Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis
Born	(1964-03-07) March 7, 1964 Los Angeles, California
Occupation	novelist
Genre	Satire
Literary movement	Postmodern, Transgressive
Website
http://www.breteastonellis.com/

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 different languages. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. He is a self-proclaimed satirist, whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. Ellis employs a technique of linking novels with common, recurring characters.

Though Ellis made his debut at 21 with the controversial 1985 bestseller Less Than Zero, a zeitgeist novel about amoral young people in Los Angeles, the work he is most known for is his third novel, 1991's American Psycho. On its release, the literary establishment widely condemned the novel as overly violent and misogynist; though many petitions to ban the book saw Ellis dropped by Simon & Schuster, the resounding controversy made it a paperback bestseller for Alfred A. Knopf later that year. Four of Ellis' works have been made into films; notably, Less Than Zero was rapidly adapted for screen, and a starkly different Less Than Zero film was released in 1987, and Mary Harron's adaptation of American Psycho was released to predominantly positive reviews in 2000. In later years, Ellis' novels have become increasingly metafictional. 2005's Lunar Park, a pseudo-memoir and ghost story, received positive reviews, and 2010's Imperial Bedrooms, marketed as a sequel to Less Than Zero, continues in this vein.

Work

Ellis' first novel, Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was praised by critics and sold well (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved back to New York City in 1987 for the publication of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction, which follows a group of sexually promiscuous college students and sold fairly well, though Ellis admits he felt he had "fallen off", after the novel failed to match the success of his debut effort. His most controversial work is the graphically violent American Psycho. The book was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster, but they withdrew after external protests from groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and many others due to the allegedly misogynistic nature of the book. The novel was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.

His collection of short stories, The Informers, was published in 1994. It contains vignettes of wayward Los Angeles characters ranging from rock stars to vampires, mostly written while Ellis was in college, and so has more in common with the style of Less Than Zero. Ellis has said that the stories in The Informers were collected and released only to fulfill a contractual obligation after discovering that it would take far longer to complete his next novel than he'd intended. After years of struggling with it, Ellis released his fourth novel Glamorama in 1998. Glamorama is set in the world of high fashion, following a male model who becomes entangled in a bizarre terrorist organization composed entirely of other models. The book plays with themes of media, celebrity, and political violence, and like its predecessor American Psycho it uses surrealism to convey a sense of postmodern dread. Ellis's novel Lunar Park (2005), uses the form of a celebrity memoir to tell a ghost story about the novelist "Bret Easton Ellis" and his chilling experiences in the apparently haunted home he shares with his wife and son. In keeping with his usual style, Ellis mixes absurd comedy with a bleak and violent vision. Imperial Bedrooms (2010) follows the characters of Less Than Zero 25 years later; it combines the violence of American Psycho and the postmodernity of Lunar Park with the unaltered ennui of Ellis' debut novel.

Biography

Ellis was born to a wealthy California household. His father, who he said was abusive, became the basis of Ellis's most well-known character Patrick Bateman, and the frosty relationship between Victor and his father in Glamorama is based in part on this as well. He attended Bennington College, where he met and befriended fellow writers Donna Tartt , Jonathan Lethem, Francis Lombard and Joseph McLaughlin, none of whom were aware of his literary aspirations. After rising to fame with Less Than Zero in 1985, Ellis became closely associated and good friends with fellow Brat Pack writer Jay McInerney: the two became known as the "toxic twins". The writer became a pariah for a time following American Psycho (1991), which later became a cult hit, more so after its 2000 movie adaptation. It is now regarded as Ellis' magnum opus and is favorably looked upon by academics. The Informers (1994) was offered to his publisher during Glamorama's long writing history. Ellis wrote a screenplay for The Rules of Attraction's film adaptation which was not used. Ellis records a fictionalized version of his life story up until this point in the first chapter of Lunar Park (2005). After the death of his lover Michael Wade Kaplan, Ellis was spurred to finish Lunar Park and inflected it with a new tone of wistfulness^Citation?. In Lunar Park, through his fictional alter ego and the character's relationship with his own son, Ellis resolved some of the issues surrounding his father^Citation?.

