DAILY: MAY 23, 2019

The 1980s was the last sexy decade in American fiction. It was a decade on the make, all moussed up and ready to slay. Freshly hatched novelists and short-story writers popped up on the scene like teen-mag pin-ups, their sentences as photogenic as their faces. It was tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction’. The former fiction editor of Esquire, Lish was the chief tactician, technician and propagator of minimalism as a page-sized theatre of operation; his editorial pencil slashed like Zorro’s sword through fatty tissue and descriptive frou-frou, the severity of his cuts to Raymond Carver’s prose precipitating a controversy that still roils. Lish’s pedagogical manner, however, was the opposite of his surgical style. A born showman and provocateur, he presided over workshops and private master-classes that lasted for hours, often with limited bathroom breaks. It wasn’t the practical advice and forked-lightning insights that made the tuition fees and bladder discomfort worth it. Lish could make careers happen. As a book editor at Knopf and the editor of the Quarterly, he had the power to publish his protégés, the clout to be the casting director of a new generation. Working without a pulpit were other top-notch talent scouts and star-makers, such as Gary Fisketjon, the Random House editor who created the trade paperback series Vintage Contemporaries, the springboard for Jay McInerney’s breakthrough novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and Morgan Entrekin, the editor at Simon and Schuster who acquired Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero. Lish had the cult cred, but their properties shone the brightest. Gary and Morgan, Morgan and Gary, Jay and Bret, Bret and Jay – how often we heard their names tick-tock together then, the cricket chatter of the zeitgeist.Along with Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York), Jay and Bret were touted as the founding members of New York’s Literary Brat Pack, Manhattan’s bohemian answer to Hollywood’s Brat Pack (Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals involved, but the thing about catchphrases is that once they click, they stick. And for a brief spell, Jay and Bret obliged the cameras and gossip columnists, reflecting the flashbulb daze and glaze of downtown party animals as they moved from table to table, sofa to sofa, cameras capturing their full range of blank expression, the Parsnip and Pimpernel of the post-punk demi-monde. They were compadres but very different writers. McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a tale of coke squalor and eventual redemption, had a big schmaltzy heart beating in its pigeon breast. Less than Zero, a shockeroo begun when Ellis was a teenager and published while he was still a student at Bennington, fixed a clinical lens on its tribe of callow degenerates, a Warholian gaze devoid of Warhol’s Catholic depth. As Jay and Bret evolved as writers, their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place in the pantheon, a penthouse view. Not Bret. He didn’t seem to care about any of that traditional jazz. Whether it was a frosty pose or reflected a genuine disposition, Ellis didn’t court establishment acceptance and audience affection, showers of rose petals. His persona, his literary approach, his interviews, carried a built-in take-it-or-leave-it shrug. This attitude outfitted him with a protective padding that would come in handy later during the mud-stomping rugby scrums he’d find himself at the bottom of.

The spare narrative of Less than Zero – as if the story was being dealt out in crime-scene snapshots, a succession of dirty Polaroids – seemed to denote Ellis as a Lishian minimalist. He soon dispelled that notion. Where the minimalist faithful, such as Hempel and Robison, persisted in their ivory inscriptions and tracings of psychological hairline fractures, Ellis took on larger canvases with a thicker application, deploying recurring characters à la Balzac and covering swathes of social action. For him, the primary unit of fiction wasn’t the sentence, as it was for the minimomaniacs, but the scene, which Ellis indulged a tendency to turkey-stuff. The novels were crammed with incident and woozy excess, kaleidoscopic turns that didn’t know when or how to stop. Such kineticism undercut the satirical intent of novels such as American Psycho and Glamorama, since satire benefits from formal rigour to pin it to the frame. American Psycho, which took the torture porn of Sade, suited it in Armani, gave it a facial peel and took it out for a prowl, installed its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, as an archetype of the metrosexual serial killer and elevated its author to public enemy number one in much of the literary world. The fury in the novel and the fury towards Ellis formed a feedback loop that has tramp-stamped his subsequent career. At the time American Psycho was defended as a satire of the designer brand narcissism and capitalist predation of the 1980s, the dankest of dark comedies, but there was so much hate and heat in its sadistic overdrive that any message got lost in all the viscera. Once a starving rat has been introduced into a victim’s vagina, artistic licence seems a flimsy pretence. Yet for all its flaws, American Psycho was prophetic in its invocation of Donald Trump as aspirational monster-mogul and endures as an exhibit of slasher-film iconography owing to Mary Harron’s screen adaptation from 2000. The film’s spotless scene design (everything showroom shiny, the downtown loft as laboratory, anticipating the Soderbergh aesthetic), its Polanski-ish pacing and macabre devilry, and the hallowed hauteur of Christian Bale’s cheekbones aestheticised the carnage and drained away most of the gory dreck. Glamorama, an extended caper involving terrorism, international intrigue and idiot models, its paragraphs bloated with celebrity names, designer brands and song titles, like photo-captions run amuck, might have enjoyed the same fate on screen if it had been given a similar crash diet.

