_______________GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST BY JONATHAN KEATS (01/22/99)

I believe Jonathon Keats misses the true antecedents of Bret Easton Ellis in his review of "Glamorama." Ellis' more distant precursor is not Gertrude Stein but the Marquis de Sade. That Sade is a canonical figure is agreed on by such disparate sources as Camille Paglia and Michel Foucault. Canonical or not, Sade's work is unreadable for the same reason that Ellis' later novels are: While Sade and Ellis share dull characters and illogical plots, the main reason for their unreadability is precisely what Keats argues is Ellis' novels' significance. He says that in "'Glamorama' the real action ... is structural." Here Ellis is in the Sadean tradition. Sade is unbearable to read not so much because of the content as the structural necessity to account for every possibility. "The 120 Days of Sodom" is impossible to read because every combination must be first exhaustively described and then interminably enacted. Ellis' later novels are also rendered unreadable because of a similar structural necessity that Keats calls "too many rats in too many mazes." While this may suffice to elevate them both to the canon, it makes them no more readable. -- Charles Peck This piece was a joke, right? Jonathon Keats, writing in the breathless prose of a college sophomore who just discovered a "really rad book" under his bed, was, I'm assuming, engaged in some variety of parodistic enterprise that, while lacking in much meaning, might stir the waters just a bit. Which by the way, seems to be the only possible explanation for printing it in the first place. -- Harley Peyton For the record, I've read all of Bret Easton Ellis' novels, including "Glamorama." I dislike Ellis' work not for the violence or alleged misogyny, but for what appear to be Jonathan Keats' reasons for admiring him: His language is boring and he couldn't tell a story if his life depended on it. Structural innovation devoid of interesting story leads to bad or boring novels. This is not to knock innovation. Faulkner at his most experimental may be a challenge to read, but he seldom lacks for interesting characters or story. He and Virginia Woolf gave us the interiors of characters as we'd never had them before, but that innovation was linked to how the story they wanted to tell was best told. Keats may consider plot and character workaday concerns or shackles, but he may want to pause and reconsider his hipster pose and compare the number of great writers who embraced them to the number who rejected them. He may save himself the years of embarrassment that will come from hanging around the coffeehouse, posing as a misunderstood genius who complains about how they just don't get it, man. -- Jim Coley If Keats' strange and peurile tract hadn't so completely exhausted me with its specious posturing, I might have had the energy to counter it with more intelligence than he was apparently able to muster while exploring the literary virtues of an otherwise poor writer. Instead, all I can say is that he's full of hooey. Better luck next time. -- H. Andrew Lynch San Francisco Bret Easton Ellis is certainly not as bad a writer as his countless critics claim; indeed, I think a serious argument can be made that he deserves a footnote in literary history as one of the more fervent practitioners of the Hemingway style of writing in the 1980s. A cut above the Kmart realists, but not by much, though much more disciplined than most of them and therefore capable of producing interesting work well beyond the time when "precocious" no longer applied. That's about it. To place him in the pantheon with Stein and her ilk would be the ultimate victory of Greed Decade-style hype, and if the novel is going to survive and thrive into the new millennium, we can't be having any of that, now can we? -- Robert Anderson N E X T+P A G E+| "Do you employ editors at Salon?"