drive to the building on Sawtelle and park on the fourth floor of the garage and wait for his noon

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session ... and I listen to a song ... and I’m nodding to myself ... and deciding I’ll accept ... and how that’s the only plan, and then I’m remembering ... and that if you’re alone nothing bad can happen to you. (106–7) In spite of the minimalist style there is an important difference with respect to Less Than Zero. Imperial Bedrooms has a plot, whereas Less Than Zero was a collection of images and scenes that only led to mounting horror rather than to some kind of resolution. Moreover, the first pages of the novel are written in a metafictional style which resembles the first section of Lunar Park. The Clay who narrates Imperial Bedrooms distances himself from the Clay who narrates Less Than Zero since apparently in the novel ‘the author’, who was one of Clay’s acquaintances at the time, had taken Clay’s voice and hijacked his life. According to Clay, the author resented Blair’s choosing Clay over him and had decided to write a novel about them turning Clay into a narrator incapable of feeling love and unwilling to help his friends. Clay complains that the author of the book was ‘too lost in his own passivity’ (3) but still admits that most of the events narrated were accurate. This is an interesting beginning because it creates the expectation that the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms is unlike the Clay of Less Than Zero. This Clay has finally recovered his real voice and is not the shallow person and the ‘inarticulate zombie’ (5) that the author portrayed in his first novel. However, these expectations are not met as we read the book and discover that this Clay is much worse than he was 25 years before. In this connection it is interesting that the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Less Than Zero features on its cover the shadow of a teenager, whereas on the Imperial Bedrooms cover we see the shadow of a man with horns. Before even starting to read the book we already know Clay has become the devil. Erica Wagner has dismissively claimed in the New York Times that after the ‘neat, postmodern, self-referential beginning’, the novel wanders a ‘dime-store path’ (2010). By contrast, Mark Lawson in the Guardian finds that Ellis’s literary inheritance combines the ‘playful self-advertisements of Philip Roth’ and the ‘ambiguously complicit social reportage of F. Scott Fitzgerald’ (2010). Dime novel or social reportage, Imperial Bedrooms’ metafictional beginning gives way to a Chandler-like hard-boiled-fiction plot. Without noticing, Clay becomes entangled in a murder mystery in which the narrative of investigation is more important than that the murder itself. Death was an important motif in Less Than Zero; in Imperial Bedrooms it fuels the plot since this is a much darker novel. If death was symbolically present in Less Than Zero through the coyote that was run over by Clay and Blair and by a snuff movie, death is firsthand in Imperial Bedrooms. In the course of the novel several characters are tortured and killed: a Hispanic actress, Kelly Montrose (a producer), Amanda Flew (Rain’s roommate) and Julian. Besides, their deaths are recorded and distributed, echoing the snuff movie that Clay and his friends watched in Less Than Zero. In spite of this incipient genre, Clay is not a man of principle in a world of corruption. He is as cynical as the people around him and just happens to

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find himself in the middle of the events. In an unplanned way Clay starts to play the role of detective. Through the different conversations with Blair, Julian, Trent, Rip and Rain he gathers clues about Rain’s true identity and the different crimes committed. He tries to disentangle the truth, not because he cares about who killed whom but because he is a narcissist wanting to know how events affect him. He consciously plays the detective role when talking to Rain about the disappearance of her roommate Amanda: ‘ “Well, maybe Rip’s involved in this,” I say, imitating a child investigating a crime. “Isn’t Rip fucking her too? He must be very worried as well” ’ (117). He finally does discover the truth because he is a much more competent detective than Victor was in Glamorama. What Clay shares with Victor is his paranoia, especially when he has the feeling that a blue Jeep is following him, which is in turn being followed by a black Mercedes. He also has the feeling that someone has broken into his place and certain objects have been rearranged. As in Lunar Park there is even a supernatural plot line since the former owner of the apartment was a young actor who died and both Clay and Rain see him in dreams. The paranoiac feeling is also reinforced by the anonymous text messages he receives that say ‘I’m watching you’. Technology is also used to create alternative realities. For example, Rain shows Clay some pictures to prove she has been with her mother in San Diego when she disappears for four days (78). In a scene that clearly resembles the one in Glamorama in which Bobby shows Victor fake videos that incriminate him in terrorist actions, in Imperial Bedrooms Rip shows Clay emails that Clay himself has supposedly sent Rain threatening to kill Julian. Thus, Rip uses fake emails, photographs and videos to incriminate Clay for Julian’s murder, even sending him a video of Julian’s torture-murder with the threatening message Clay left on Julian’s mobile as background sound. In a Victor-like attitude Clay tries to interpret all the emails which ‘become maps that need to be redesigned in order to be properly followed, but they’re accurate on certain points and have a secret and purposeful strategy to them’ (124). Victor is warned in Glamorama that there is no master narrative that explains everything; Julian tells Clay something similar: ‘ “This isn’t a script,” Julian says. “It’s not going to add up. Not everything is going to come together in the third act” ’ (113). Ironically enough, things are explained in the end, at least in terms of plot. Ellis finds the mood of hard-boiled fiction very enthralling, he likes the idea of ‘a man searching for something or moving through this moral landscape and trying to protect himself from it, and yet he’s still forced to investigate it’ (in Pearson 2010). In these novels the city plays a very important role as background; it is a place of ‘empty modernity, corruption and death ... a world of exploitation and criminality’ (Cawelti 1976: 141). Of all cities Los Angeles epitomizes this urban world of glamour, danger and isolation. Clay connects with the city and relishes the view from his apartment which ‘is so tactile that you can almost touch the blues and greens of the design center on Melrose. Because of

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how high I am above the city it’s a good place to hide when working in L.A. Tonight the sky is violet-tinged and there’s mist’ (13). It is the combination of corruption and glamour represented in the city that provides the setting for the crime. The role of the city is so important in the novel that Los Angeles magazine published a guide to locations in the city featured in the novel and a special article in which Clay Easton comments on them: the Polo Lounge, Equinox, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Santa Monica Pier and the Griffith observatory are among the 22 selected locations (Arnold 2010). In several interviews Ellis has underlined the way Los Angeles is an alienating place (in Shone 2010) and how the city impressed him when he returned after having lived in New York for so many years: The force of the alienation and isolation of the city really hit me full on in a way that it never had. Regardless of if you’re in a relationship or have a lot of friends or whatever – in L.A., it doesn’t matter. You’re still alone a lot of the time. It’s just a totally different idea of living. (Ellis in Katz 2010: 161) The detective of hard-boiled fiction has to face the fears of loneliness and isolation that the city transmits (Cawelti 1976: 157), and at the same time is forced to define his own moral position and his concept of morality and justice. In Less Than Zero Clay’s biggest fault had been his passivity and his jaded attitude towards life but at least he chose to leave Los Angeles and the loneliness and isolation it represents. In Imperial Bedrooms Clay has to face the city again and its corrupt inhabitants. At the beginning of the novel his childhood friends seems to have found some sense of direction. Blair is married to Trent and Julian has been sober for a year. However, Trent is having an affair with another man, while Blair has had affairs with Clay and, more recently, with Julian who left her for an actress who we end up discovering is Rain Turner. Rip is still a dealer and a gangster and looks like a monster after too much cosmetic surgery. Julian himself has been running a teenage prostitution service and has agreed to his girlfriend Rain going to bed with Clay to get a role in a film. When Clay finds out the truth Julian cannot understand what they have done wrong: ‘I thought you would have found it, I don’t know, fun ... that, y’know, you’d get something out of it and, well, she’d get something out of it and you wouldn’t take it so seriously’ (114). In the novel no one can be trusted, not even Clay. The detective of the formula is a man used to the corruption of society and at the beginning of Imperial Bedrooms Clay is a cynical character aware of the superficiality of the world that surrounds him. He knows Rain is trying to stay young because she knows it is part of her appeal: ‘[t]he surface she represents is really all she’s about’ (52). The knowledge that she needs a role in the film and that she is using her beauty to get it does not prevent him from using her himself. According to Cawelti the real hostility of the hard-boiled plot is directed towards women and the rich but

