Brett Easton Ellis

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

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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)

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GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST | PAGE 1, 2
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Stein was an experimentalist; her prose challenged the conventions of her time, altering the way following generations wrote and the way we read them today. Just when the Victorian novel reached a point of social stalemate, a bystander in a pretty dress unwilling or unable to engage in the 20th century's hurly-burly, Stein, drove art into the American tumult by making words into the deeds they were once only asked to depict. Consider this fragment from the novel "Lucy Church Amiably": "Gradually remembering a lake. Gradually. Remembering. A lake." Stein's language is anything but passive; you're left with no option but to remember that lake, and to do so gradually. Reading Stein is a physical act. A workout. As is true, in at least one sense, of reading any experimentalist: The pleasure, and the value, come not from the comfort of familiarity, but rather from familiarity's conquest.

Like Stein, Ellis is at core an experimental writer. Nearly alone among his contemporaries, he's had the courage, and the genius, never to leave the literary playing field as he found it. It should have been obvious from the start; now there can be no doubt. Critics will cringe and scholars will scriven. Bret Easton Ellis has written "Glamorama."

"Glamorama" is a glorious wreck of a novel. To summarize the plot would be an exercise in futility; there are narrative pretensions, but they're so convoluted as to defy comprehension. On the surface, this is the story of a male model who, when he isn't busy fucking his female counterparts and denying his attraction to the male competition, attempts to open a New York nightclub, stumbles onto an international terrorist conspiracy of beautiful people, spills more blood than was lost in all five Crusades combined and winds up in the bar of a French hotel without so much as his own identity. But ... but ... The whole thing may or may not be real. And the narrator may or may not be the narrator. And Ellis? He may or may not have crafted the Great American Novel.

What is awful about "Glamorama" is all the things a novel needs to be good: The characters are hopelessly dull. The plot is wildly illogical. The themes are endlessly recycled. The blood is fake, as are all the orgasms. What is brilliant about Glamorama is ... everything else.

Consider the novel in terms of a character named Alison Poole. Alison made her literary debut more than 10 years ago as the narrator of Jay McInerney's typically abysmal "Story of My Life." The novel disappeared without a literary trace, and it seemed Alison did too -- until now: Alison Poole has resurfaced in the pages of "Glamorama." And while McInerney is reportedly none too pleased to learn of the literary kidnapping perpetrated by his friend, something has happened to Alison since Bret stole her from Jay. She hasn't become interesting, per se, in Ellis' novel. Rather, like a chess pawn in Garry Kasparov's grasp, she's become meaningful. Characters are unimportant in Ellis' fiction; the fact that he picked Alison from the scrap heap of failed personae rather than, say, choosing to revive Amanda White, the female lead from "Bright Lights, Big City," is incidental. Ellis takes in Alison Poole not because she has anything to offer, but rather because she has nothing to declare. Why? "I just think there's a hole in your truth," the narrator is informed late in "Glamorama." By keeping the sum total of character development in his novel less than zero, Ellis is able to suck the reader through that "Alice in Wonderland" hole as smoothly as cocaine through a $100 bill.

"Glamorama" is "American Psycho" with the volume turned to 11, louder and more extravagant in its death count, yes, but also so wildly distorted as to attain a quality utterly unique in contemporary literature. In "American Psycho," Patrick Bateman had near-authorial control over his circumstances; in "Glamorama," nobody, not even the author, seems to have control over Victor Ward's. Ward starts out as the narrator, and, even if he often has less of a grasp on reality than the reader, he holds onto the job for the first 444 pages. He is always careless but never cruel, a frequent accessory to murder, but hardly the brains of the operation (after all, he is a male model). Then we turn to Page 445 to learn that he's been summarily dismissed: A new narrator, identical in every perceptible way, has replaced him.

Beneath all the prepackaged gore and the empty personae thrust into it, the real action in "Glamorama" is structural. And that is what makes it fundamentally an experimental work. Characters are pawns for the same reason rats go unnamed in scientific studies: "Glamorama" is ultimately a novel not about people -- either individually or collectively -- but about the state of the novel itself. And if there are too many rats lost in too many mazes for the reader to draw a single conclusion or even to infer a coherent hypothesis, if the success or failure of the novel is impossible to measure, it's because, like Stein's "Lucy Church Amiably," there's no standard against which to measure it.

