The Perspiring Writer Magazine

Born in Los Angeles, Bret Easton Ellis is the son of Robert Martin Ellis, an investment analyst specializing in real estate, and Dale (Dennis) Ellis, a homemaker. While in high school, Ellis wrote three unpublished novels. He completed a B.A. at Bennington College, and since then, he has supported himself with his writing. Although he has never won a major literary award, Ellis has survived early celebrity and later infamy to fashion one of the more substantial and consistently interesting bodies of work of any novelist of his generation. 

For Generation X, Ellis’ first novel, Less than Zero (1985), was as defining as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was for the “Lost Generation” of American expatriates who had survived the First World War and as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise was for the generation that came of age in America immediately following that war. In the post-Vietnam War era, America did not so much decline economically as lose confidence in the values that its prosperity had been thought to represent. Ellis captured the sense of drift among a generation that ought to have been driven to succeed but had nothing around to inspire the required effort and nothing in them to sustain it. 

Ellis' first novel had its genesis in several vignettes he had written and placed in literary journals while at Bennington College. One of his teachers there, Joel McGinness (known for his book Fatal Vision on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case and a controversial biography of Ted Kennedy) recommended the manuscript to his editors at Simon and Schuster. When the novel was published, critics almost immediately grouped Ellis with Jay McInerney, Tama Jamowitz, Jill Eisenstadt, and Douglas Coupland as one of the literary voices of the first post-baby-boom generation. 

Classified as minimalists, these novelists, and especially Ellis, have produced narratives that are the equivalent of advertising copy--facilely engaging, fraudulently promissory, and unable to penetrate beyond the surfaces of material affluence. The brand names of almost innumerable specialty retailers, “designer” products, and popular night spots are juxtaposed against the contrived intensities of the characters’ experiences. In fact, there is a terrible immediacy to the characters precisely because their lives are devoid of meaningful intimacies. Translated into more than thirty languages, Less than Zero was also adapted to a film directed by Marek Kanievska and starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey, Jr., and James Spader. 

Autobiographical in many of its elements, the novel centers on a young man named Clay who is attending a college in New Hampshire and returns to his Los Angeles home for the Christmas holidays. In a mad whirl of club-hopping and private parties thrown by his affluent friends, Clay reconnects with some of his friends but feels a sense of disconnection from many of their social and emotional preoccupations. In a sense, he is the most adrift of a generation of privileged young adults that might be expected to be restless but, despite all of the advantages afforded by their backgrounds, actually feel rootless. And their rootlessness, in combination with their shallow self-absorption, fuels the sort of viciousness that about a decade earlier had become the medium of expression among the cast-offs of affluence who had collected around Charles Manson in a perverse substitution for the conventional “family.” 

Paradoxically, Clay’s sense of disconnection from the increasingly disconnected lives of his friends allows him ultimately to escape back to college, where, even if he does not transcend his background, he can escape the descent into the void that is now defining most of his friends’ movement out of adolescence. Very illustrative of that void is the situation in which Clay’s friend Julian finds himself. In debt to a heroin dealer named Finn, Julian agrees to prostitute himself in order to insure a continuing supply of the drug. Even worse off than Julian is Muriel, who suffers from anorexia, alcoholism, heroin addiction, and an obsession with violent death. 

Readers who would later be outraged by the graphic violence against women in American Psycho seem to have forgotten that two of the focal scenes in Less than Zero involve casual violence against women: one party that features the showing of a snuff film and another leads to the coke-fueled abuse of a twelve-year-old girl—who has been tied to a bed and raped by two of Clay’s friends called Rip and Spin.  Although Clay is appalled by seeing both the film and the girl left bound and gagged and naked on the bed, he has himself exhibited a persistent fascination with the barbarous, collecting newspaper clippings about horrible murders committed by family members against each other. The linkage between Less than Zero and American Psycho is further indicated in Clay’s attending the same college as Sean Bateman, the older brother of Jason, the serial killer of American Psycho. 

Less than Zero has been discussed with such previous “Hollywood novels” as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, as well as with such subsequent novels as Bruce Wagner’s Force Majeure. As a coming-of-age narrative, it has also provoked comparisons to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Lastly, Nicki Sahlin has traced the linkages between Ellis’s work and that of the existentialists, in particular Albert Camus. 

