REVIEW: BEE
I was just looking through some old bits that never got into print for one reason or another and found this article written for Re:Mix; turned out that they ran out of space to run the story...
Bret Easton Ellis appeared in the literary scene at the age of twenty-one with 1985’s Less than Zero, a brilliantly wrought novel that evoked Catcher in the Rye’s disaffected Holden, but was closer to the 1920s fetishes of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having written four novels before turning seventeen, BEE hit his stride with his third published work, American Psycho, published when he was twenty-seven. A $300,000 contract was cancelled by BEE publisher Simon & Schuster on sight of the manuscript and Norman Mailer asked that it be reviewed by a panel of twelve writers before it was printed in 1991 on Random House’s Vintage imprint. American Psycho was initially banned in New Zealand, and was released shortly after on the condition that it be sold shrink-wrapped and stickered R18. BEE followed American Psycho with the quietly deceiving The Informers in 1994 and made a confident return in 1998 with a celebrity satire cum thriller, Glamorama, where he refined his style to perfection.[1] The Washington Post called BEE’s fictions “the literary equivalent of a snuff flick.”
Already notorious for the unrestrained stylised characters and smoothly repetitive plotless narratives of Less than Zero and 1988’s The Rules of Attraction, BEE burst into infamy with American Psycho. Inflammatory, controversial and bitterly protested against, American Psycho gave the capitalist era its Frankenstein in psychopath Patrick Bateman, who perfectly illustrates the selfish greed and insanity of the Eighties. It was a book that strapped you down and mocked you through a welter of amoral fantasies and material depravity described with clinical, detached precision. Death threats were sent, anonymous phone calls made, feminists were up in arms, and Fay Weldon wrote, “Look, I don't want you to actually read BEE's book. I did it for you.”[2] And BEE agrees with her; if you’re a teenager, he doesn’t want you to read it either.
It is these palettes BEE dexterously wields that compel readers to return to his books: his narcissist dislocated youth; his obsessive detailing of surface perfections masking inner emptiness; amoral social requirements to conform; and lives spent chasing the dragon. It’s slasher pornography wretched out of its plastic molds, but it’s no less pornographic than news media pornography, fashion pornography, or war pornography, and that’s the point.
Everyone’s disappearing, and they can’t find or feel themselves anymore, but nothing much happens, anyway, in BEE’s fictions. Money, designer clothes, restaurants, brand names and objects replace their selves, and they are no longer capable of affect, desensitized by random acts of violence, sexual brutality and remorseless prose. Material wealth is taken for granted, and spirituality comes down to what brand of health food is consumed. Nothing shocks; the mention of a snuff movie in Less than Zero has narrator Clay wondering if he should be concerned. Yet no matter how dreadful the action gets, BEE is a master of the American novel; peering into the underbelly of what it means to be an American and unflinchingly documenting his amoral people with a deep sense of moral perspective, as Thomas Pynchon, and Don Delillo did before him.
The characters that people BEE’s books search for their feelings, they try to find something to make them have feelings, something to anchor them to reality. Their tales of disaffect illustrate our prisons, and while BEE is most likely to disappear from the library stacks, ending up a lonely “Lost” in library databases, his fictions will yet reserve pride of place upon the bookshelves of these feeling BEE’s satire, and most likely to be borrowed and never returned. You know who you are. It’s okay; I would too, if I were you.
books
Less Than Zero [Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1985 / Picador: London, 1986]
“You can disappear here without knowing it.”
Clay returns to Los Angeles from college in New Hampshire at Christmas to find his best friend Julian is sleeping with his girlfriend, Blair, but he doesn’t care. As their drug use goes from recreational to habitual, homogenous blond/e and tan teenagers search the suburban Xanax haze of Los Angeles for something to give meaning and feeling to their lives. Julian develops a large drug debt and sells himself for sex, then disappears. Clay observes it all, unsure whether he should merge because people are afraid to merge in Los Angeles, and then he leaves.
The Rules of Attraction [Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1987 / Picador: London, 1988]
“The scene of us standing there was too real and too pointless.”
It’s all stereotypes with haircuts; the diary of a group of confidently hot New Hampshire college students drinking, having sex and doing drugs, in no particular order. Paul’s in love with Sean, but Sean acts straight; Victor Ward’s looking for a girl in Europe; Lauren’s post-virginal and sleeping with someone who’s not her boyfriend, isn’t sure if she likes it or not, and she’s missing Victor; Harry’s dead, suicide, with no heartbeat, but he’s still alive; others gravitate around nothing; Stuart wants to fuck Paul; Patrick Bateman’s Sean’s brother; and Clay tells us people are afraid to merge on campus after midnight.
