Howling at the Moon

Bret Easton Ellis, former enfant terrible of American letters, now all grown up and immaculately turned out, is standing to the right of the lectern in a Trinity College lecture hall as one of the dons delivers a lofty introduction that encapsulates the novelist’s career entire – from the numb young Americans critique of Less Than Zero to the ‘80s Wall Street slasher satire American Psycho, right up to the new book Lunar Park, equal parts self lacerating skit, Stephen King homage and a Hamlet-like meditation on the sins of his father.
Ellis, however, shows no signs of succumbing to notions of literary respectability. Responding to a dare by his publicist Cormac Kinsella, he reads the portion of Lunar Park which inventories the industrial quantities of drugs the narrator (“Bret Easton Ellis”) ingested through a variety of orifices on a book tour, swiftly followed by the outline of a notional novel entitled Teenage Pussy.
There goes a guest chair in Aosdána.
Two days later, at 10 o’clock in the morning in a suite in the Merrion Hotel, Ellis seems markedly different from his self-assured public persona.
Dressed down in sweats and hotel issue slippers, a baby faced 40-something, he seems remarkably fragile.
The writer’s best friend and sometime lover Michael Wade Kaplan died of a heart attack at age 30 early last year, and perhaps as a result, Lunar Park is his most human and humane book, a sort of fake phantasmagorical autobiography and speculative riff on what his life might have turned out like had he moved to the ’burbs and started a family.
It’s also a haunted house yarn populated with demons, gargoyles and a creepy kid’s toy called a Terby. But more than anything, despite its unruly, inconstant and untidy nature, it’s his best and most readable book.
Mind you, it has divided the critics. I have friends whose opinion I take very seriously that consider it a load of cobblers. Lunar Park bears out the old definition of a novel as a long piece of prose that has something wrong with it. But to this reader, it’s his best-plotted and paced story, with a denouement to make a grown man blub. And if someone had told me a year ago I’d be weeping like a big girl’s blouse at the end of an Ellis book, I’d have thought they were nuts.
Peter Murphy: How the hell are you?
Bret Easton Ellis: You know what? ‘Um, I’m okay. I mean, what have I to complain about? This lovely hotel, and people are treating me with such kindness. I’m feeling some love!
Good, ’cos I imagine these book tours are not exactly healthy for someone in a shaky state of mind.
It’s not good for your state of well-being at all, (with) your physical, emotional, psychological state all shot to hell, but in a way this tour was a good thing to happen because I was sort of cut adrift and lost before it started, so it gave me a purpose. I was wallowing in some kind of self-pitying middle-aged mid-life crisis, having to make the move from being this 21-year old brat for 20 years, forced into adulthood by certain events that have gone on. Having to accept responsibility.
That’s pretty much the character arc of Lunar Park. It starts out snotty and debauched, goes through the horrors and ends up somewhere in the transcendental.
The death of my best friend, that happened on January '04. The rewrite on the book took place from January to August '04, and it was okay, I mean, I just pretended a lot of shit didn’t happen. And then September and October were okay, November not so okay, and then everything sort of cracked up by Christmas. There were a lot of reasons: my mother had some health issues, my sister had this rehab problem, I was the only one who had any money to take care of it, then my accountant or something was fucking up things and had been messing around with my stuff, whatever. I just had to step up… do you use the term, “step up to the plate?”
We recognise it but don’t use it.
There’s no baseball here, is there? Okay. You have to step up to the plate and deal with stuff. It was a long time in coming. So that’s where I’m at now and that’s why I’m sort of moving through this state of saying goodbye to my youth and entering into my adulthood, which I should’ve done 10 years ago at least.
It’s interesting to see you write from the point of view of a drug-addled fuck-up feebly trying to behave like a responsible parent.
I think that marriage and children kicks you into a certain stage of maturity. It has for a lot of my friends who were complete fuck-ups; they had to get their act together once they had a child. My oldest friend in LA had this ridiculous one-night-stand with a stripper and she got pregnant and she had the child and he was furious. But it absolutely changed his life. He loves his daughter. He was always a very cold, funny guy, but this has made him warmer, I like him even more now. But that’s not always the case. It wasn’t the case with my dad.
