and this is how i feel….

Bret Easton Ellis at Southbank Centre 13/07/2010.

Reading from Imperial Bedrooms.

It began with a statement about a particular Tweet. ‘Why were you happy when J D Sallinger died?‘ followed by (now that he’s dead) ‘Is is hard working in the shadows of the greats?’ Bret Easton Ellis really didn’t want to answer either of those two questions. They were the wrong questions asked by the wrong person (the Lit Ed of the Financial Times who continued from this moment to rub him up the wrong way for the duration of the talk). She really didn’t get him, and it’s probably fair to say that this can be said for most of the literary establishment – they just don’t get him. They think that they do, but they don’t. I don’t think that many people do.  Skipping to the end of the talk before i start waffling on about his writing, i can illustrate this statement by detailing the questions asked by the audience and how the author responded.

List of questions that Bret Easton Ellis refused to answer:

Question: Your work has traces of Jean Baudrillard within its structure. Is Baudrillard a philosopher you admire?

Answer: Who? Oh, that guy – no.

Question: Do you have a Business Card and if so, can you describe it to me?

Answer: I don’t have a business card.

Question: Would you ever write a book about the things that you like, or about things that are positive?

Answer: Any more questions?

List of questions that Bret Easton Ellis answered passionately:

Question: Do you still watch The Hills?

Answer: Ten minutes of analysis and explanation as to why The Hills (no me neither) is a wonderful show and a true 21st century hybrid of David Lynch and Jane Austin.

Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well i don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching….

(Correction: Someone just sent me an audio file and got a few things wrong: 1. It’s Earnestness not Sentimentality. 2. The question is completely mumbled and starts off as being about Salinger. 3. BEE mentions that he likes a few of the short stories. 4. BEE mentions that he couldn’t, and didn’t finish IJ.)

Question: Is there any truth to the scene in American Psycho where Bateman meets Tom Cruise?

Answer: Yes and no. I own an apartment in the same building in New York as Tom Cruise and i’ve shared a lift with him a few times. To be honest, I just thought it would be funny to put it in the book.

I really didn’t enjoy Imperial Bedrooms. It has the Hollywood noir aesthetic of David Lynch and Raymond Chandler but i didn’t really feel anything for Clay, Julien or Blair the protagonists (if there is such a thing in an Ellis novel) of Less Than Zero. I won’t ruin it for people by adding spoliers but i will say that the book suffers because there is no tension to bind the austerity of the story. It reads like a TV adaptation of Roman Polamski’s Casting Couch flecked with inferences of a ‘greater evil’ borrowed (geographically and literarily) from Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Ok, so i know that people rant and rave for hours about his work, but if you allow me to make a few brief points then I will say this: Ellis’s books are, in equal parts, about two things – loneliness and ‘the city’. Opinion often focuses on the imagery he creates but to over-acknowledge the violence in his novels is to credit a brush for the colour of the paint. Less Than Zero and American Psycho are two of the best books written about L.A and New York respectively. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the other American voices who have captured the feel of the streets and the voices of the people from the two cities. But for Ellis the city is intertwined with man. Not something that a character exists within or is influenced by, but rather something that he or she becomes. In Less Than Zero ‘Disappear Here’ resonates from a cinema billboard across the sprawling city, in American Psycho Patrick Bateman declares that, ‘although you see me, i’m really just not there.’ The city is Ellis’s most complete character, it places him in a literary grey area (like Ballard in the uk perhaps) not wholly a life writer, a moralist, a stylist or a great imagist, Ellis captures person and place; city and man better than anyone else. The heartbreaks, the loneliness, the lifestyles that he sees and experiences become attached to the city and the city and its characters reflect one another in the wine glasses, the windows, the wayfarers and the dirty puddles along the street.

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