Ellis has gone soft. Unlike his previous books, his latest novel has a plot. He is no longer emotionally numb, he has thawed out. He may even have relationships. He has not refuted claims that he is gay. He talks freely on TV about his feelings and his father and his family life. Ellis has had practice. Recently he starred in a British documentary about his life and work called This is Not an Exit -- The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis, which was screened late last year in London at the ICA and on the Southbank Show. But at least he hasn't lost his sense of humour. When asked in a recent interview whether or not he liked the documentary, Ellis complained that they didn't make him look good, that they only caught his fat and effeminate side...There can be no mistake.
The Ellis who penned Glamorama is a more user-friendly kind of guy. You could take him home to meet the folks. And like the author's new image, the book itself is an altogether softer, more human and more rounded affair than his previous 'classics'. This has not improved the writing, I hasten to add, quite the contrary: it has blunted it, slowed it down, siphoned off some of its force. Curiously peopled with characters drawn from Ellis's least successful second novel, The Rules of Attraction (one wonders why Ellis couldn't let such unappealing bygones be bygones? although it must be noted that the formula worked for him once before because Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is the big brother of another Rules of Attraction character, Sean Bateman), Glamorama gets off to a promising start in the clubbing/modelling New York Ellis does so well, but then flounders and falls apart around about halfway through. All too tellingly when his narrator leaves the good-old bad-old US of A and embarks upon an unbearably long, trans-Atlantic cruise to the UK -- coincidentally, this is also when this otherwise plotless novel becomes annoyingly much more plot-driven -- the book slides into the international schlock killer-thriller mainstream, an arena one can't help thinking Ellis would have been better off leaving to the likes of John Grisham et al. Indeed, it was around about the same time that Ellis's narrator embarked on the cruise that I started hoping for a postmodernly appropriating Titanic-kind-of-a-disaster, but all too disappointingly, the main character survives the journey and lives to narrate the infinitely duller second half. Of course, it is possible, given Ellis's penchant for parody (American Psycho was full of them), that the sludginess of the plot is deliberate, that it is a postmodern parody, a complaint about precisely the sort of nonsense that so often passes for a plot these days. If so, this reader at least would have appreciated just a tiny bit more signalling to that effect (thank you Mister Ellis, Sir).
I hope it is a parody. Compared to the alternative -- Ellis subjecting his break through to international schlock thriller aesthetics and mindless conspiracy theories?! -- this is the infinitely preferable option, although it brings with it its own quiet disappointments (the lesser of two evils, if this latter interpretation is the case, then Ellis has simply rewritten to the American Psycho formula, without the dazzling and infamous nasty bits that made all the difference).
Setting the novel aside for the moment to focus on Ellis' image, I wonder: is it inevitable, this passage from rebel Bad Boy/Bad Girl into reconstructed bankable NAME? From a cipher-novel like American Psycho (which Ellis once claimed was 'a bit experimental'), to the plodding, predictably plotted second half of Glamorama? Catherine Texier, another ex-Bad Girl New York writer also conforms to this trend with her new novel Break Up rocketing her from grungy Downtown notoriety to centre stage in America's literary mainstream.
It's certainly true to appearances: the way such transformations are constructed in the media makes them seem natural, logical, and yes, even inevitable. But common sense tells us that in the broader scheme of things, in the real world, transformations such as these are rare indeed.
From a certain point of view, Ellis' re-emergence last year as a mainstream writer -- after American Psycho reduced his initial success with Less Than Zero and assigned its author a hip but not very lucrative I suspect cult status -- would be interpreted as a triumphant come-back, a consolidation of his position as an important American writer. The publisher's note on the inside flap of the dust jacket adopts this perspective hailing Glamorama as confirmation of Ellis' status as 'one of the top contemporary writers'.
But from other points of view, Ellis' transformation is less clear-cut. Ellis' mainstream recognition goes hand-in-hand with his -- I think clumsy and ambiguous -- attempt at conventional plot. From this perspective, the reconstructed Ellis is rather more sinister. Not so much in terms of authorial intentionality -- I have no problems with Ellis wanting to try writing different sorts of books (or to continue his experimentation and parodying, if that's what he's doing here) and can appreciate how rare his recent success really is, in spite of the naturalised way it is presented -- but in terms of the corporate publishing industry that recognises his work through publication, publicity, hype and marketing. There seems to be an implicit message here: conventional writing equals mainstream recognition and potential canonisation; unconventional writing and experimentation equals cult obscurity and even, in Ellis' case at least, public vilification (after Americn Psycho was published, Ellis received death threats that he claims were more graphically violent than anything in the book -- one in particular, involved a nail-studded baseball bat). The scary thing is that without experimentation (without novels like American Psycho which unquestionably engendered numerous other books), literature, writing, whatever, will die.