I’d imagine a lot of fathers and husbands fear turning into Jack Torrance from The Shining, the monster in the attic. To me that’s one of the most powerful ideas in the book.
That was my dad. I’m not a father or married, but I think I was just channelling my dad a lot, in a creative way, because I was forced to watch my parents’ very strange marriage as a child, it was such a thing that took up the house. Yeah, my father did run amok and I remember it quite clearly. And ultimately I guess, it wasn’t planned, but what became part of the process of writing the book was – oh, the horrible sap of it all! – forgiving him. It’s so terrible, I hate that, I never wanted to admit that in an article, but it ended up happening and it was a total exorcism.
The “Bret Easton Ellis” narrator in the new book is probably the closest thing to a sympathetic character you’ve written.
It’s just getting older. You experience more and I think through that experience you tend to be more empathic. When you’re young you want to present yourself as a tough guy and pretend that the world doesn’t hurt you and that you’re not lonely and you’re not afraid of things, and there comes a time when you’re forced into being a more open, vulnerable person. It would have been interesting to see if I had decided to write this book before my father died. It could have been shit. Terrible and empty. A personal genre exercise. I dunno what the ghost would have been; I don’t know what I would have been haunted by.
I find it very funny when critics get the hump with genre books – be they supernatural stories or thrillers – when Shakespeare dealt in witches and murders and ghosts.
Yeah, god, ghosts all over the place. Literalised. Materialised. It is interesting this time seeing the reactions of the high cultural elite or the New York literary scene, whatever that means. I was surprised at the disdain for anything supernatural or otherworldly. It’s considered a sort of degraded genre in certain circles: “Oh when I realised the house was haunted and there were monsters in it, I became less interested in the book.” I haven’t had that from any of the younger readers or reviewers. I’ve gotten it from the old school guys my age and older: “Tut-tut-tut, that hairy thing in the hallway, the Terby, oh my god, everything was going so well for you up until then. But luckily you came in for a save in the last three pages.” That seemed to be the overall high-lit reaction. The college kids who seem to be making an inordinate amount of my audience love all that shit. I mean, why am I telling you this? Why am I talking about this? I don’t wanna talk about this!
Maybe those college kids are still young and in love enough with books not to have reached the stage of self-conscious snobbishness.
Yes! Right, right, right. Okay, thank you. That’s what I wanted to say. It’s happened to me. It’s happening to me. I hate it. I pick up books now left and right, and I can tell within five or 10 pages of a novel if I’m going to read it. It’s a terrible thing. I used to be able to suspend my disbelief about a wide array of stuff.
What do you make of someone like Chuck Palahniuk, who started out in roughly the same territory as you, then set out to rehabilitate the horror genre with his last three books.
I think Chuck’s strongest book is still Fight Club, which wasn’t so much a horror book as a commentary on masculinity and being male.
I thought Haunted was a disappointment.
I’ve read everything by Chuck and I will agree with you on that. See I like the ones that don’t necessarily deal with the horror… I sound like one of my critics! But I like Fight Club and Choke, his two most realist ones. The other ones, I dunno, just don’t quite capture my imagination. But I will admit that the opening chapter of Haunted (‘Guts’) was the most horrible thing I’ve ever read. Gawd it was gut wrenching. Jeeeesus Christ!
One of the strangest feelings I got from Lunar Park was that it made me feel safe and cosy, the way Halloween does every year. It reminded me of being about 13 years old and devouring Stephen King and James Herbert books and John Carpenter films.
I totally get it. That’s a very interesting point. I wanted to write something that took me back to the books I loved as a kid. That all ties in with what you’re saying about the cosiness. Yes, there’s a certain structure and a certain kind of inevitability about the novel that is pleasurable. And also, something I had never really done before was tell a tale, and there’s something pleasurable about that as well. I just like the tropes, the gimmicks of the genre, and I was looking forward to playing with them.
Stephen King wrote recently: “In the last couple of chapters, Lunar Park goes all out, balls to the wall. I respect that.”
I cried when I read that. I gotta stop telling people that.
You don’t have to play the hard-ass anymore. The cat’s out of the bag.
