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Do you employ editors at Salon? Has anybody there a cursory understanding of literature? Where do you get off talking about "American Psycho" as a seminal work, an offspring of Gertrude Stein's genius? If Bret Easton Ellis is a literary pioneer, Jerry Springer is a broadcasting revolutionary. Shocking people is easy. It started with Andy Warhol and Hugh Hefner in the middle of this century and continues today. The unwashed eat it up like sugar-coated Spaghetti Os. Perhaps you know this and are just pandering to a larger readership. What's truly sad is that the American landscape is dotted with literary genius right now. Most of them do interviews in magazines far less successful than yours and live off MacArthur "genius" Grants or some other artistic welfare. While wannabe art socialites like Jonathan Keats wax nonsensical about things they don't understand. Oooooohhh, mahhhvelllous, dawwwhhling, controversy sells! -- Bruce MacDonald Jonathon Keats' piece on Bret Easton Ellis was one of the most exuberant examples of pretentious drivel I have ever read, a truly fine example of silly literary criticism. At the core of Keats' literary being is the confusion of fashion with literary values, as well as a creepy attraction to Ellis' loving depiction of sexual torture. Ellis writes deadly dull prose, and readers are bored -- Jonathan Keats is entranced. Ellis relishes describing the sexual torture of young girls, and feminists are outraged -- Keats is thrilled. If you are a trendy, not very insightful, literary eunuch, overstuffed with LitCrit, you want to be on the Ellis team. If Ellis' work shocks and irritates so many people, an existential sissy like Keats figures that the author is right up there in the avant garde. Keats informs us several times about the violent passions engendered by Ellis. "They wanted to kill Bret Easton Ellis," he writes, and "If it takes a little real-world bloodshed to bring fiction to the brink ... load up those shotguns and take to the streets." I can see our fearless reviewer quivering with excitement at the thought of some deranged feminist or boredom-maddened reader attacking Ellis who has joined "that great secular sainthood ... alongside Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare." Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare? Oh come on, try Mickey Spillane, Harold Robbins and, in honor of "Glamorama," Judith Krantz. -- Larry Specht Bret Easton Ellis' work is not damned for its violence, any more than Marilyn Manson's whole idiotic persona is critiqued for the dangerous threat it poses to ... to whatever it is Manson thinks he's threatening. Bret Easton Ellis' work, like Manson's, is damned because it is juvenile and vacuous and devoid of talent. Teenage boys may regard these two hacks as agents of a cogent, shrewd, eviscerating critique of a vacuous culture (or something), but the rest of us know dross when we see it (or read it). -- Marshall Boswell If one were to compare the works of Bret Easton Ellis and Gertrude Stein seriously, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" would be a natural choice; it follows, in an elliptical style, the activities of a group of sometimes childish, sometimes pretentious, often brilliant Parisian artists and friends. The most obvious difference between Stein's classic text and any club-scene Ellis tale is that Stein employs a sly, literate self-awareness and wit, while Bret Easton Ellis is remarkable for his lack of voice, his lack of vision, his pointless emptiness. -- Renee Rooks Boston SALON | Jan. 27, 1999

R E C E N T L Y+| CAN THIS PLANET BE SAVED? BY DON GEORGE

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