Brett Easton Ellis

A L S O+.T O D A Y

The Haunted Wood
Reviewed by Jerome Perzigian
A historian and a journalist penetrate the secret files of Stalin's foreign intelligence -- and come away with unfiltered tedium

T A B L E+T A L K

Which is more vital: fuzzy slippers or a warm cup of tea? Talk about the necessary accouterments of reading in the Books area of Table Talk

B O O K C A S E

A new service
for book lovers

R E C E N T L Y

It keeps right on a-hurtin'
By Charles Taylor
Peter Guralnick's story of Elvis Presley's decline is an American tragedy with a rock 'n' roll beat
(01/18/99)

The making of an American historian
By Carol Lloyd
After 12 years, two children, three jobs and a decade in the Yankee limelight, British-born journalist Harold Evans unveils a tribute to his adopted country
(01/13/99)

The Salon Interview: Going up
By Laura Miller
"The Intuitionist" author Colson Whitehead talks about elevator codebooks, too many "Good Times" jokes and the lost legacy of the black intellectual novel
(01/12/99)

Colson Whitehead's alternate New York
By Laura Miller
His brainy, gritty first novel about a black elevator inspector, "The Intuitionist," is a formidable literary debut
(01/12/99)

Excerpt
An excerpt from Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist"
(01/12/99)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Browse the
Books feature archive

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Great American novelist
________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IT'S TIME TO ADD BRET EASTON ELLIS TO THE CANON.

BY JONATHON KEATS | They wanted to kill Bret Easton Ellis in the winter of 1991. Who wanted to kill him, that was never established. Why they wanted to do it, though, couldn't have been more obvious. In 1991, Ellis published the novel "American Psycho." He was 27 years old that winter, and everybody hated him. In January, Simon & Schuster had summarily canceled his $300,000 contract, leaving Vintage Books to publish his novel in trade paperback. By February, the Washington Post dubbed his fiction "the literary equivalent of a snuff flick." By March, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women vowed to boycott Vintage -- and every other Random House imprint -- for as long as "American Psycho" remained in print. And then there were the death threats, anonymous phone calls that cut his reading tour short.

Word was that "American Psycho" treated acts of torture with the same bland precision it used to describe the track-by-track progression of the latest Huey Lewis album. Word was that its author had crossed the line of social acceptability. Word was that Bret Easton Ellis, that over-privileged pretty boy who wrote the way George Plimpton threw parties, was bad -- artistically and morally.

People loathed "American Psycho" and they wanted to kill its author, but lost in all the blood and guts was one important fact: Ellis was well on his way to being as great a novelist as any alive today. A moralist? God, no. Ellis treats violence the way Thomas Pynchon uses gravity -- as raw material with which to formulate art. Brutality is a fact of life as ineradicable as the rules of attraction, and Ellis is no more a cause of violence in America than Pynchon is accountable for gravity's rainbow (his term for the trajectory of a missile). Notorious as Ellis is for his excesses -- for his wild night life and his celebrity and his instinct for controversy -- few will acknowledge (and fewer still publicly) that it's precisely by sacrificing his own flesh and blood and even his sanity, by unearthing the graveyard underworld of Patrick Bateman, narrator of "American Psycho," that he has advanced beyond the workaday concerns of character and plot and found truth and beauty, the bookends between which our classics stand.

The canon exists in religion as a rule against which to judge our behavior; in literature, the canon provides a standard against which to judge our work. We add a novel or a poem or a play because it misbehaves so severely by existing standards that it demands a scale of its own -- one on which future works, previously unimaginable, can at last be built. And so the author joins that great secular sainthood, taking his place alongside Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare.

The time has come to canonize Bret Easton Ellis.

Critics dismiss Ellis as an MTV novelist forever caught in '80s reruns. Scholars group him with his unshakable brat pack playmates -- Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz -- treating the three as some passing weather front of vague historical, never literary, significance. Even Ellis himself has modestly judged his prose to be within the slippery tradition of Joan Didion.

They're all wrong. They're wrong not in degree but in principle; judging Ellis by popular standards, even by his own, makes as much sense as measuring the distance between Los Angeles and New York in degrees Kelvin. Ellis' true literary forebear? The unsinkable Gertrude Stein.

N E X T+P A G E+| Dull characters, illogical plot, brilliant novel