Quite honestly, I never felt like a real hard guy. But the intimations of my mortality shiver around me. I mean, I feel like an old man! But then I look back and I think I felt like an old man at 18. I think a very old man wrote Less Than Zero in a way. When I re-read it recently I thought, “God, you really hated your generation, you really thought they all sucked.” I wasn’t blaming the older generation for all the problems that were going on, it was really an attack on my generation, and on me. That’s very rare in a book about adolescence. It’s not a very sentimental view: “Look how young, how lost and how cute we all were.” It’s a very unapologetically cold book, and I like it.
It was set in a very strange period. The ‘80s were a crap time in which to come of age. Everyone else had the Stones and the Pistols and Nirvana: we got Huey Lewis & The News. We were gypped.
Totally gypped! Totally gypped! Oh my god, I know. I feel the same way.
The thing about American Psycho was that, if the ‘80s were the spiritual antithesis of the ‘60s, Patrick Bateman was the perfect inversion of the Manson figure. Instead of an outsider preying on the bourgeois ‘pigs’ he was a yuppie blinding homeless guys and mutilating call girls.
It’s strange when you realise that you’re never going to write anything that has that impact or sells that many copies. Every writer has one, a book that defines you, but y’know, you feel a bit powerless about it.
You get to write ’em but you don’t get to pick ’em.
No, you don’t get to pick them. You can control it the three or four years you’re working on the book, and then… I really didn’t expect much from American Psycho when it went out into the world. The orders were not very big; my career seemed to be on the wane, so I really didn’t expect anything.
In Lunar Park, the narrator is horrified to find some guy apparently recreating the American Psycho murders. I got the feeling that you were almost doing penance for creating Patrick Bateman. Or am I reading too much into it?
No you’re not. Or if you are it’s my fault, because the book was conceived without me as a narrator, but it was always me anyway, I just simply turned the names around. Basically the original guy was freaked out that this character he’d written had escaped from his novel and was hunting around the suburbs he lived in, and he starts apologising for the book. And I’ve been telling interviewers that that’s not me, I just changed the names, but that doesn’t really hold water anymore. I guess there is a certain part of me that was very resentful of Patrick Bateman becoming so iconic and such a larger than life character who is going to definitely outlive me – something I never imagined he would become. Christian Bale’s performance in the movie… Halloween guys going as him in the street fair in New York… Tons of letters. A Patrick Bateman doll?!! It just became… I never saw Patrick Bateman as a character per se. I never saw him as anything but a generic faceless voice that was summarising while underneath it criticising this time and place and my feelings about society.
I thought the chapter where he went to see U2 was very funny.
For the UK edition of American Psycho, because of libel laws, I had to change something, my publishers were so ridiculous they said, “Bono can sue if you write: ‘And I realise that I am staring at the devil.’” And they made me take that out, it’s only in the US edition. I love Bono. I love the last two records. I loved How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb and I did not expect to at all. I thought the other album (All That You Can’t Leave Behind) had four or five great tracks on it and a lot of it was just nyaaaah, kind of wandering, but I dunno, they’re great. That’s all I want to say about that.
Researching Lunar Park required you to read over your older novels again. What did you learn from your past?
Absolutely nothing. I just thought it was funny. People said, “This must be a response to your detractors: ‘You think Bret’s really bad? You don’t have a clue as to how badly behaved he was and how he didn’t give a shit about his novels and he was a lazy drug-taking bastard who fucked anything and snorted anything.’” It was very liberating to write that and it was really fun, but I don’t think it meant anything except, “Okay, I gotta get this character out of this life and he’s gotta get back with this woman and connect with his son… let’s just riff on this for a little while and hit rock bottom.” And that’s really what I was thinking about. I learned that I can poke fun at myself, and that’s liberating.
Maybe it’s given you a license to become a different kind of writer.
And yet, where do I wanna go next? I learn all this stuff about me and I try to grow and I write this book where I exorcise all the demons, I’m going through something right now that I’m hopefully gonna get out of, and yet, where do wanna go? Back to Less Than Zero? (Pauses, considers the horror of this.) BACK TO LESS THAN ZERO?!!