But if "Glamorama" is lavish proof that Ellis is the kind of rogue genius worthy of canonization, still it does not belong in the canon. As a novel, it's a failure. Its chief value, rather, lies in the truth it tells about another Bret Easton Ellis novel. If once there was doubt, now there can be only certainty: "Less Than Zero" is the work of a literary saint.

Let us consider "Less Than Zero" in the pale fire of "Glamorama." Let's consider it, as critics and academics and publishers have refused to, not as social commentary or cultural text, but as a novel. An experimental novel. What characters there are swiftly fall away. (Remember Blair? Trent?) If ever there was a discernible plot, it is eagerly forgotten. (Remember who fucks who following Daniel's pre-Christmas party?)

What remains? "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles," the novel famously begins. It's a small sentence, and one almost completely starved of content. People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles: The cadence of that sentence is the cadence of the book. Lines pass by the reader fast and inconspicuous, like frightened traffic on a Los Angeles freeway.

But that's just the beginning. Continue on, and you'll find more than traditional cadences under siege; the narrator's voice itself is at odds with all we've the right to demand. "We do some of the coke," we're flatly informed at one point, "and then go to an arcade in Westwood and play video games for close to two hours and end up spending something like twenty bucks apiece and we stop playing only because we run out of quarters." There are no stylistic quirks to the narrator; over time he becomes almost invisible, an everyman on whom it seems meaningless, if not impossible, to place blame for anything. No matter how violent they may be, acts reported in Ellis' first person anonymous appear as diffuse and abstract as the road rage of his Los Angeles setting -- as if the narrator operated with the inevitability of history itself.

Even individual words behave as accomplices: They are plainclothes words, apparently harmless, even innocent. But their colloquial slouch is a disguise, or rather a trick of voice. See what damage words can do: "When we get to Rip's apartment on Wilshire, he leads us into the bedroom. There's a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head. Her cunt is all rashed and looks dry and I can see that it's been shaved ... Spin kneels by the bed and picks up a syringe and whispers something into her ear. The girl doesn't open her eyes. Spin digs the syringe into her arm. I just stare." Few words here are longer than two syllables; none are SAT fodder. They are small words, but their size makes them as sharp and dangerous as gunshots. They rain down on you and at first you don't notice but gradually the volume increases until suddenly you know it's too late -- there's no escape. Taken in sentences, Ellis' words are lethal.

For the driver on a freeway, every moment is now; by refusing the emotional backwash of a traditional novel, by denying his sentences the basic humanity of language and granting his words the freedom of innocence, Ellis reduces every moment in "Less Than Zero" to now, too. The chapters are as brief as MTV videos, the vocabulary as simple as Mr. Rogers', not to reflect our attention span, but rather, like a life cut short by a bullet, to thwart it. There's too much road rage in "Less Than Zero." Too much adrenaline. You can't possibly follow what's happening because everything happens at once and nothing spans a perceptible expanse of time. Vacuous? Yes. But only in the sense that Flaubert made "Un Coeur Simple" vacuous that he might slip through the shackles of plot. "Glamorama" is an experiment; "Less Than Zero" is a success.

Nobody writes like Gertrude Stein, yet nobody can write now as they could before she invented her tautological vernacular. Similarly, Ellis' autocratic present stands alone, but the implications of "Less Than Zero" cannot be ignored by any serious novelist.

Nor by any serious reader. Those who hurl contempt at Ellis for the violence in his work take potshots at the messenger -- senselessly blaming him for the society we ourselves have created -- and misinterpret his message for the bloodied envelope in which he delivers it. Thank God for violence. Thank the saints. If it takes a little real-world bloodshed to bring fiction to the brink, to drop literature at our doorstep, load up those shotguns and take to the streets.

Gertrude Stein is dead; long live Bret Easton Ellis.
SALON | Jan. 22, 1999

Jonathon Keats' first novel, "The Pathology of Lies" (Warner Books), will be released in April.