The increasingly corporatised publishing industry has become increasingly frightened of unconventional writing and experimentation in recent years, leaving small and independent presses to do most of the risk-taking (with the corporate industry often cashing-in on the risks taken by small/independent presses and other nurseries for up-and-coming writers by buying risky authors with big advances). I recently heard a New York agent say that publishers in the Big Apple wouldn't even look at a novel unless they could guarantee hardback sales of a least 30,000 copies. But a corporate industry that doesn't take risks, a publishing industry which continues along its current trajectory pushing for safer and safer books, is a corporate industry increasingly resembling a literary graveyard (a role hitherto played by traditional English Departments at Universities, but reconfigured in the current case in the interests of big business): either way, literary life, such as it is these days, takes place elsewhere. Probably too, a whole generation of writers will be sucked into the internet (along with everyone else) which, it must be said, desperately needs their skills.
Ellis' publishers are wrong: American Psycho was an important book and because of it Ellis is an important writer. Whether Ellis continues as a mainstream author remains to be seen.
But the question I want to ask is: what kind of stories are seen to be 'safe' by today's corporate industry and what does this tell us about writing today?
Justine Ettler
GIVEN THAT BOTH ELLIS' Glamorama and Texier's Break Up were published last year (i.e. during the current period of no-risk taking), we can assume their publishers felt they were 'safe bets' in terms of the 30,000 hardback benchmark. What sorts of stories have made these former 'Bad Boy/Girls' safe?
The first half of Glamorama is set in the fashion and night-clubbing scenes in New York. In keeping with Ellis' best writing to date, this half of the novel doesn't have much going for it in terms of plot. But what it lacks in gripping suspense, it makes up for in its dazzling textuality -- Ellis' unique talent for mapping out our postmodern super-consumer society in text that has so many layers and which makes so many references to other texts that it produces a kind of reality-vertigo-effect on the reader.
The story, such as it is, goes as follows: Victor, a gorgeous ex-model who's on the cover of the latest YouthQuake magazine, is setting up a mega-glamorous nightclub for his psychotic, enormously wealthy 'friend' Damien. Victor's girlfriend Chloe is a super model and even though Victor loves her he is compelled to cheat on her with Damien's trust-fund-without-a-cause fiancé Alison (a character borrowed from fellow-Brat Pack author Jay McInerney's novel Story of My Life and who also appeared in American Psycho). When Alison threatens to blackmail Victor into leaving Chloe for her, all chaos breaks out. The result is 185 pages of Victor's no-holes-barred slice of life narration during the twenty-four hour lead-up to the opening of Damien's club.
What ultimately saves the first half of Glamorama from being just another shallow and cynical poor-little-rich-kids story is Ellis' biting satire. Like American Psycho, Glamorama is brilliantly funny, darkly satirical and bitingly nasty. No other writer, in my opinion, does mindless, sophisticated, New York vacuity as well as Ellis. Scorching one liners like 'Reality is an illusion, baby', or 'The better you look, the more you see', or, 'Baby, Andy [Warhol] once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence', tear across some of the sharpest dialogue I've read in years.
My favourite dialogue -- mindless vacuity at its most intense, reduced to a list of names -- is when the narrator Victor checks his RSVP list with assistants Beau and JD for the opening night of the club.
'Alicia Silverstone is a yes.' [JD]And on and on it goes for eight pages in total. And Ellis' point? My guess is Ellis is pointing out how our society is more celebrity-obsessed than ever. The consumer is so overwhelmed by information that only the hippest celebrity is capable of getting anyone's attention any more. This explains why one recent multinational felt it was necessary to hire Madonna to do their lipstick ad on TV. By implication a product without a celebrity attached to it through advertising, publicity or marketing may not sell. So working out what is so compelling about celebrities is more important in terms of understanding how our society works than ever before. Ellis' answer to this question is disarmingly simple but chilling in its consequences. We are obsessed by celebrities because of their superficiality, because of the strange emptiness that subsists within every celebrity image.
'Fan-fucking-tastic.' [Victor]
'Sharon Stone is a maybe, though it "looks likely".''