In The Rules of Attraction (1987), his second novel, Ellis gives a contemporary turn to the conventional lovers' triangle. In this case, the three young people are a bisexual male, a heterosexual female, and a homosexual male. The milieu is much the same as that in Ellis' first novel, but the concentration on a much smaller group of characters places their self-indulgence and materialism under a much less forgiving light. These characters are so thoroughly products of American affluence that they hardly even question their unthinking consumption of all that is readily available to them--from food and drugs to trendy clothes and cars, from popular music and visual media to cutting-edge technology and kitschy gadgets--and their almost reflexive commodification of every relationship in their lives. Ellis’ second novel was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Indeed, a number of critics have noted that almost all of the literary 'brat pack' produced follow-ups to their break-through books that have had a less enduring impact. Jay McInernay followed Bright Lights, Big City with Ransom, and Tama Janowitz followed Slaves of New York with A Cannibal in Manhattan.

Ellis' first two novels did not prepare reviewers or readers for his third, American Psycho, in which he provides an intimate but deadpan profile of a weirdly detached yuppie serial killer named Patrick Bateman. One of the most controversial novels ever published in the United States, American Psycho seemed almost to spell the end of Ellis’ literary reputation, even as it insured him of the kind of wealth and notoriety that most novelists, never mind “serious” novelists, can only dream of. Yet, despite the consternation and even outrage that American Psycho has provoked, it does represent the next step thematically in Ellis' increasingly unforgiving treatment of the deadening emotional and moral effects of affluence and privilege. 

The wry take on what appears to be an extended adolescence in Less than Zero becomes a flatter satire on adults who seem unequipped for mature and truly meaningful relationships in The Rules of Attraction. Then, in American Psycho, the main character, an investment banker named Jason Bateman, is sociopathically incapable of treating anyone as a fellow human being. He objectifies everyone around him, not just his victims. He has gone beyond a cooly impersonal view of the world to a coldly depersonalized attitude toward it. In a grim irony, there is less a difference in kind than in degree between his attitudes and those of the others in his social milieu. He approaches real life as if it were a video game in which there is no time for and no medium for disappointment or pain and in which even the player=s satisfaction and frustration are very transitory. 

In interviews, Ellis has pointed out that less than ten percent of the novel’s nearly 400 pages are devoted to the barbaric torments that Jason Bateman inflicts on the women whom he murders.  Moreover, Ellis has asserted that none of the horrors that he has attributed to Jason Bateman are without precedents in the annals of serial killings that he researched in preparing to write the novel. Even if that claim is accurate, there is clearly something about the style of Ellis’s novel—the unsparing and unfeeling attention to the physical details of the crimes—that readers have found terribly unsettling, regardless of whether or not they are so outraged as to want the book to be suppressed. 

Several of the novel’s scenes—involving a rat shoved into a victim’s vagina, a nail-gun used as an instrument of torture, a chain saw tossed down a stairwell to cut down an escaping victim, and an act of sodomy involving a victim’s severed head—have become even more notorious than the protagonist’s abuse (actually self-abuse) of a piece of liver in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Cold cruelty has trumped a shocking lack of self-restraint as Ellis has pushed beyond any previous limits of what a “serious” literary work might depict. 

The manuscript of the novel reportedly created such outrage among female editors at Simon and Schuster that executives at the house, which had published his first two novels, decided to cancel its publication and to write off the $300,000 advance that Ellis had received. Still, Richard Snyder, the chairman of Simon and Schuster, admitted that he had not read the manuscript until the pre-publication controversy intensified, especially after a gruesomely graphic excerpt appeared in Spy magazine. Indeed, Simon and Schuster’s high-toned position on Ellis’ novel was undercut more than a little by the fact that the publisher’s parent company, Paramount, has produced the extremely profitable series of Friday the 13th slasher films. 

Although Ellis and his representatives expressed outrage at Simon and Schuster’s decision, within forty-eight hours Vintage Paperbacks, a division of Random House, bought the rights to publish the book, and several other major publishers were reportedly in on the bidding. So even in the short term, Ellis suffered no financial loss due to Simon and Schuster’s refusal to publish American Psycho. Indeed, before a single copy of the novel had been distributed, he had received substantial payments from two publishers. 

Before the novel was published by Vintage, Tammy Bruce, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, called for a national boycott of the book, of Random House, and of booksellers who carried it. The acquisition of the book became a very delicate issue for many libraries. In an editorial for Library Journal, John N. Berry III argued that whatever its deficiencies might be, the novel is clearly a “serious” literary work, rather than merely exploitative. Indeed, the unusual furor surrounding its publication is in itself evidence that even the critics of the novel have taken it seriously. 

