Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror - New York Times 22/01/11 00:53

August 7, 2005
Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror
By EDWARD WYATT

DID Bret Easton Ellis really crash a Ferrari while driving naked in Southampton?

Was he married? Does he have a son? Did he have dinner at the White House, a guest of George W.
Bush? A weeks-long crystal-meth binge? An exclusive orgy? Dates with both Christy Turlington and
George Michael? Well, perhaps, at least according to the spellbinding opening chapter of "Lunar Park,"
the new novel by Mr. Ellis that features as a protagonist an author of some repute named Bret Easton
Ellis. But don't ask him to sort it out.

"My worry is that people will want to know what's true and what's not," he said recently. "All these
things that are in the book - my quote-unquote autobiography - I just don't want to answer any of those
questions. I don't like demystifying the text."

It is not the first time that Mr. Ellis, 41, has tried to refract the events of his life through those of his
characters while at the same time evading attempts to tie the two together. Introduced as the bad boy of
American letters, the brattiest of the Brat Pack that included Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and other
chroniclers of young Reagan-era angst, Mr. Ellis has achieved over the last 20 years a level of notoriety
and acclaim that has eluded most of his peers.

With "Less Than Zero," his startling debut novel, published in 1985, he wrote about meaningless sex and
casual drug use among the bored children of wealth in Los Angeles, where he grew up. In 1987, in "The
Rules of Attraction," he wrote about casual sex and obsessive drug use among bored students of a dead
ringer for Bennington College, which Mr. Ellis attended.

So in 1991, when he published "American Psycho," about soulless sex and maniacal, drug-fueled
dismemberment, many readers concluded that he was a raging misogynist, if not a potential serial killer.
And now he is back with a seemingly autobiographical novel that renounces but does not apologize for
the excess that has characterized much of his work.

It is yet another episode in which Mr. Ellis asks readers to discern the difference between truth and
fiction, between imagination and self-obsession, a distinction he nonetheless tries his best to frustrate.

"And that's when, well, do you lie?" he asks. "To preserve what you think, as the author of this book, is
its purity? I think this might be a day-by-day situation. Or it's going to be based on how I feel about the
journalist I'm talking to. If I sense they have an agenda, if I sense they don't like the book, they're out to
get me, then sure I'll lie. But if they're nice and they're accepting, they like the book, I'd love to tell the
truth."

But will the rest of the world honor these one-sided terms? "Lunar Park" isn't just about Mr. Ellis's
narcissism. A phantasmagorical account of life in the suburbs and the horror that can fester in the
unresolved conflicts of love and family, the novel is at heart an homage to Stephen King, monster comic
books and scary movies.

It is also an elegy, a description of the anguish inflicted by an uncaring father, a testament to the pain of
lost love and an account of the frustration of unexpressed admiration and remorse. And finally, it is an
exorcism, a re-examination of Mr. Ellis's life and work, in which he does, eventually, answer some of
the questions he has deflected for years.

Asking readers to care something about his inner life after years of endowing his characters with little
more than fashionably amoral ennui, is, to say the least, a change for Mr. Ellis. But then again, so is
including anything that could be referred to as a plot. Has Bret Easton Ellis actually let down his guard?

"I think he's intentionally trying to confuse people as to what is true and what is not in this," said Morgan
Entrekin, the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic Inc. It was Mr. Entrekin who, as a young editor
at Simon & Schuster, read and bought a manuscript called "Less Than Zero." Now a character bearing
Mr. Entrekin's name makes an appearance in "Lunar Park"; the same goes for Mr. Ellis's agent, Amanda
Urban; his publicist at the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Paul Bogaards; and his Brat Pack rival and
friend, Jay McInerney - or, as he refers to him here, "the Jayster."

"He's playing with truth in a kind of metaphysical way," Mr. Entrekin said. "He's combined the celebrity
memoir and excessive confessionals that our society seems to be obsessed with."

Mr. Ellis certainly did not invent the trope of creating a more extreme alter ego and then daring

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observers to tell truth from fiction. Or scolding them for being so naïve as to try. Philip Roth, who
created a fictional version of himself in "Zuckerman Unbound" and again, with a character named Philip
Roth, in "Operation Shylock," discouraged drawing connections between his life and those of his
characters. Hip-hop stars do it all the time, casting themselves as larger than life while complaining about
the burdens of celebrity. And on television, the hall-of-mirrors fame game had become familiar even
before all those C-list stars started turning their lives into reality shows.

But after all these years, Mr. Ellis doesn't seem to find that game any less amusing. Sitting last week in
his Manhattan apartment, a sparsely furnished studio with scuffed floors and permanently drawn shades
that is steps from what used to be the back door of the Palladium nightclub, he said he recently read the
Bible, front to back, 5 to 15 pages a day. Asked which version he read, however, he said he was not
sure.

Well, was it the King James version or one of the easier ones? "I think I read both," he said. Did you
read the Old or New Testament? "The one that starts out, you know, with the four chapters of different
stories," he replied.

Were the stories about Moses or Jesus? "Jesus," he said. "I think."