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it is always mixed with attraction and desire (1976: 158). The role of the female betrayer is also very important in the genre. The female temptress is an object of pleasure but also a trap as she usually sets out to seduce the hero. In Imperial Bedrooms this role is clearly played by the ambitious Rain Turner, the novel’s femme fatal. Clay is not impervious to demands, threats and bribes and succumbs to them all. In the end he is trapped in his own web. He leaves his passivity behind to become a serial liar who abuses his power in the film industry, who is keen on torturing actresses and prostitutes and who is ready to betray his friend Julian and set him up. Towards the end there is a chapter in which he tortures two prostitutes, which seems taken from American Psycho and which shows the moral degradation to which Clay has sunk. No wonder that Clay marvels at his becoming the moral compass in the 1987 film adaptation of Less Than Zero and at his trying to save Julian in the film by selling his car to pay back his debts. At the end of Imperial Bedrooms he pretends to play the role of moral compass when he promises Julian he will pay Rip the money Julian owes him and apparently accepts the fact that Julian is going to elope with Rain Turner. However, it is all a lie to let Rip kidnap and kill Julian since Rip was also in a relationship with Rain and does not want her to disappear. At the end Clay becomes the villain who betrays Julian’s confidence. The hard-boiled detective has to protect himself from several threats, temptations and betrayals; in Imperial Bedrooms it is Clay who betrays his friend, crossing the line between detective and criminal. He turns into a version of Rip as some of the characters realize: Trent thinks both Rip and Clay have much more in common than Clay thinks (138) and Julian is surprised that Clay and Rip have become friends when Clay used to think that Rip was a freak (149). In spite of his suspicions, Julian does not realize Clay’s real intentions: to get rid of him by telling Rip where he is. At the beginning of the novel Clay complains that the author in Less Than Zero turned him into the boy ‘who wouldn’t save a friend’ and ‘couldn’t love the girl’ (4). At the end of Imperial Bedrooms this is what he becomes. The final turn in the novel is that he has no alibi for the night he drove Julian to the place where Rip’s thugs kidnapped him, and the police think Clay may be part of a conspiracy. Blair proposes to tell the police that Clay was with her that night but, like everyone else in the novel, she wants something in return: he has to stay with her. Blair is not as innocent as she seems as Clay realizes that the black Mercedes which has been following him was hers. Clay’s final sentence is a kind of confession: ‘I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people’ (169). He is trapped by Blair and the lie she is ready to tell for him. He has no escape. As Ellis puts it in an interview: ‘Lunar Park, sure, is the portrait of a narcissist, too. So is American Psycho. But this time out, the narcissist reaches a dead end’ (in Kellogg 2010). For different reasons both Imperial Bedrooms and American Psycho could have shared the same ending: ‘This is not an exit.’

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Imperial Bedrooms is probably one of Ellis’s darkest novels. If Lunar Park was about reconciliation and true feelings, Imperial Bedrooms is about hopeless narcissism and punishment. This is not to say that the novel lacks feeling. Tom Shone in the Sunday Times finds the novel moving and a revision of a character that escaped undamaged in Less Than Zero, in spite of his being uninterested, unaffected and immune to everything swirling around him. Vice Magazine also connects the endings of Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms for their emotional impact. They are both a kind of exorcism that Ellis has performed on his previous novels. When asked what his next book is going to be about, Ellis claimed that he is no longer attracted to darkness: ‘The excitement now is more positive things. Ultimately, it has to be. You just get tired. I’m tired of it. I don’t want to fight anymore. Regardless of what that does to my work’ (in Shone 2010). Whether we should believe him or not is another story. Ellis’s literary style has gone through several phases in the 25 years that have elapsed since the publication of Less Than Zero. The minimalist style of his first novels evolved into the blank writing of American Psycho and into the convoluted and more metafictional prose of Glamorama. In Lunar Park Ellis displays authorial self-awareness and continues the metafictional path opened with Glamorama. Imperial Bedrooms is apparently a return to the minimalist style of his literary origins but it also draws from the whole literary universe which Ellis has created in recent years. There has also been an evolution from narratives without plot to complex stories based on popular genres. He plays with generic expectation in most of his novels, as seen in Less Than Zero’s use of the comingof-age novel, American Psycho’s serial killer genre, Glamorama’s novel of manners and conspiracy thriller, Lunar Park’s horror story and Imperial Bedrooms’ hardboiled formula. Narrators in his fiction – such as Clay, Patrick Bateman and Victor – are usually blank, passive and incapable of openly expressing feelings. Their distance from their own actions or inactions is established by means of generic disruptions and stylistic choices. In general terms, Ellis can be labelled a postmodern writer, as his fiction reflects the changing conditions of postmodernity. The subjects he deals with are always connected with different forms of narcissism: the wealthy Los Angeles youth culture, the yuppie world, celebrity culture, suburban society and the Hollywood industry. Within the postmodern movement, Ellis’s style can be better understood as blank fiction and this is the literary context I have mainly used in the analysis of his books. The author’s way of combining high and low culture with a blank fiction style and his interest in drawing from popular culture and well-known genres has been the thread running through the analysis of his books. Both Ellis’s novels and his role as a contemporary author articulate the discourses and contradictions in the high and low culture debate. The limits of both have traditionally been policed but they have also been gradually blurred and contested. In fact, in postmodernist times this blurring has intensified, but the world of literary criticism has proved a much more traditional arena and