American Psycho [Vintage: New York, 1991 / Picador: London, 1991]
“Murders and executions ... mergers and acquisitions”
A sadistic, psychopathic Wall Street merchant banker, Patrick Bateman, obsessively details every element of his daily life; recording an extensive bathroom routine with the same relish as his mutilations of prostitutes, rats in vaginas, decapitations, beggar shooting, dog knifing, and what his peers are wearing, eating, and saying. His life is whiled away in a succession of lunches and parties and fucking and killing. No one notices anything behind Patrick’s blank face, and if they notice, they don’t react; there is no exit anyway.
The Informers [Borzoi: New York, 1994 / Picador: London 1994]
“We’ve already been there,” I tell him. “We’ve already seen it.”
In a collection of inter-related stories about a group of friends, it’s been a year since Jamie died in a car crash outside Las Vegas. Tim looks good but isn’t quick on the uptake, and his friend Graham’s mother self-medicates with Libriums and Valiums, fantasises about sex with the pool-tender. She follows Graham to his drug pick-ups, and catches him in lies, as does Tim’s mother; meanwhile vampires stalk Los Angeles, and bodies are found skinned in rubbish bins. The impressions of their lives flash past, and as the stories get bleaker and disquieting, there is left a passed-out intoxication, a drained emptiness.
Glamorama [Borzoi: New York, 1998 / Picador: London, 1998]
“The better you look, the more you see.”
Victor Ward, a blandly handsome twentysomething New York model with a semi-successful sideline in movies and two girlfriends, becomes lost in an increasingly surreal reality. Victor imagines he’s always being filmed, considering how a director would shoot the scene, how the light would appear on his face, and perhaps he is always being filmed, or perhaps his whole life is a glamour. The line between film and real life is hovered up through a rolled-up Benjamin. Victor accepts $300,000 to go on a cruise ship to the UK and somewhere along the way he is replaced by a double, disconnected from his old life and becomes unwillingly entangled in a conspiracy, where everyone’s involved, and he’s a pawn manipulated through broad lashings of cinematic terrorist attacks, which may be staged.
cutoffs:
“But the precise facts of his substance use, like those of his sexuality, or his social life, or his future ambitions, remain out of reach.” [3]
footnotes:
[1] Less than Zero was filmed in 1987 with brat-packers Andrew McCartney and Robert Downey Jr., and Mary Harron sympathetically bought American Psycho to the screen in 2000, and this year Roger Avery brings us The Rules of Attraction; it’ll be interesting to see what he’s made of a book panned as a too self-conscious college diary.
[2] Weldon, Fay. “An honest American psycho: Why we can’t cope with Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel.” The Guardian. Thursday April 25, 1991.
[3] Beckett, Andy. “Leader of the Bret pack.” The Guardian. Saturday January 9, 1999.
Bret Easton Ellis appeared in the literary scene at the age of twenty-one with 1985’s Less than Zero, a brilliantly wrought novel that evoked Catcher in the Rye’s disaffected Holden, but was closer to the 1920s fetishes of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having written four novels before turning seventeen, BEE hit his stride with his third published work, American Psycho, published when he was twenty-seven. A $300,000 contract was cancelled by BEE publisher Simon & Schuster on sight of the manuscript and Norman Mailer asked that it be reviewed by a panel of twelve writers before it was printed in 1991 on Random House’s Vintage imprint. American Psycho was initially banned in New Zealand, and was released shortly after on the condition that it be sold shrink-wrapped and stickered R18. BEE followed American Psycho with the quietly deceiving The Informers in 1994 and made a confident return in 1998 with a celebrity satire cum thriller, Glamorama, where he refined his style to perfection.[1] The Washington Post called BEE’s fictions “the literary equivalent of a snuff flick.”
Already notorious for the unrestrained stylised characters and smoothly repetitive plotless narratives of Less than Zero and 1988’s The Rules of Attraction, BEE burst into infamy with American Psycho. Inflammatory, controversial and bitterly protested against, American Psycho gave the capitalist era its Frankenstein in psychopath Patrick Bateman, who perfectly illustrates the selfish greed and insanity of the Eighties. It was a book that strapped you down and mocked you through a welter of amoral fantasies and material depravity described with clinical, detached precision. Death threats were sent, anonymous phone calls made, feminists were up in arms, and Fay Weldon wrote, “Look, I don't want you to actually read BEE's book. I did it for you.”[2] And BEE agrees with her; if you’re a teenager, he doesn’t want you to read it either.
It is these palettes BEE dexterously wields that compel readers to return to his books: his narcissist dislocated youth; his obsessive detailing of surface perfections masking inner emptiness; amoral social requirements to conform; and lives spent chasing the dragon. It’s slasher pornography wretched out of its plastic molds, but it’s no less pornographic than news media pornography, fashion pornography, or war pornography, and that’s the point.