Later, Ellis was approached by young screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki to adapt The Informers into a film; the script they co-wrote was cut from 150 to 94 pages and taken from Jarecki to give to Australian director Gregor Jordan, whose light-on-humor vision of the film was met with unanimously negative reviews when the film was released in 2009. Despite setbacks as a screenwriter, Ellis teamed up with acclaimed director Gus Van Sant in 2009 to adapt the Vanity Fair article "The Golden Suicides" into a film of the same name, depicting the paranoid final days and suicides of celebrity artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. In 2010, Ellis released the sequel to his debut novel, in the form of Imperial Bedrooms. Ellis wrote it following his own return to LA and fictionalises his work on the film adaptation of The Informers, from the perspective of Clay. Positive reviews felt it was a culmination of the themes began respectively in Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park. Negative reviews noted the novel's rehashed themes and listless writing.

Personal life

When asked an interview in 2002 whether or not he was gay, Ellis explained that he does not identify himself as gay or straight. He explained that he is comfortable to be thought of as gay, bisexual or heterosexual and that he enjoys playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight and bi to different people over the years. In a 1999 interview, the author puts forward that his reluctance to definitively label his sexuality (in his own words, he is "very coy and weird about it") is for "artistic reasons", because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read [my books] in a different way. If they knew I was gay, 'Psycho' would be read as a different book." In an interview with Robert F. Coleman, Bret refers to his as an "indeterminate sexuality", and said "any other interviewer out there will get a different answer and it just depends on the mood I am in". In a 2011 interview with James Brown, Ellis again states that his answers to questions about his sexuality have varied from interviewer to interviewer, citing an example where his reluctance to refuse the label "bi" had him labelled as such by a Details interviewer. "I think the last time I slept with a woman was five or six years ago, so the bi thing can only be played out so long," he clarifies. "But I still use it, I still say it." Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse."

In his semi-autobiographical novel Lunar Park, the fictional Bret continues both transient affairs and long-term relationships with men and women at various points in the novel. Lunar Park was dedicated to his lover, Michael Wade Kaplan, and Ellis's father, Robert Ellis, about whom he speaks openly in interviews promoting the novel. Robert Ellis died in 1992. In one interview, Ellis describes feeling a liberation, in the completion of the novel, that allowed him to come to terms with unresolved issues regarding his father. In the "author Q&A" for Lunar Park on the Random House website, Ellis comments on his relationship with his father, and says he feels that his father was a "tough case" who left him damaged. Having grown older and having "mellow[ed] out", Ellis describes how his opinion of his father changed since 15 years ago when writing Glamorama (in which the central conspiracy concerns the relationship of a father and son). Even earlier in his career, Ellis based the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho on his father. In a 2010 interview, however, he claims to have "lied" about this explanation. Explaining that "Patrick Bateman was about me", he confesses "I didn’t want to finally own up to the responsibility of being Patrick Bateman, so I laid it on my father, I laid it on Wall Street." In reality, the book had been "about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings". To James Brown, he clarified Bateman was based on "My father a little bit but I was living that lifestyle, my father wasn’t in New York the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to".

Fictional setting and recurring characters

Ellis often uses recurring characters and settings. Major characters in one novel may become minor ones in the next, or vice versa. Camden College, a fictional New England liberal arts college, is frequently referenced. It is based on Bennington College, which Ellis himself attended, where he met future novelist Jonathan Lethem and befriended fellow writers Donna Tartt and Jill Eisenstadt. In Tartt's The Secret History (1992), her version of Bennington is given as "Hampden College", although there are oblique connections between it and Ellis' Rules of Attraction. Eisenstat and Lethem, however, use 'Camden' in From Rockaway (1987) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003), respectively. Though his three major settings are Vermont, Los Angeles and New York, he doesn't think of these novels as about these places; they are intentionally more universal than that.