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gatekeeper intellectuals are still unwilling to allow authors to cross certain boundaries. The distinction between prestige and mass-market authors is difficult to erase and many still think that all authors should fall into one of the two categories. This frame of mind holds that the social order is made up of assorted fixed positions in a classificatory system and meaning is imposed on the world through binary oppositions; in order to classify things clear difference must be made between them. Regarding the rules of purity and pollution in primitive cultures, anthropologist Mary Douglas suggested that what really disturbs order are those things placed in the wrong category or things that do not fit in any category. What we do with these things is expel them, in this way restoring the social order (1966). High and low culture is a binary opposition that for decades has brought order to cultural productions. Bret Easton Ellis and his novels do not completely or exclusively fit into a single category, which may explain many of the attacks he has sustained and the heated debates he has generated. Since things that do not fall in any category disturb order, many critics and reviewers have been quick to classify his novels and his status as author on an oversimplified clear-cut scale. A study of the reception of his novels shows that for some critics Ellis’s novels are mere exploitative fiction; for others they are an example of serious postmodernist writing. Whatever turns Ellis’s career may take, popular culture will probably continue playing an important role in his fiction and in the literary universe he has created. Popular culture serves different purposes in his novels but it is often used to describe contemporary society, especially through references which are charged with emotional meanings such as brand names, TV programmes and song titles. Through these references emerges the wealthy L.A. youth culture of Less Than Zero, as do the world of yuppie consumerism of American Psycho and the celebrity culture of Glamorama. In a culture that is increasingly more visual and less literary, Ellis makes use of other visual media like photography, the music television formula or film language to enrich his narrative. He also plays with and disrupts popular genres that make use of formulas known to book readers and film viewers alike. However, Ellis’s use of popular culture has become controversial as a result of using what traditional terminology would label the lowest genres, such as pornography and horror. Less Than Zero has plenty of sensationalist chapters, American Psycho is full of gory descriptions of torture and exploitative passages, Glamorama has explicit porn scenes and Imperial Bedrooms includes very violent passages. The presence of extreme violence and pornography makes some of his novels partake of the capitalist spiral of commercialism. Moreover, in our present world literature is a commodity like any other and Ellis makes use of the system to promote his novels. However, critics who have considered his fiction just exploitative and pornographic have taken the part for the whole and reduced the novels to those specific passages. The other common position has been to ignore such sections when it came to placing Ellis’s fiction in a clear-cut category of serious literature. The fact that Ellis can be both popular and

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‘literary’ literature has generated much of the controversy alluded to in the title of this book. The use of violence to condemn violence or the description of out-and-out consumerism to criticize that same consumerism may produce ambiguous readings. Thus the fact that blank fiction writers deal with controversial subjects in a blank style which lacks characters or narrators who clearly condemn the despicable actions is a source of ambiguity. However, criticism is not entirely absent but produced through other, subtler means. We have seen the way Ellis disrupts generic expectations, uses metafictional comments or introduces intermedial references. The power of these narratives is that they are hard to classify and clear-cut interpretations cannot be safely applied; for example, Less Than Zero uses the MTV structure but also criticizes MTV youth culture, which is depicted as passive, blank and entirely lost. Blank narratives have the power to generate ambiguity and complex debates that revitalize literature and cause a more general public interest, as seen in the case of American Psycho. These ambiguities are also seen in the figure of Ellis as a key contemporary American author in a rapidly changing literary industry. The way entertainment corporations have progressively bought publishing houses makes a field that used to be considered representative of high culture forcefully embrace other forms of production and distribution. This is a tendency that has been in crescendo in the last decades of the twentieth century and that Ellis has known how to turn to his own advantage. Simon & Schuster and later Knopf fostered the construction of Ellis as a celebrity, promoting his fiction through his personality, which in turn has been built out of world tours, TV appearances, documentaries, interviews, profiles, book signings, gossip and parties. In addition, newer forms of promotion have also been used such as real and fake web pages, book trailers and on-line, short story competitions. Some reviewers and journalists find these promotional campaigns acceptable for popular writers like Stephen King, but are still unwilling to accept them for writers whose fiction aspires to be more than mere entertainment. This situation makes us aware that although the blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is taking place – as seen in these promotional campaigns and in the way writers draw from popular culture – categories are still firmly in place in many people’s minds, especially in the literary world where the line between high and low culture is alive and well. The result of these schizophrenic positions which coexist leads to complex cases like Ellis’s. The way reviewers have complained about his narcissism and his seeming uncritical embrace of mass and consumer culture has prevented a thorough analysis of his novels. This book has tried to offer such a study by examining contextual aspects and the author’s use of popular references and styles, but also through a detailed narratological analysis of his novels. Out of all the ambiguities, Ellis emerges as a writer with an ear for dialogue, who has set out in great detail the minutiae of a certain American lifestyle in such a way that the reader is by turns shocked, affronted, confused

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and eventually forced to reach his own conclusions about the ethical questions raised. This conscience-raising is achieved, not without considerable discomfort, through Ellis’s skill in keeping his distance from his subject matter and from his reader. He is also capable of using popular and consumer culture as part of such criticism. He is a writer who draws from different cultural spheres and who, as a celebrity author, falls between the high and the low, into the limbo of literary fame.

Notes

Chapter 2 1

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For a specific example see Jack Kapica (2004) who deals with the confusing case of Mickey Mouse, created by Walt Disney in 1928, and which is a registered trademark but also an artistic creation that may pass into the public domain. It could be argued that the film Zoolander (2001) is a comic adaptation of Glamorama since they share the basic plot line. In fact, it seems that Bret Easton Ellis considered taking legal action citing copyright infringement. In the end, the case was settled out of court (Ellis in BBC Interview 2005).

Chapter 3 1

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Little did David Foster Wallace know that his name was going to be linked to the ‘conspicuously young’ celebrity author Bret Easton Ellis as part of a media-savvy generation of American writers who wrote in an ‘avant-pop’ style, a style that combined the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and formal innovation with an addiction to pop culture in all its manifestations. See McCaffery (1995). The sociological and cultural aspects of Ellis’s works have also aroused the interest of sociologists themselves. Joanne Finkelstein has presented American Psycho as a disturbing ‘symptomatology of the times’ and Ellis as a ‘maven of our times whose products we should thus incorporate into the conceptual tool kit of any formal human studies’ (2004: 303–4). On the blurring of high and popular culture see the seminal works of Huyssen (1986) and Simmons (1997). Cooper has moved from small publishing houses such as Sea Horse to more well-known and mainstream ones, Serpent’s Tail and Grove Press, for example. Kathy Acker was only published by small presses until the mid-1980s, when she started being published by Grove Press. For a good review and introduction to Palahniuk’s novels see Mendieta (2005). For a more specific analysis of Palahniuk’s poetics regarding blank fiction see Collado Rodríguez (2007). Collado Rodríguez analyses Palahniuk’s style as blank fictional but he also sees in this writer an interest in becoming more explicitly ethical than other blank fiction writers. Palahniuk may be clearing a path out of blank fiction excesses and towards a new more ethical fiction, a trend which can also be seen in Ellis’s Lunar Park.

