A Novel of Indifference: A Review of Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. 308 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95 (hardcover).

Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park is a novel, sort of. I really can't do much better than that lackluster sentence in describing the set-up of this book, which is meant, I think, to tantalize its reader with its peculiar combination of roman a clef, autobiography and horror novel.

The main character of Lunar Park is, namely, Bret Easton Ellis. Like the actual author of the book, the Mr. Ellis of the novel became one of the main voices of "Generation X" with the publication of his collegiate novel, Less Than Zero, and subsequently went on to write more shockingly violent (and, as some would have it, shockingly brilliant) books, including The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho. The first chapter of Lunar Park describes, in more or less autobiographical terms, this rise to fame and all the benefits that came with it; the descriptions of the massive amounts of drugs consumed and money squandered are cringe-inducing.

The remainder of the book is where the fiction lies, as the burnt-out Ellis marries a former lover, moves to the suburbs, and attempts to be a father to his wife's two children, including his own biological son. The plot quickly veers from the tableau of Ellis' rather pathetic attempts to start a family, however, as a series of strange events occur in his new existence: his stepdaughter's doll, Terby, begins taking on a life of its own, the furniture in the house seems to be rearranging itself, and local boys his son's age disappear mysteriously. Most troublingly, a detective shows up and tells Ellis that there's a murderer on the loose who's re-entacting the serial killings of Patrick Bateman, the American psycho whom Ellis wrote into existence.

This shift in the tone of the book is jarring; we go from rather tired satire of suburban life - the overmedicated kids, the overyoga-ed wife - to The Thing That Goes 'Thump' In The Night; it's as if the author of the beginning of the book were unavoidably detained and Stephen King was called in to write the rest. The latter parts of the novel do tend to stick to the reliable standbys of the horror genre; the one-sentence paragraphs that impress on us how frightened we should be, and the italicized conversations that the narrator holds with himself that suggest the severe mental strain under which he operates and how close he is to succumbing to the dark and scary forces that surround him (e.g., the satanically inclined doll). And while Mr. Ellis (the real Mr. Ellis) may also be trying to satirize these conventions, that satire is not particularly effective.

In fact, that comment pretty much sums up this entire book; it is not effective. The fact that Ellis chose to write himself and parts of his life into the book suggest that it is intended, at least in part, as a sort of authorial penance and way of straightening himself out. And he does try to touch on several Big Issues: the relationship between fathers and sons, the responsibility of the artist for his creation, and the process of becoming an adult. But, in an odd way, even as Mr. Ellis attempts to connect to the reader through this novel, and to explain things that he feels need explaining, this is a very solipsistic book. I'm not a fan of Mr. Ellis' other novels; I have no particular interest in his life, and Lunar Park did not convince me that I should feel otherwise. This book is too much about its author, and not enough about its audience. In an age where we can watch several hours of celebrity reality on television a day, another "confessional" is not really needed, especially when it doesn't confess much of substance at all, but, like the average episode with Nick and Jessica, or the soothing rows of zeroes in the Public Safety crime report, tells us more about how we want to appear than who we really are.