'On and on and on -- '
'Greta Scacchi, Elizabeth Saltzman, Susan Sarandon -- '
'Tim Robbins too?'
'Let me cross reference -- um, wait, wait -- yes.'
'Faster.'
'Ethan Steifel, Brooke Shields, Jon Stamos, Stephanie Seymour, Jenny Shimuzu -- '
'Okay, okay -- '
'David Salle, Nick Scotti -- '
'More, more more -- '
'Sage Stallone.'
'Why don't we just invite the fucking Energizer bunny? Go on.'
'Markus Schenkenberg, Jon Stuart, Adam Sandler -- '
'But not David Spade.'
'Wesley Snipes and Lisa Stansfield.'
'Okay, my man.'
'Antonio Sabato, Jr., Ione Skye -- '
'She's bringing the ghost of River Phoenix with her,' Beau adds. 'I'm serious. She demanded that it be put on the list.'
'That's so fucking hip I want it faxed to the News immediately.'
'Michael Stipe -- '
'Only if he doesn't keep flashing that damn hernia scar.'
Celebrity images may be cold and essentially devoid of meaning -- in the book, the celebrity-filled world Victor inhabits is literally shiveringly cold -- but they can't hurt us because they -- well their images at least -- just aren't real. With celebrities the damaged and fearful can finally feel safe.
If only Ellis had left it at that, and not gone on to write the second half which gets hopelessly bogged down in a silly, clichéd CIA/international terrorist, conspiracy theory and which takes far far too long to deliver the moral of the story: a warning that the safety the escapist celebrity world promises is only an illusion. An illusion that comparatively realistic reality has a nasty habit of shattering and in the process of which lives may actually be lost. In the end, Glamorama is a kind of a celebrities-can't-live-with-them, can't-live-without-them, story. It may not be the most profound thing you've ever read but when it comes to the subject of celebrities, a subject worthy of serious attention, it's about as good as it gets for now.
LUCKILY, HOWEVER, the newly-styled, plot-toting, mainstream Ellis comes with a compensating up-side. More open in interviews, the less-guarded Ellis offers never-seen-before glimpses into his life as a writer. In an ironic twist, the celebrity obsessed writer offers himself up to a willing public as a fully-formed Writer-Celebrity.
During his recent publicity-tour to the UK for Glamorama, I heard the answer to a question I've been dying to ask Ellis for years: what was the point of the graphically violent descriptions in American Psycho, what did they mean to him? I knew from Ellis' press that at the time, he said these scenes simply represented the sorts of things his character, Patrick Bateman, would do. Well, yes Bret, I thought, but he's your character, what does he say to you ?
Perhaps the benefit of distance has cleared the way for Ellis, or perhaps the endless hooplah and speculation about Oliver Stone, Leonardo Di Caprio and the film rights for American Psycho has made him more brazen, but it seems at last that we the readers have an answer. And it looks so simple now -- years after a fierce media debate polarised the Australian public and lead to American Psycho only being sold in plastic wrap and to readers over the age of eighteen -- indeed all this time it's been positively staring us in the face.
When Ellis wrote those passages (the passages everyone complained about but no-one, or very few people actually read), he wrote them as a person who was offended by that character, as a person who found that kind of behaviour towards women repellent. In a recent TV interview he claimed he was surprised when feminists protested about the book. When he wrote it, he thought they would find the male character reprehensible too, he thought that the feminists would be on his side against his monstrous character, that they would share his disgust. And because this is all happening on TV and unlike in a print interview I can closely watch the expression on Ellis' face when he says this, I can say that this is said without the remotest sense of irony. This is sincere, sensitive, insecure Ellis with his whinging voice and vaguely tortured, extremely self-conscious demeanor -- and this, for this literary punter, is as close as I got (I was refused an interview during this same tour because, in an irony of ironies, Super Celebrity Ellis was way 'too busy').
Taking authorial intention into account alongside Liz Young's enlightened commentary in Shopping in Space, about the worst thing you could say of American Psycho is that it is a touch under-written. That is, the author did not provide enough signalling, did not make the many clues -- and you only have to read Young's brilliant essay to be utterly convinced that there were clues, and lots of them -- clear enough. The author was too subtle. Perhaps now we can feel sorry for Ellis for having had to go through that aweful media merry-go-round just because he neglected to spell things out in bold and simple strokes. But then again, perhaps he will at least be happier in the literary mainstream (less tortured, surely), often, but not always, the land of simple strokes for simple folks? Yeah well you wouldn't want to try anything too subtle, especially not these days.