Thus, to preclude its inclusion in library collections is an insupportable position, especially since very few readers would come to the book without expecting to be shocked. Berry added that condemning a book on the basis of pre-publication hearsay seemed a dangerous precedent—although in fairness to Ellis’ critics, no one claimed after the publication of American Psycho that the controversy had been overblown. If anything, the criticism of the book intensified after it was published. Ellis reportedly received enough convincing death threats that he decided to forego a planned publicity tour. 

Yet, despite, or more likely because of, the tremendous controversy that surrounded its publication, more than 600,000 copies of American Psycho were initially sold. The novel has, however, remained continuously in print, with subsequent annual sales of more than 20,000 copies. Although some of the continuing interest in the novel can be attributed to residual sensationalism, it may also suggest a possibility that would have seemed inconceivable that the novel may outlast its notoriety and be accorded readings and interpretations less colored by controversy than by literary considerations. 

Interestingly, while some reviewers have described American Psycho as a literary snuff film, others have recognized that the only way to avoid the humanization of the sociopath that occurs even, say, in Thomas Harris' novels featuring Hannibal Lecter is to approach the materials with a documentary distance that paradoxically makes the character impenetrable but very much heightens the immediacy of the horror. 

There is some evidence in Ellis’ early remarks on the novel when it was still “in-progress” that, at least in his original conception of the narrative, the violence was meant to be so deadpan that most of the expected responses would be foreshortened and a weird comic effect would fill the vacuum. But, as far as I know, no reader has admitted in print to having found any of the violence funny. 

American Psycho was adapted fairly faithfully to a film directed by Mary Harron and starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, and Chloe Sevigny. The film did little to alter the framing of the arguments about the story. 

After the controversy that surrounded American Psycho, Ellis’ fourth novel, Glamorama (1999), seemed, perhaps, merely topical. The main character is Victor Ward, the son of a U.S. senator, who has become a successful male model. His life confirms every stereotype about beautiful people who seem superficial in proportion to their attractiveness. He is gradually drawn into a terrorist plot in part because his extemporaneous approach to making personal choices makes him vulnerable to manipulation and in part because his busy life is so empty of meaning that he is a receptacle for any forcefully expressed argument. Glamorama has been compared to Jay McInernay’s Model Behavior, which also treats the fashion industry and was published at roughly the same time as Ellis’ novel. 

In Lunar Park (2005), Ellis engages in a postmodern narrative game meant to confound critics who have focused, often unduly, on the autobiographical elements of his work or who have approached his work through the facets of a literary persona that they themselves have largely created for him. The protagonist of Lunar Park is named Bret Easton Ellis, but the details of Ellis’ own life are mixed into the details of the lives of the protagonists of his previous novels. 

Like Bret Easton Ellis the author, the character of the same name is haunted by internal and external demons, both real and imagined--and very often crossing the usual boundaries between the actual and the invented. Ellis the character is stalked not only by Ellis the author’s dead father but also by his most fearsome fictional creation, who have more figuratively shadowed the author’s literary reputation. This novel as been described negatively as a muddled or tortured exercise in psychotherapy and more positively as a homage to Stephen King’s novels, other monster tales, and horror movies. 

Ellis has also authored a collection of short fiction, The Informers (1994). Interestingly, in a number of these stories, Ellis has used vampirism as a metaphor for the predatory nature of affluent self-involvement and self-indulgence. (In almost all variations of the folk myths featuring vampires, they are privileged and powerful figures.) The characters in Ellis’ stories move among or count themselves among the “living dead.”  

Ellis’s articles and reviews have appeared in such periodicals as Interview, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal. Of these articles, one that has received considerable notice is “Bennington Blues,” written for Rolling Stone’s 1985 annual special issue on colleges. In the article, Ellis analyzes the loss of the spirit of rebellion on the Bennington Campus, once a haven of radicalism. 

Ellis has received some positive notice for his mentoring of the novelist Donna Tartt, who achieved critical and commercial success with her debut novel, The Secret History. In the late 1990s, Ellis again courted notoriety when he participated in the making of a documentary film about his life and work, Gerald Fox’s This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis. When the filmmaker questions Ellis about his sexuality, which has long been a matter of considerable speculation, Ellis seems to admit to being gay. But in subsequent interviews, he has again muddied the issue, admitting to bisexuality but emphasizing his preference for keeping his sexual orientation “undeclared.”