Austinist Book Review: Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

Much like the author of Lunar Park, we’re prefacing this review with a brief introduction: we knew next to nil about Bret Easton Ellis or his previous works, the most famous of which include American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction, and Less Than Zero. We had, on several occasions, tried watching the film adaptation of American Psycho, but never seemed to get far past that part towards the beginning where Christian Bale’s deranged Patrick Bateman brutally defiles that girl while admiring his (admittedly) taut physique, reflected in his bedroom mirror. We were all but repulsed by such disgusting narcissism - at the time - and completely missed the whole murder mayhem that ensued.

But, as we discovered upon reading the first dozen pages of Lunar Park, any prior cursory knowledge of Ellis’ accomplishments was altogether unnecessary: the author, here manifested as the protagonist, is all too eager to expound on his fruitful, sordid past. In self-indulgent yet captivating prose, Ellis narrates the tale of his seedy life: from the near-overnight skyrocket to literary acclaim, the mind-numbing coke habit, the drunken orgies, the shopping list of celebrity trysts, the international book tours spent only minimally cognizant, to the vehement lambasting by fundamentalist public interest groups, Ellis spews forth an entire introduction of vile, visceral excess, leading the reader to a singular conclusion:

Bret Easton Ellis is an egomaniacal asshole.

Which makes his abrupt transition to this tame family man so startling. At the proper start of the novel, Ellis has settled with fictional actress Jayne Dennis in a complacent, affluent Northeast suburbia on the outskirts of New York City. Here he makes his valiant attempt to salvage what remains of his life and his humanity: in their McMansion on 307 Elsinore Lane, Zagat (the “Devil’s Dictionary”) is replaced by Snuffleupagus, the coke binges with quiet trips to the neighborhood mall. Ellis accepts a modest creative writing teachership at a small college. But almost from the start, the fragile thread holding together the tattered sweater of his newfound humanity – and, as it were, sanity – beings to unravel at an accelerating pace.

For the reality of Lunar Park is a grotesque doppelganger of our own: imagine an America where first grade children – for whom Lord of the Flies is required reading material – are constantly evaluated, psychoanalyzed, and medicated, where boys just seemingly vanish, and where September 11th marked but the beginning of increasingly frequent terrorist attacks:

Miles of major cities had been cordoned off behind barbed wire, and morning newspapers ran aerial photographs of bombed-out buildings on the front page, showing piles of tangled bodies in the shadow of the crane lifting slabs of scorched concrete.

In this contemporary dystopia that Ellis implants himself, it’s not terribly surprising when monsters from his past – both real (his father) and imagined (Bateman, of American Pyscho; a younger Bret; a sinister children’s toy, Terby) – begin materializing. And when the murders begin - in one of the novel’s rare displays of the animalistic brutality that seem to characterize much of his prior work, a woman is brutally dismembered and bits of her found scattered in a bloodstained motel room – Ellis is helpless to stop them, because he has written himself into the story.

For us to give away much more might reveal the heart of the novel, which you’ll anyways discover by the end. While reading Lunar Park, we found ourselves feeling sorry for Ellis’ gimpish maneuverings one moment, then creeped out by what he discovers the next. Continuing for over thirty chapters, he masterfully sustains this rhythmic pattern of horror, self-loathing, remorse, and by the novel’s climax it was all we could do to keep from shouting out, “you've brought all this on yourself!”

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