Camden is introduced in Less Than Zero, where it is mentioned that both protagonist Clay and minor character Daniel attend it. In The Rules of Attraction (1987), where Camden is the setting, Clay (referred to as "The Guy from L.A." before being properly introduced) is a minor character who narrates one chapter; ironically, he longs for the Californian beach, where in Ellis' previous novel he had longed to return to college. On "the guy from L.A.'s door someone wrote "Rest In Peace Called"; R.I.P., or Rip, is Clay's dealer in Less Than Zero; Clay also says that Blair from Less than Zero sent him a letter saying she thinks Rip was murdered. Main character Sean Bateman's older brother Patrick narrates one chapter of the novel; he will be the infamous central character of Ellis' next novel, American Psycho. Ellis includes a reference to Tartt's forthcoming Secret History in the form of a passing mention of "that weird Classics group... probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals". There is also an allusion to the main character from Eidenstadt's From Rockaway.

In American Psycho (1991), Patrick's brother Sean appears briefly. Paul Denton and Victor Johnson from The Rules of Attraction are both mentioned; on seeing Paul, Patrick wonders if "maybe he was on that cruise a long time ago, one night last March. If that's the case, I'm thinking, I should get his telephone number or, better yet, his address." Camden is referred to as both Sean's college and the college a minor character named Vanden is going to. Vanden was referred to (but never appeared) in both Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. Passages from "Less Than Zero" reappear, almost verbatim, here, with Patrick replacing Clay as narrator. Patrick also makes repeated references to Jami Gertz, the actress who portrays Blair in the 1987 film adaptation of Less Than Zero. Allison Poole from Jay McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life appears as a torture victim of Patrick's. 1994's The Informers features a much-younger Timothy Price, one of Patrick's co-workers in American Psycho, who narrates one chapter. One of the central characters, Graham, buys concert tickets from Less Than Zero's Julian, and his sister Susan goes on to say that Julian sells heroin and is a male prostitute (as shown in Zero). Alana and Blair from Zero are also friends of Susan's. Letters to Sean Bateman to a Camden College girl named Anne visiting grandparents in LA comprise the eighth chapter.

Patrick Bateman appears briefly in Glamorama (1998); Glamorama's main characters Victor Ward and Lauren Hynde were first introduced in The Rules of Attraction. As a in-joke reference to Bateman being portrayed by Christian Bale in the then-in-production 2000 film adaptation, the actor himself briefly appears as a background character. The book also includes a spy called Russell who is physically identical to Bale, and at one point in the novel impersonates him. Jamie Fields, who has a major role in the book, was first briefly mentioned by Victor in The Rules of Attraction. Bertrand, Sean and Mitchell, all from The Rules of Attraction, appear in a Camden flashbacks and several other Rules characters are referenced. McInerney's Alison Poole makes her second appearance in an Ellis novel as Victor's mistress. Lunar Park (2005) is not set in the same "universe" as Ellis' other novels, but contains a similar multitude of references and allusions. All the author's previous works are heavily referenced, in keeping with the book-within-a-book structure. Jay McInerney cameos. Donald Kimball from American Psycho questions Ellis on a series of American Psycho-inspired murders, Mitchell Allen from Rules lives next door to and went to college with Ellis (Ellis even recalls his affair with Paul Denton, alluded to in Rules), and Ellis recalls a tempestuous relationship with Blair from Zero. Imperial Bedrooms (2010) establishes the conceit that the Clay depicted in Zero is not the same Clay who narrates Bedrooms. In the world of Imperial Bedrooms, Zero was the close-to-non-fiction work of an author friend of Clay's, and its film adaptation (featuring actors James Spader, Jami Gertz and Robert Downey, Jr.) exists within the world of the novel, too.

Bibliography

• Less Than Zero (1985)
• The Rules of Attraction (1987)
• American Psycho (1991)
• The Informers (1994)
• Glamorama (1998)
• Lunar Park (2005)
• Imperial Bedrooms (2010)

See also

• List of novelists from the United States
• List of horror fiction authors
• Transgressional fiction

External links

• Official website of Bret Easton Ellis
• Bret Easton Ellis at IMDb