Everyone’s disappearing, and they can’t find or feel themselves anymore, but nothing much happens, anyway, in BEE’s fictions. Money, designer clothes, restaurants, brand names and objects replace their selves, and they are no longer capable of affect, desensitized by random acts of violence, sexual brutality and remorseless prose. Material wealth is taken for granted, and spirituality comes down to what brand of health food is consumed. Nothing shocks; the mention of a snuff movie in Less than Zero has narrator Clay wondering if he should be concerned. Yet no matter how dreadful the action gets, BEE is a master of the American novel; peering into the underbelly of what it means to be an American and unflinchingly documenting his amoral people with a deep sense of moral perspective, as Thomas Pynchon, and Don Delillo did before him.
The characters that people BEE’s books search for their feelings, they try to find something to make them have feelings, something to anchor them to reality. Their tales of disaffect illustrate our prisons, and while BEE is most likely to disappear from the library stacks, ending up a lonely “Lost” in library databases, his fictions will yet reserve pride of place upon the bookshelves of these feeling BEE’s satire, and most likely to be borrowed and never returned. You know who you are. It’s okay; I would too, if I were you.
books
Less Than Zero [Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1985 / Picador: London, 1986]
“You can disappear here without knowing it.”
Clay returns to Los Angeles from college in New Hampshire at Christmas to find his best friend Julian is sleeping with his girlfriend, Blair, but he doesn’t care. As their drug use goes from recreational to habitual, homogenous blond/e and tan teenagers search the suburban Xanax haze of Los Angeles for something to give meaning and feeling to their lives. Julian develops a large drug debt and sells himself for sex, then disappears. Clay observes it all, unsure whether he should merge because people are afraid to merge in Los Angeles, and then he leaves.
The Rules of Attraction [Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1987 / Picador: London, 1988]
“The scene of us standing there was too real and too pointless.”
It’s all stereotypes with haircuts; the diary of a group of confidently hot New Hampshire college students drinking, having sex and doing drugs, in no particular order. Paul’s in love with Sean, but Sean acts straight; Victor Ward’s looking for a girl in Europe; Lauren’s post-virginal and sleeping with someone who’s not her boyfriend, isn’t sure if she likes it or not, and she’s missing Victor; Harry’s dead, suicide, with no heartbeat, but he’s still alive; others gravitate around nothing; Stuart wants to fuck Paul; Patrick Bateman’s Sean’s brother; and Clay tells us people are afraid to merge on campus after midnight.
American Psycho [Vintage: New York, 1991 / Picador: London, 1991]
“Murders and executions ... mergers and acquisitions”
A sadistic, psychopathic Wall Street merchant banker, Patrick Bateman, obsessively details every element of his daily life; recording an extensive bathroom routine with the same relish as his mutilations of prostitutes, rats in vaginas, decapitations, beggar shooting, dog knifing, and what his peers are wearing, eating, and saying. His life is whiled away in a succession of lunches and parties and fucking and killing. No one notices anything behind Patrick’s blank face, and if they notice, they don’t react; there is no exit anyway.
The Informers [Borzoi: New York, 1994 / Picador: London 1994]
“We’ve already been there,” I tell him. “We’ve already seen it.”
In a collection of inter-related stories about a group of friends, it’s been a year since Jamie died in a car crash outside Las Vegas. Tim looks good but isn’t quick on the uptake, and his friend Graham’s mother self-medicates with Libriums and Valiums, fantasises about sex with the pool-tender. She follows Graham to his drug pick-ups, and catches him in lies, as does Tim’s mother; meanwhile vampires stalk Los Angeles, and bodies are found skinned in rubbish bins. The impressions of their lives flash past, and as the stories get bleaker and disquieting, there is left a passed-out intoxication, a drained emptiness.
Glamorama [Borzoi: New York, 1998 / Picador: London, 1998]
“The better you look, the more you see.”
Victor Ward, a blandly handsome twentysomething New York model with a semi-successful sideline in movies and two girlfriends, becomes lost in an increasingly surreal reality. Victor imagines he’s always being filmed, considering how a director would shoot the scene, how the light would appear on his face, and perhaps he is always being filmed, or perhaps his whole life is a glamour. The line between film and real life is hovered up through a rolled-up Benjamin. Victor accepts $300,000 to go on a cruise ship to the UK and somewhere along the way he is replaced by a double, disconnected from his old life and becomes unwillingly entangled in a conspiracy, where everyone’s involved, and he’s a pawn manipulated through broad lashings of cinematic terrorist attacks, which may be staged.
cutoffs:
“But the precise facts of his substance use, like those of his sexuality, or his social life, or his future ambitions, remain out of reach.” [3]
footnotes:
[1] Less than Zero was filmed in 1987 with brat-packers Andrew McCartney and Robert Downey Jr., and Mary Harron sympathetically bought American Psycho to the screen in 2000, and this year Roger Avery brings us The Rules of Attraction; it’ll be interesting to see what he’s made of a book panned as a too self-conscious college diary.
[2] Weldon, Fay. “An honest American psycho: Why we can’t cope with Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel.” The Guardian. Thursday April 25, 1991.
[3] Beckett, Andy. “Leader of the Bret pack.” The Guardian. Saturday January 9, 1999.
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