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Chapter 5 1

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The term has its origins in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 Understanding Media and Raymond Williams’s 1974 Television Technology and Cultural Form. More recent examples of the connections between the different media is Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1999 Remediation. Understanding New Media and Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi’s 2007 Literary Intermediality: The Transit of Literature Through the Media Circuit. E. Ann Kaplan provides a full account of the techniques that MTV uses which are taken from the avant-garde. They include the abandonment of traditional narrative devices (such as cause/effect or time/space), self-reflexivity seen in the way TV monitors and production rooms are constantly shown in MTV videos and the use of pastiche in the incorporation of film genres and conventions (1987: 33–48).

Chapter 7 1

Curiously enough, as we have already mentioned in Chapter 2, now it is possible to buy a Patrick Bateman talking action figure that comes with two knives, an axe and a nail gun.

Chapter 8 1

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As Richard Dyer has noted, the number of female serial killers is statistically negligible (1997: 16). Joel Black deals with these possibilities in his fascinating The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture, where he analyses celebrity murders and murderers who have been inspired by mass media productions such as books, films or television serials and series (1991: 135–87 and passim). In Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection, Tabloid Dreams (1997), we also find the parodic use of tabloid headlines as chapter/short story titles such as ‘Woman Loses Cookie Bake-off, Sets Self on Fire’, ‘Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac’ or ‘Every Man She Kisses Dies’. Butler uses them for comic purposes mainly, which is not the case with American Psycho. The way the events of 11 September 2001 were handled in the mass media has confirmed Ellis’s point here. The recorded images of the two planes crashing into the World Trade Center were endlessly and insatiably repeated on TV. The story of subsequent events similarly made the news for months. Questions such as where Bin Laden is, or how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going have served as skeleton to the series of news on TV, combining the pleasurable aspects of repetition and anticipation. For Baudrillard, our culture is a culture of the ‘simulacrum’. Simulation ‘is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (1988b: 166); that is to say, the process by which the distinction between original and copy is

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destroyed (e.g. in film and record). ‘Simulacrum’ would then be an identical copy without an original.

Chapter 9 1

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See Sara Knox for an account of how the media have turned actual murder cases into stories fitting the conventions of literary forms such as the gothic tale or the romance, especially in the case of the so-called ‘Heart Killers’ (1998: 79–127). On real serial killers copying fictional ones see Joel Black who deals with the cases of Mark David Chapman’s 1980 killing of John Lennon and John W. Hinckley’s attempt on the life of newly elected President Reagan. Both Chapman and Hinckley were trying to imitate fictional characters. Chapman assumed the identity of Caulfield as the alienated saviour of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Hinckley was trying to ape Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver (1991: 135–87). For significant examples of true-crime literature see Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1965); Kate Millett, The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979); and Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (1980). For fictional serial killers inspired by real ones see those in the works analysed in this chapter. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is similar to the actual serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer; Jame Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs resembles Ed Gein. For a further account of the life of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and other real-life serial killers, see Palacios (1998). The success of TV series such as C.S.I. and, to a lesser extent, House, illustrates this obsession with open bodies in America’s wound culture. The literary serials may seem more characteristic of the nineteenth century; however, the World Wide Web seems to be reviving this way of publishing in instalments. In June 2000, Stephen King started distributing his on-line serial, The Plant, at the price of one dollar per chapter. In December 2000 he posted the sixth and last instalment, promising to continue after a year or two’s break for working on other projects. Readers felt cheated because even if they love serials they also love an all-embracing conclusion, which King failed to provide. Douglas Clegg’s attempt was more successful in 1999, when he posted the internet’s first serial thriller. To this I should add the exception of those narratives where the serial killer is not caught as a marketing device. This allows a second part: a cliffhanging ending entices audiences to buy or watch the next part. This is a term coined by Wayne Booth in his 1961 book, The Rhetoric of Fiction: ‘I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is not to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not’ (158–9). Thus, it is a first-person narrator whose credibility is compromised by lack of knowledge, psychological instability or a strong bias. In the United States the 1970 National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography could not find a causal link between images of sexual violence and actual violence. In 1986 the Attorney General’s commission reached a more ambiguous conclusion. Even though they admitted that no empirical evidence proves that explicit sexual materials cause sex crimes, the report had a very serious impact. Corporations like RCA, CBS, Ramada Inns, Warner Communications and the Southland Corporation were identified as distributors of porn. As a consequence,

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the 7-Eleven stores (owned by Southland Corporation) not only removed Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves, but also Rolling Stone and Cosmopolitan. For further information, see Kauffman (1998: 235–43) and Knox (1998: 25–8). Of course more allegorical interpretations are also possible. John Pollock (2000) sees the smudge as a mark of the devil, Price representing a fallen angel that has put a ‘price’ on Bateman’s soul. Pollock’s and my own reading may be compatible, taking into account that the Christian-based purity crusade identified liberated women, homosexuals and AIDS as the evil they were organizing themselves against (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988: 352).

Chapter10 1

Literary critics have followed these more positive interpretations. For example, Bent Sørensen has seen in the book an interesting mixture of postmodern gothic and satire, especially in the vampire subplot (2004: 275–282).

Chapter 11 1

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The blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction, appearing to be and being, reached its peak in the promotional campaign for the film adaptation of Glamorama, which was due to be released by the end of 2004 but which has been postponed indefinitely. A fake webpage of the online edition of YouthQuake was created (http://www.youthquakemagazine.com/) where we can read an interview with Victor Ward by Christie Carnes. There is even a Victor Ward official site where you can see Victor’s portfolio – actually photos of Kip Pardue, the actor who played Victor’s role in the film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction – Victor’s biography and a number of links (http://www.youthquakemagazine.com/victorward/main. htm). Victor also has a Facebook profile and MySpace and Twitter accounts. Another earlier example of a pseudo-event described in literature can be found in Don DeLillo’s celebrated White Noise (1984); in a scene, Jack Gladney and a friend visit the most photographed barn in America. There are 40 cars, a tour bus and lots of people taking pictures, which prevents them from seeing the actual barn, so instead of looking at the barn they watch the photographers. As Jack’s friend puts it: ‘They are taking pictures of taking pictures’ (1984: 13), which is a comment on the emptiness of the situation and its unreality. At this point in the narration, these situations may be explained by Victor’s unreliability as a narrator. However, as the plot unfolds we discover that he really has a double that is living his life. These confusions show the power of image reproduction and the artificial construction of personality in the celebrity world. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the use of popular culture references to place events was also popular among minimalist writers. For example, in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country the story is temporally placed in these terms: ‘It was the summer of the Michael Jackson Victory tour and the Bruce Springsteen Born in the USA tour, neither of which Sam got to go to’ (1985: 23). The similarities with the Glamorama quotation are obvious.

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In his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Neil Postman also warns against the dangers of the mass media, especially television, which has extended the message of entertainment to all aspects of life, blurring the boundaries between the serious and the superficial or the real and the simulated. A recent example of the link between the spectacle and conspiracy theories was seen in the post-election spectacle of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, which came to an end with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to stop the recounting of votes. In Tim Barney’s 2001 ‘Celebrity, Spectacle, and the Conspiracy Culture of Election 2000’ we can appreciate the extent to which conspiracies and celebrities are related.