At the opposite aesthetic extreme, Downtown New York novelist Catherine Texier was motivated to write her mainstream breakthrough the memoir, Break Up, when her life became so unbearably painful she couldn't do anything else but write. Whereas with Ellis, transformation from cultish/outsider status into mainstream author produced a more open and believable interviewee as a kind of side effect, Texier's transformation proceeded in the opposite direction: during the course of a year Texier changed from Bad Girl novelist into distraught, compulsive diarist and finally producing the mainstream and hugely successful Break Up as a kind of after effect. Texier's transformation came from too much life (unlike Ellis, she is more guarded to interview than her 'character-I' is in the book), whereas Ellis' textual play produced a more lively author as a result. What both authors have in common is that their writing careers started out on or passed through, the rebel fringe, they both did time at the outer limits of the mainstream before moving inwards and becoming more conventional -- although Texier's grungy, Downtown novels are a far cry from Ellis' infamous cult classics.
Love Me Tender and Panic Blood , Texier's second and third novels respectively (the first was written in French and is yet to be translated into English), feature vulnerable, unconventional heroines from New York's then seedy, pre-gentrified Lower East Side. The women work as strippers, or singers, or dancers and generally struggle to make ends meet. The men in their lives tend to be gritty losers who make up for their inability to deliver on the security front by being great in bed, but often have an evil destructive side. The women are often displaced and originally come from somewhere else -- Texier was born in France -- and have complex family histories that further destablilise their precarious existences. These are women on the edge, less cynical that Janowitz's Slaves of New York, but every bit as believable.
While the books were reasonably well-received Texier supplemented her writing income with other work. She and husband Joel Rose (also a novelist) set up and ran the cutting edge literary magazine Between C and D. They parented two daughters. For Texier, things got tough. When the manuscript for her fourth novel was rejected she felt she'd hit the wall. But her nightmare was only just beginning.
Meanwhile, husband Rose's career was on the up and up. His manuscript for Faster Faster Kill Kill (about a man who cheats on his wife) was getting a lot of positive feedback. Crown Books editor Helen Rinaldi was impressed, as were a number of other attractive young women on the scene, Texier couldn't help noticing. Rose started acting strange in the relationship, staying out till two or three am, refusing to talk or explain and retreating into silence or anger. But their sex-life, the anchor for their marriage, remained strong, so Texier wasn't too worried. When Rinaldi bought Rose's book Texier stayed home with the girls and Rose and Rinaldi went out to celebrate the deal.
Texier was also deeply into therapy and had been preoccupied with her own personal ghosts. Recently she had met her biological father for the first time. She was reaching a personal turning point when one day Rose threw everything into turmoil with the following devastating words: 'I will never forgive you. I don't love you anymore. I will never make love to you again.'
But instead of going to pieces, Texier sat down at her desk, copied the words into a diary and didn't stop writing until the manuscript for Break Up was finished. 'It was the only way I could cope,' she told me during our telephone interview last year. Texier was determined not to play the part of the victim and equally unwilling to be a New Woman -- the sort of woman who would throw him out. Instead she found her own way through as she watched her fourteen-year marriage go into melt-down before her very eyes.
Break Up is poetic, pithy writing -- economical, impatient to get its message across, to get the experience down, to record each successive wave of destruction until there's nothing left to be destroyed. It was my impression after talking to Texier for three hours and reading the book twice that it is bravely faithful to her real experience of events. For the reader it's an emotional roller-coaster which sucks you in with its initial frisson of pain and won't let you go till the very end. It deserves to be read, argued over and slowly digested. Even so, there are a few very telling facts to add to my musings here about 'safe' books.
Firstly, Texier, while a self-professed feminist, works from within conventional definitions of gender: her subversions are relatively subtle. Secondly, no matter how emotionally 'true' Texier feels Break Up is more a work of fiction than simple memoir, which is how the publishers in the US (but not in France or Spain) released the book, cashing in no doubt on the recent memoir-trend. Finally, according to the publicity, it is as if the old Texier, the woman who had authored three literary novels, never existed: the new Texier as constructed in the media is highly fictionalised, the stuff of make-believe (from nobody to overnight success, propelled by real events. Forget all those years of hard slog and heart ache, perfecting her craft, mastering writing in her second language).