ONE of the biggest surprises in "Lunar Park" is its treatment of "American Psycho." If that book was
about anything, it was the grotesque materialism of the 1980's. But that theme was embedded in the story
of a young Wall Street investment banker who works out his rage by blinding homeless men, stabbing
young children in the throat and performing unspeakable acts on the bodies of young women.

The original publisher, Simon & Schuster, canceled the book weeks before it was to be shipped to
bookstores. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, picked it up, after which it attracted the outrage
of women's groups and critics. And it sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Mr. Ellis refused to back down at the time. "I was not trying to add members to my fan club," he told
The New York Times in 1991. "You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You
write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you."

But while working on "Lunar Park," he re-read the earlier book and saw it in a new light. "When I got to
the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked," he said, in a surprising public retreat. "I can't
believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there."

"I guess the mistake I made," he added, matter-of-factly, "was being very punky, nihilistic and very
transgressive at 23, 24, 25, thinking that this conceptual novel, no matter how violent it was going to be,
was really not going to scare anyone."

A different author might have opted never again to dwell on that subject matter. But not Mr. Ellis. In
"Lunar Park," the writer Bret Easton Ellis is being haunted by his own creation: someone is acting out
the murders of "American Psycho." Was this some strange compulsion? Did he force his readers to
return to the scene of his crime? "Maybe I did," he said. "I mean I don't know. It just seemed like an
interesting idea. One in a series of steps that led to what became kind of a mock autobiographical novel."
But who, exactly, is being mocked?

PERHAPS the biggest clue to Mr. Ellis can be found within the two dedications in "Lunar Park." One is
to his father, Robert Martin Ellis, who died in 1992. The author says that the protagonist in the book, the
fictional Bret Easton Ellis represents Robert, while Robby, the son in "Lunar Park," represents the real
Bret.

Several of Mr. Ellis's past characters have been modeled on his father, including the deranged protagonist
of "American Psycho." This time, Mr. Ellis said, he did not set out to write about his father. "But as the
years went by," Mr. Ellis said, "it was something that almost involuntarily seemed important."

He describes the man as an abusive alcoholic, an angry "control freak" who, after separating from Mr.
Ellis's mother, bought a Ferrari and a condominium and wore "age-inappropriate clothing." When he
died, suddenly, he left behind an estate tangled with debts and other problems. Father and son had not
spoken for several months. But since his father's death, Mr. Ellis said he has found himself longing for
reconciliation.

"Because he had a couple of qualities that I liked a lot," he said. "And I think those qualities - which
were often hidden by all the bad qualities - I think in the end might have emerged and taken over his
personality."

The impossibility of that happening, Mr. Ellis said, "makes me sad."

The other dedication is to Michael Wade Kaplan, who Mr. Ellis said was his best friend and lover for six
years, and who died, in January 2004, at the age of 30. They did not live together, Mr. Ellis said: "It was
a very loose kind of partnership. It was not particularly conventional, and neither one of us was

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interested in the lifestyle, I guess."

Mr. Kaplan died barely a month after Mr. Ellis had traveled from New York to Los Angeles to spend
Christmas with his mother and two sisters, as he has in most years since he finished college and moved
to Manhattan. He planned to spend a few months finishing the final draft of "Lunar Park" and then return
to New York.

Instead, he said, Mr. Kaplan's unexpected death left him in a tailspin. He did not attend the funeral in
Michigan, he said, because he could not even bring himself to leave his room - the room in his mother's
house in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, where he grew up. And he stayed in Los Angeles
for 19 months, shuffling from mother to sister to friend and finally a series of hotels, suffering what he
calls "a midlife crisis."

"His death was a big catalyst to finish the novel," Mr. Ellis said, and it probably added "a new layer of
wistfulness and melancholy to the writing" that had not been there before.

It certainly seems to have brought a new sense of his personal boundaries. Since the publication of "Less
Than Zero," in which the main character engages in both heterosexual and homosexual affairs, Mr. Ellis
has deflected questions about his own sexual orientation. Even after a documentary called "This Is Not
an Exit" referred to his homosexuality, Mr. Ellis always kept the public record decidedly vague. Until
now.

Speaking about his pain and loss, acknowledging his errors in judgment, and writing with a newfound
sincerity - these seem like the acts of someone trying, hard, to distance himself from the outrageous
literary behavior for which he became famous. But continuing to play with his fame and that of his
name-brand friends, and switching from forthcoming to evasive depending on whom he is speaking to,
suggest that the 21-year-old prodigy is never all that far away.

"A writer has a sensibility, and a sensibility doesn't really change over 40 or 50 years," he said. "No
matter how often you reinvent yourself, you're writing the same book."

His next book, he said, might be about Hollywood, a curious choice for someone who claims to have lost
interest in social satire. In any case, almost everything Mr. Ellis has said through the years about what
his next project might be has proven to be wrong. Which might, in the end, be the point.

"I was a mystery, an enigma, and that was what mattered," he writes in "Lunar Park." "That's what sold
books, that's what made me even more famous."

Besides, Mr. Ellis said the other day, "they're not big lies, you know; I just play around with things."

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