Chapter 12 1

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Before the 1960s 73 per cent of US citizens trusted the government in Washington, in 1994 it was 21 per cent and in 1998 34 per cent (Knight 2000: 36). Since the 1960s, conspiracy culture in the United States is not the language just of extremists. For many commentators, the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 brought forth a general paranoia and popularized conspiracy-thinking. Some critics have even seen this historical moment as the starting point for the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion characteristic of postmodern culture ... drawing attention to the lack of coherence and coordination in the plot of history’ (Knight 2000: 114). The scepticism about the authoritative power of narrative may have found its origin in the proliferation of narratives that conspiracy theory provides. An interesting example is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and the role of one of the main characters in the story, the protagonist lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop. In this sense, a clear comparison can be made between Victor in Glamorama and Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow. Both are sexually active but total failures as heroes. They are paranoid and constantly feel they are being spied on – in fact they are – and are unable to understand and interpret all the information they receive. They end up dissolving in the text, literally and literarily disappearing. Thus, Victor’s dissolution of the self in celebrity culture can be traced back to some of Pynchon’s characters. For a thorough analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow and Pynchon’s deconstruction of the role of the mythic hero see Collado Rodríguez (2004: 119–53). This is another similarity with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow since Tyrone Slothrop is also searching for a new type of plastic called Imipolex-6, directly connected with the rocket bomb. Chaos theory is based on the notion that we are surrounded by nonlinear systems, chaotic systems which hide deep, ordered structures but are rich in unpredictable evolutions since there are nonlinear connections between causes and effects (Hayles 1991). In literature we can find many examples of this vertigo of interpretation, for example Don DeLillo’s Libra, when Nicholas Branch has to write a history of Kennedy’s assassination. He has so many theories, so many hypotheses, so much information that he has been unable to write for fifteen years (1988: 59–60). His

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not wanting to write a new grand conspiracy theory prevents him from writing anything at all and, as a result, his desire is to escape the rhetoric of conspiracy that further entraps him.

Chapter 13 1

Some reviewers have intentionally and predictably played with the confusion that the Bret Easton Ellis name may generate, writing paragraphs such as: From the very first sentence from Bret Easton Ellis that Bret Easton Ellis gives us, we can see that Bret Easton Ellis does an awfully good impression of Bret Easton Ellis, or that Bret Easton Ellis does an awfully good impression of himself, if we assume that Bret Easton Ellis and Bret Easton Ellis are more or less the same person, which seems feasible, given their circumstances and, um, their names, and the fact that Ellis opens with someone telling Ellis, ‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself.’ In fact, Ellis’ very phrase – ‘awfully good impression’ – is an awfully good impression of Ellis, as at first glance it seems sort of empty but could in fact be a sort of deadpan impersonation of emptiness as so much of the work of Bret Easton Ellis (and, in this work by Bret Easton Ellis, the work of Bret Easton Ellis) appears to be. (Handler 2005: C27)

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Ellis has generally refused to clarify in interviews what is true and false in his mock autobiography section but he has stated that he really was invited by Jeb and George W. Bush to dine at the White House but he never went, being just 23 and more worried about partying than anything else (in Bernhard 2005). Of course, it is hard to take Ellis at face value here or anywhere else. This is also true in Bret Easton Ellis’s life. In fact, he has publicly claimed that Patrick Bateman was inspired by his father, with whom he was not on speaking terms when he died. Fat Actress was a Showtime comedy series about an actress (Kirstie Alley, playing herself) who struggles to lose weight and revitalize her Hollywood career. Curb Your Enthusiasm is an HBO TV series that blurs real life with fictional, performed events. It features verité-style footage of Larry David (the co-creator and co-executive producer of the comedy series Seinfeld) at home and at work. There are appearances by guest celebrities playing themselves or character roles, so the blurring of reality and fiction is constant. McInerney has repeatedly been mentioned as one of the writers that formed the brat pack together with Ellis and Janowitz. He is a personal friend of Ellis’s and in the novel has a cameo role as friend of the fictional Ellis as well. The title seems prescient as one of the reviews of Lunar Park claimed: ‘The problem with this novel is not that it is a fast, lurching ride to nowhere. Of course, it is; it’s a Bret Easton Ellis novel’ (Scott 2005). The title ‘Destination Nowhere’ seems an ironic comment on the way some reviewers tend to interpret Ellis’s novels and a play on the ‘This is not an exit’ that closes American Psycho. This obviously sounds like a mockery of American Psycho’s two most common interpretations: a serious satire of the conservative 1980s or just the exploitative, violent story of a serial killer.

Works Cited

Primary Sources Ellis, Bret Easton. (1985), Less Than Zero. London and New York: Picador. —(1987), The Rules of Attraction. London and New York: Picador. —(1991), American Psycho. London and New York: Picador. —(1994), The Informers. London and New York: Picador. —(1998), Glamorama. London and New York: Picador. —(2005), Lunar Park. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. —(2010), Imperial Bedrooms. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Film Adaptations and Documentaries Less Than Zero. (1987). USA, dir. Marek Kanievska. This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis. (1999). USA, dir. Gerald Fox. American Psycho. (2000). USA, dir. Mary Harron. The Rules of Attraction. (2002). USA, dir. Roger Avary. The Informers. (2009). USA, dir. Gregor Jordan.

Secondary Sources Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán. (2000), ‘The narratorial function in minimalist fiction’, Neohelicon XXVII, (2), 237–48. —(2001), ‘Minimalism vs. postmodernism in contemporary American fiction’, Neohelicon, XXVIII, (1), 129–43. Abel, Marco. (2007), Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. (1944), ‘The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception’, Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979, pp. 120–67. Aldridge, John W. (1992), Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner. Almond, Steve. (2005), ‘Ellis masquerades as Ellis, and it is not a pretty sight’, Boston Globe, 14 August. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/08/14/ellis_ masquerades_as_ellis_and_it_is_not_a_pretty_sight?mode=PF [Accessed 10 July 2010]. Amazon.com. (2005), ‘A tale of two Brets: a conversation with Bret Easton Ellis’,http:// www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/571852/102–3562855-7265721 [Accessed 10 July 2010].

