Bret Easton Ellis: Lunar Park

Poor Bret Easton Ellis, look what became of him. He was young, and famous young, a member of the Brat Pack, "essentially a media-made package: all fake flash and punk and menace." He hung out with the equally young and equally famous. He lived "in a place where the cops could be bought off ... a place that allowed a three-day smack binge with the upcoming supermodel in the four-star hotel. It was a world that was quickly becoming a place with no boundaries."

Then he wrote a controversial book called American Psycho about a Wall Street yuppie named Patrick Bateman who also happened to be a serial killer "filled with vast apathy during the height of the Reagan eighties." And then he — Ellis not Bateman because Bateman didn't exist, not really and he may not even have been a ficitonal serial killer either — hit the skids.

He was smacked out, on the road with his new book, Glamorama. A tour on which the author demanded, at every stop, "ten votive candles, a box of chewable vitamin C tablets, an assortment of Ricola throat lozenges, fresh ginger root, three bags of Cool Ranch Doritos, a chilled bottle of Cristal, and an unlisted outgoing-only phone line, and at all readings, the lights above the podium had to be orange-tinted because this would bring out the darkness of my salon-induced tan." There was a fine if these contractual demands weren't met."No one said being a Bret Easton Ellis fan was easy."

Some of this is true. This may or not be true. On Patrick Bateman, the narrator of this novel — who is called Bret Easton Ellis — says he was repulsed by this creation and wanted no credit for it — "Patrick Bateman wanted the credit."

So, the fictional Bateman becomes, again, a character in a book written by Easton Ellis about a fictional Easton Ellis. A nice conceit.

What is not true is that Easton Ellis ended up living in the suburbs with an actress called Jayne Daniels (she really doesn't exist) and the child whose existence Ellis has denied for 11 years. He preferred to pretend to believe Keanu Reeves was the father. It is here, in Elsinore Lane, in the big house with the nice neighbours, where the kids are drugged zombies and where Ellis drinks and takes drugs and pretends to be on the straight and narrow, where things begin to go badly wrong for the blocked writer.

The set scenes in Elsinore Lane are often wildly funny, in slapstick fashion, and involve Ellis' seedy excesses set against the streets of the American Dream, with the Starbucks and the kids book shops, the two golf courses, "the variety of gourmet food stores, a first-class cheese shop, a row of patisseries, a friendly pharmacist who filled my Klonopin and Xanax prescriptions ..." The claustrophobic horror of it.

There are magnolia trees and cherry trees and somewhere out there, or in here inside the writer, lurks Bateman. Weird things start happening.

How much of this you'll be able to take — indeed, how much you are prepared to laugh at all of this — depends on how much you are prepared to indulge one of these Brets.

No one said being a fan was easy.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer
* Picador, $34.95