A Novel of Indifference: A Review of Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park
Katie Derrig
Issue date: 10/7/05 Section: Features
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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.
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