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Amsden, David. (2005), ‘Fly like an Ego: in praise of self-indulgence’, New York magazine, 38, (30), 29 August–5 September, 166. Anft, Michael. (1994), ‘Another loser for Bret Easton Ellis’, Sun (Baltimore), 21 August, 6E. Annesley, James. (1998), Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press. —(2006), Fiction of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel. New York and London: Continuum. —(2010), ‘Bret Easton Ellis’, in David Seed (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Chichester: Willey-Blackwell, pp. 514–21. Arnold, Shayna Rose. (2010), ‘My LA to Z: Clay Easton’, Los Angeles magazine, 1 June. http://www.lamag.com/latoZ/article.aspx?id=25479 [Accessed 10 July 2010]. Arvidsson, Adam. (2006), Brands: Meanings and Value in Media Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Aufderheide, Pat. (1986), ‘Music videos: the look of sound’, in Todd Gitlin (ed.), Watching Television. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 111–35. Back, Kurt W. (1989), ‘Thriller: the self in modern society’, in John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen (eds), Texts of Identity. London: Sage, 1994, pp. 220–36. Baelo-Allué. (2010), ‘ “It’s really me”: intermediality and constructed identities in Glamorama’, in Naomi Mandel (ed.), Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park. New York and London: Continuum, pp. 84–97. Baker, John F. (1990), ‘Publisher responsibility and Bret Easton Ellis’, Publishers Weekly, 30 November, 7. Balitas, Vincent D. (2005), ‘Living stoned, spoiled’, Washington Times, 28 August. http://washingtontimes.com/books/20050827–114536-9441r.htm [Accessed 10 July 2010]. Barnes, Hugh. (1986), ‘Young ones’, London Review of Books, 8, (10), 5 June, 22. Barney, Tim. (2001), ‘Celebrity, spectacle, and the conspiracy culture of election 2000’, American Behavioral Scientist, 44, (12), August, 2331–7 Battersby, Eileen. (1999), ‘From the moral low-ground’, Irish Times, 25 February. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/1999/0225/99022500101. html [Accessed 10 July 2010]. Baudrillard, Jean. (1970), The Consumer Society: Myths & Structures. London: Sage Publications, 1998. —(1983), ‘The ecstasy of communication’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, 1985, pp. 126–34. —(1988a), America. London: Verso. —(1988b), ‘Simulacra and simulations’, in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 166–84. —(1988c), ‘Consumer society’, in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 29–56. Bawer, Bruce. (1988), Diminishing Fictions: Essays on the Modern American Novel and Its Critics. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press. Baxter, Tara and Nikki Craft. (1993), ‘There are better ways of taking care of Bret Easton Ellis than just censoring him ...’, in Diana E. H. Russell (ed.), Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. 245–53.

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Index

Page numbers in bold denote whole chapters Abel, Marco 119 Acker, Kathy 32, 33, 157, 201n.4 adolescents see teenagers Adorno, Theodor 11, 30, 49, 50 Aldridge, John W. 20–1, 23, 75, 150 American dream 40, 123–5 American Idol (television reality show) 143 American Psycho 2–5, 11–13, 15, 17, 19–20, 28, 32–4, 79–91, 92–111, 112–28, 201n.1, 202n.3, 203n.1 and Glamorama 131–6, 140–2, 147, 150–1, 159, 164–7 and Imperial Bedrooms 191, 196–9 and Less Than Zero 45–6 and Lunar Park 176–9, 184, 186–7, 189 American Psycho (film) 17, 91, 101, 104, 107 American Psycho II (film) 17 Annesley, James 20, 27, 33–5, 75, 103, 121, 145 Arvidsson, Adam 102, 106, 208 Asahina, Bob 24, 39 assembly-line fiction 20, 23, 25, 150 Aufderheide, Pat 51, 57–8 autobiography 24, 175, 178, 184, 189, 206n.2 autofiction 189 see also Ellis, Bret Easton: as character Avary, Roger 17 Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan 183–5 Barth, John 27, 183 Barthelme, Donald 26–7, 29, 103

Barthelme, Frederick 25–7, 29 Baudrillard, Jean 71–3, 109–10, 142, 153, 155, 168, 170, 202n.5 see also hyperreality Bawer, Bruce 23 Baxter, Tara 87 Beattie, Ann 20, 29, 44 Beattie, Anne 25 Big Brother (television reality show) 143 Bildungsroman see coming-of-age novel Bilton, Alan 20, 144 Black, Joel 92, 114, 202n.2, 203n.1 blank fiction 2, 4, 6, 19, 22, 26, 29, 30, 33–5, 199 and American Psycho 81, 94, 103, 110–11, 122 and Imperial Bedrooms 197, 201n.5 and Glamorama 140, 144 and Less Than Zero 49–50, 52, 62, 75–6 and Lunar Park 175, 178, 181, 189 and The Informers 131 Blazer, Alex E. 97, 160, 164 Bloom, Allan 66–7, 182 Boorstin, Daniel J. 11, 16, 149, 151, 153 see also pseudo-events Booth, Wayne C. 203n.5 Bolter, Jay David 202n.1 brand names 2, 11, 16, 28–9, 198 and American Psycho 84–5, 102–5 and Glamorama 133–4, 140, 148–51, 164 and Imperial Bedrooms 191 and Less Than Zero 46, 49 and Lunar Park 177–8 and The Informers 131–2 brat pack 13, 22–6, 30–1, 33, 44, 79, 82–3, 135, 175

224

Index

brat packers see brat pack Braudy, Leo 150 Brooker, Peter 117, 119 Brown, Dan The Da Vinci Code 170 Bruce, Tammy 1, 19, 85, 87 Burroughs, William 26, 29, 86, 157 Bushnell, Candance 105, 136 Sex and the City 105 Butler, Robert Olsen Tabloid Dreams 202n.3 C.S.I. (television series) 127, 203n.2 Cadigan, Pat Fools 143 Cameron, Peter 23, 44 capitalism 12, 33, 49, 73, 95, 165 Capote, Truman 46 In Cold Blood 43, 203n.1 Caputi, Jane 113, 121 Carver, Raymond 20, 25, 28–31, 44, 46, 132–3 Caveney, Graham 19, 31–3, 35 Cawelti, John G. 10, 156, 159, 161, 166, 194–5 Celebrities Uncensored (television programme) 143 celebrity culture 3, 5, 9, 13–14, 133, 137–9, 142–7, 150–1, 154, 156, 188, 197–8 Chabon, Michael The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 62 Chandler, Raymond 44, 46, 190, 193 The Long Goodbye 190 Cheever, John 182, 188 Chénetier, Marc 30–1 Clarke, Jamie 18–19, 135, 138, 140, 152, 167, 182 Vernon Downs 18 Cojocaru, Daniel 97 Collado Rodríguez, Francisco 201n.5, 205n.2 coming-of-age novel 2, 5, 62, 74–6, 197 conspiracy culture 155, 157, 168, 205n.1 thriller 2–3, 5, 134, 140, 142, 155–9, 161–3, 166, 168, 172, 189, 197

consumerism 5, 27–8, 32–5, 198–200 and American Psycho 81, 92, 95, 98, 101–12 and Glamorama 133, 135, 144, 150, 164–5 and Less Than Zero 41, 50–2, 63–4, 68, 72–4, 76 and Lunar Park 188 and The Rules of Attraction 79–80 Cooper, Dennis 31–3, 135, 140, 201n.4 Try 32 Coover, Robert 27, 103 corporations 15–17, 83–4, 203n.6, 204n.6 Costello, Elvis 3, 24, 42, 46, 48, 60–1, 66–7, 186, 190 Imperial Bedrooms 3, 190 ‘Beyond Belief’ 190 My Aim Is True 48, 191 ‘Less Than Zero’ 42, 46, 61, 190 Trust 66 Coupland, Douglas 33 Curb Your Enthusiasm (television series) 182, 206n.4 D’Amato, Brian 33 Davies, Adam The Frog King 18 Debord, Guy 11, 142, 146–7, 153 see also society of spectacle DeLillo, Don 26, 29, 83, 157, 168, 182, 188 Libra 205n.5 Underworld 168 White Noise 182, 204n.2 Derry, Charles 156, 161 Dexter (television series) 115 Didion, Joan 18, 44, 46, 132, 157 Play It As It Lays 44 Dos Passos, John 51, 102 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 40, 92–3 Notes from Underground 92–3 downtown writing 22, 26, 29, 31–3 drugs 3, 6, 15, 18, 28, 30–3 and American Psycho 81, 84, 115 and Glamorama 134, 139, 155 and Imperial Bedrooms 191–2

Index and Less Than Zero 41, 46–8, 59, 64–5, 68–73 and Lunar Park 176–7, 179, 181, 183, 186 and The Informers 131–2 and The Rules of Attraction 79–80 Durand, Alain-Philippe 28 Dyer, Richard 95, 96, 113, 124, 202n.1 Edmundson, Mark 97, 100, 101 Eisenstadt, Jill 40, 62 From Rockaway 62 Eldridge, David 91, 117 Ellis, Bret Easton as celebrity author 4, 9, 13, 26, 138, 150, 188, 200 as character 175–8, 182–9 and copyright 16–17, 21, 201n.2 and trademark 11, 16, 17, 21, 83, 188, 190, 201n.1 see also titles of novels Elton, Ben Popcorn 143 Entourage (television series) 143 Entrekin, Morgan 24, 39, 40 Erdrich, Louise 20 fashion 5, 26, 32, 52, 66, 75, 93, 109, 134–5, 138, 147, 152, 154, 164, 167, 184 Fat Actress (television series) 182, 206n.4 Featherstone, Mike 64, 105, 109 Fiske, John 69, 73, 120 Fisketjon, Gary 24, 82–3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 4, 14, 43, 46, 88, 143, 193 The Great Gatsby 43, 143 Ford, Richard 29 Freccero, Carla 20, 114, 127 Freese, Peter 48, 75 Gabler, Neal 147, 154–5 Gaitskill, Mary 31 Gamson, Joshua 10, 12, 144, 150 Genette, Gerard 76 Gibson, William 143, 157 Idoru 143

225

Gitlin, Todd 26–7, 29 Glamorama 2–5, 11, 13, 15–18, 22, 28, 45, 131–41, 142–55, 156–72, 175–6, 178, 185–9, 191, 194, 197–8, 201n.2, 204n.4, 205n.2 Glitterati (film) 18 GQ (magazine) 93, 100, 131 Grassian, Daniel 35 Grossberg, Lawrence 51 Grusin, Richard 202n.1 Hall, Stuart 55 Harris, Thomas 89–90, 94, 112, 115 The Silence of the Lambs 89, 94, 112–16, 120–2, 127, 203n.1 Harvey, David 27–8 Hassan, Ihab 27 Hebdige, Dick 68, 74 Hell, Richard 33 Helyer, Ruth 98, 151, 154, 167 Hemingway, Ernest 10, 46, 51 Hempel, Amy 23 high culture 1, 4, 6, 9, 12, 26, 41, 48–51, 91–4, 108, 179, 181, 188, 197–9 Holmes, A. M. 33 Horkheimer, Max 11, 49–50 Hornberg, Michael Downers Grove 18 Hornby, Nick High Fidelity 59 House (television series) 15, 82, 87, 171, 175, 203n.2 hyperreality 5, 56, 72, 111, 142, 150–1, 153–4, 167, 202n.5 see also Baudrillard, Jean Imperial Bedrooms 2–4, 6, 11, 13, 18, 22, 175, 190–200 Indiana, Gary 31 intermediality 49–51, 53, 55, 175, 202n.1 Jameson, Fredric 27, 33, 145, 157–8 Janowitz, Tama 20, 23–5, 30–1, 33, 40, 44, 46, 80 A Cannibal in Manhattan 80 Slaves of New York 25

226

Index

Jong-Fast, Molly Normal Girl 18, 105 Joyce, James 43, 46, 102 Ulysses 102 Kakutani, Michiko 22, 41, 44–6, 51, 80, 132–3, 138–9 Kaplan, E. Ann 48, 51–3, 202n.2 Kauffman, Linda S. 20, 98, 100, 115, 121 Kerouac, Jack 43, 46 King, Stephen 5, 90, 97, 105, 175, 177–8, 180–2, 184, 188, 199, 203n.3 Cujo 181 Salem’s Lot 182 The Dark Half 181 The Plant 203 The Shining 181–2 Klinkowitz, Jerome 145, 149 Knight, Peter 157, 165, 170, 205n.1 Knopf 17, 82, 87, 138, 176, 183, 188, 199 Lady Gaga 144 Lasch, Christopher 109, 110, 111 Lau, Evelyn 33 Law and Order (television series) 127 Le Carré, John The Little Drummer Girl 160 Leavitt, David 23, 30, 40, 44, 46 Les misérables (play) 101, 120 Less Than Zero 2–6, 13–14, 17, 22–6, 28, 30–1, 34, 39–47, 48–61, 62–76, 79–82, 88, 125, 131–3, 135, 142, 153, 162, 167, 176–8, 184–7, 189–93, 195–9 Less Than Zero (film) 46–7 Leyner, Mark 33 low culture 1, 4, 6, 9, 26, 41, 49, 50–1, 91–4, 179, 188, 197–9 Lowenthal, Leo 11 Lunar Park 2–5, 11, 13, 15, 17–18, 22, 24, 175–89, 190–1, 193–4, 196–7, 201n.5 Lunar Park (film) 18 Madonna 131, 144

Mailer, Norman 10–11, 80, 90, 122, 170 The Executioner’s Song 203n.1 Making the Band (television reality show) 143 Mandel, Naomi 20, 28, 120 Marshall, David P. 10 Marx, Karl 105, 110, 146 Mason, Bobbie Ann 20, 29, 44, 204n.4 In Country 204n.4 mass culture 2, 5, 6, 25–6, 28, 31, 34, 35, 50–1, 66–9, 76, 94–8, 103–4, 106, 108, 110, 113, 120–1, 144, 189 McGinniss, Joe 39, 86 Fatal Vision 39 McInerney, Jay 4, 18, 20, 23, 24, 30–4, 40, 42, 44–6, 52, 62, 83, 135, 138, 143, 183, 206n.5 Bright Lights, Big City 24, 45, 83 Model Behavior 135, 138, 143 Ransom 45 Story of My Life 4, 62 McLuhan, Marshall 202n.1 Melley, Timothy 160, 170 metafiction 2–4, 6, 17–19, 22, 26–7, 29–30, 117, 119, 135, 143, 179, 182–4, 189, 193, 197, 199 minimalism 22, 26–32, 44, 192 Minot, Susan 23 Moore, Lorrie 20, 84 Moore, Susanna 33 Moran, Joe 9–10, 12–13, 17 MTV 12 and Glamorama 134, 152 and Imperial Bedrooms 191 and Less Than Zero 42–61, 65, 67, 69, 70, 73, 75–6, 199, 202n.2 and The Informers 131 Murphet, Julian 20 narcissism 4, 109, 111, 136, 139, 160, 167, 184–5, 192, 194, 196–7, 199 National Organization for Women (NOW) 84–5, 87, 90, 187 Nead, Lynda 108, 166 Nelson, Blake Girl 62 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 154 nihilism 44, 68, 177

Index nostalgia 57–8, 74, 185–6, 191 novel of manners 5, 142–3, 145–6, 149, 156, 159, 189, 197

227

Operation Shylock 182 Portnoy’s Complaint 182 Zuckerman Unbound 182

Palahniuk, Chuck 33, 143, 183, 201n.5 Tell-All 143 Palladino, Grace 63, 64, 66, 69 Palmer, Jerry 156, 158–9, 160, 163 Pan, David 76 Paramount Communications 12, 15, 83, 84 Parish, Jane 171, 218 Pennacchia Punzi, Maddalena 202n.1 Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar 74 pornography 1, 5, 32–4, 203n.6 and American Psycho 85–6, 88–9, 93, 107–8, 120–1 and Glamorama 134, 138, 166–7 and Less Than Zero 55, 57, 60, 68–71, 75 and Lunar Park 179, 188, 198 Postman, Neil 205n.5 postmodernism 6, 22, 26–9, 33, 50–1, 128, 144–5, 165–6, 197, 198 pseudo-events 5, 151–5 see also Boorstin, Daniel Punter, David 124 Pynchon, Thomas 3, 21, 27, 103, 157, 160, 168, 170, 205n.2, 205n.3 Gravity’s Rainbow 168, 205n.2, 205n.3 The Crying of Lot 49 160

Sahlin, Nicki 75 Salinger, J. D. 43, 74 The Catcher in the Rye 43–4, 46, 62–3, 74, 92, 203n.1 satirist see social satire Schumacher, Michael 24, 42–4 Seabrook, John 51–2 Seltzer, Mark 95, 113–14 seriality 5, 95–7, 100, 102, 106, 110, 113–14 serial-killer fiction 95–6, 100, 112–16, 121, 128 sex see pornography Shakespeare, William 5, 183–4, 189 Hamlet 183–4 Siegle, Robert 32 Simmons, Philip E. 50, 201n.3 Simon & Schuster 12, 15, 24, 32, 39, 40, 42, 80–4, 199 Simpson, Philip L. 97, 112, 114, 122, 154 Slocombe, Will 33–4 social satire 19, 80, 112, 117, 133, 145, 182, 188, 204n.1, 206n.7 society of spectacle 142, 146–8, 153–4, 167 see also Debord, Guy Sontag, Susan 108 Sørensen, Bent 204n.1 Stevick, Philip 103 Strinati, Dominic 34

Ramón-Torrijos, María del Mar 31 Ressler, Robert 95, 113–14 Rifkin, Jeffrey 12, 52, 54, 58 Robison, Mary 29 Roche, David 28, 97 Rose, Joel 31 Rosenblatt, Roger 34–5, 85–7, 90, 93, 104, 115, 177 Roth, Philip 25, 103, 175, 182, 184, 188, 193

talk shows 5, 95, 98–9, 121 Tallent, Elizabeth 23 Tartt, Donna 18, 33, 62 The Secret History 62 teenage culture see youth culture teenagers 3, 5, 14, 27, 40, 55–6, 59, 60, 63–9, 72, 74, 133, 192 terrorism 28, 135, 162, 165, 167 Texier, Catherine 31, 132

Oates, Joyce Carol 112, 114

228

Index

The Canyons (television series) 18 The Face (magazine) 68 The Golden Suicides (film) 18 The Informers 2–3, 13, 15, 131–3, 140, 190 The Informers (film) 18 The Mentalist (television series) 115, 127 The Rules of Attraction 2–4, 13–14, 18, 25, 79, 80–1, 88–9, 120, 133, 135, 147, 176, 178, 184, 186 The Rules of Attraction (film) 17–18, 204n.1 The X-Files (television series) 157, 169 This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis (documentary) 16, 136–8 Thurm, Marian 23 Thurschwell, Pamela 59, 61, 66 Tichi, Cecelia 51 Tillman, Lynne 31 Tuttleton, James W. 145 Twilight series (films and novels) 127 unreliable narrators 118–19, 187, 203n.5 Updike, John 103, 182, 188 Rabbit Redux 103 Urban, Amanda 18, 24, 81, 84, 183 Vanity Fair (magazine) 46, 90, 102, 110, 114, 131–2, 138, 182, 185 Vintage Books 15, 82, 84–5, 87 Vintage Contemporary Series 24, 40, 82–3 violence 3, 28, 30, 33–4, 198–9, 203n.6 and American Psycho 81, 85, 88–92, 113–22, 127–8 and Imperial Bedrooms 190 and Glamorama 135, 154, 157, 163, 165–6

and Less Than Zero 45, 69, 72–3 and Lunar Park 177–9, 187 and The Informers 132 Vogue (magazine) 67, 131, 139 Vonnegut, Kurt 25, 103, 157 Wallace, David Foster 23, 201n.1 Warhol, Andy 25–6, 144, 146 Weiss, Caroline and Margaret Wallace Stalking Bret Easton Ellis: A Novel in Two Parts 19 Weldon, Fay 1, 89–90, 104 The Bvlgari Connection 104 Wernick, Andrew 13 West, Nathaniel 44, 46, 143 The Day of the Locust 143 Whannel, Paddy 55 Will, George F. 88, 90 Williams, Linda 108, 120 Williams, Raymond 50, 202n.1 Williams, William Carlos 51 Winterson, Jeanette 32 Wolcott, James 135, 138 Wolfe, Tom 25 The Bonfire of the Vanities 84 Wolff, Tobias 29 Wolitzer, Meg 23 workshop fiction see assembly-line fiction Yates, Richard 182, 188 Young, Elizabeth 15, 19, 23, 31–3, 35, 64, 66, 71, 80, 117–18 youth culture 49, 61, 74, 197–9 YouthQuake (magazine) 147, 164, 204n.1 yuppies 3, 5, 28, 30, 92–9, 106, 109, 118, 123–7, 163, 197–8 Zoolander (film) 143, 201n.2