Ellis’s most successful satire was self-satire: Lunar Park, a postmodern haunted house novel filled with post 9/11 dreads, in-jokes and autobiographical notes, with Jay and Bret themselves futzing around as doofus sidekicks. An uncharacteristically companionable novel from Mr Trendy Sicko, it also indicated a narrowing avenue ahead. After you’ve made yourself the hapless protagonist, poked fun at your own celebrity, vanity and substance intake, how much more meta can you go? His next novel, Imperial Bedrooms, a belated follow-up to Less than Zero, confirmed a sense of dehydration. Fiction, you felt, was becoming harder for Ellis to sustain, the risk-reward ratio more difficult to justify (‘Three years of my life compressed into a 160-page novel that was a complete pain to write, absolutely hellish,’ he told the TLS), the literary world no longer a sexy place enlivened by feuds, parties and pirate adventures, but a rope ladder of identity politics, personal trauma and image maintenance. And it’s harder to keep the faith when each new back-strainer of a novel makes less of a splatter. There are other areas for writers to try out, such as the immortal hustle of turning out screenplays, of which Ellis has done a slew, most of them languishing for ever in the cargo holds of development hell. Unfortunately, his best-known script is notorious for all the wrong reasons: The Canyons, directed by Paul Schrader, a Hollywood thriller pairing the improbable team of Lindsay Lohan and porn stud James Deen. Deen acquitted himself quite well, giving a more convincing, noirish performance than Lohan, whose tardiness and wayward lurches were chronicled in an on-set report by Stephen Rodrick for the New York Times magazine titled ‘Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.’ The article was such a crunchy read, so stuffed with only-in-Hollywood anecdotes and luxury shopping specifics, that it upstaged the movie before its release. Sometimes with a Troubled Production, miracles happen in the editing suite, but this wasn’t one of those times. (‘The Canyons is inept and de-energising, and Lindsay Lohan is enough to make you cry,’ David Thomson lamented). Schrader would regain an auteur crown with First Reformed, but Ellis’s next screenplay credit was on a teen movie called The Curse of Downers Grove, which has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 15 per cent – not good.

Talking is easier than writing, no matter how fluently the hackwork flows, and in 2013, Ellis began hosting a podcast. In 2019, nearly everyone with a smidge of name recognition and a working set of vocal cords is fronting a podcast, but Ellis got into the game relatively early for a literary dude, and proved himself solid at it. His opening monologues – ruminations on the latest movies and/or controversies rattling the detention halls of social media and the ecclesiastical offices of the New York Times – unroll in the pensive, slightly irked manner of Gore Vidal expounding on the verandah, taking inventory of civilisation’s rapid cookie crumble. For all his purported solipsism, Ellis has proved to be a skilful interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and Larry Clark, the actresses Anne Heche and Illeana Douglas, and the uncontainable Kanye West. His conversations with fellow novelists and screenwriters are among the best I’ve heard, insider sessions of literary shoptalk that discuss the mechanics of the trade instead of treating it as an exalted calling, and his reunion episode with Jay McInerney was nostalgic and sweet, like Ross and Chandler of Friends getting together after so many years. Ellis has found his midlife métier. Even when he can’t resist turning the interview back to himself, the self-conscious self-involvement doesn’t grate. Narcissism comes in many flavours, and Ellis’s has a nice soothing vocal quality, perfect for earbud listening on long rides.

No matter how mellow Ellis manages to sound, however, he retains a knack for maddening people, for saying just the right wrong thing to make his legions of detractors swirl like hornets. Some of these interventions begin on his Twitter feed, then are expanded on or tamped down on the podcast, or are made on his podcast and become a Twitter to-do, e.g. his claim that the action director of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow, was overrated in Hollywood because she’s a ‘very hot woman’, his revulsion over the martyred sanctification of David Foster Wallace (‘the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation’), and his slating of the Best Picture winner Moonlight as a ‘victim narrative’ capturing Hollywood’s sympathy vote. Ellis’s oft-expressed irritation with the clammy grip of liberal groupthink, especially entertainment-biz liberals who are so carried away by anti-Trump fear and loathing that it’s driven them to pills and apoplexy, has led some to associate him with the Intellectual Dark Web, that supposedly sinister warlock cabal of professors (Jordan Peterson), pundits (Ben Shapiro) and big-league podcasters (Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin). He’s too much of a party of one for that. What he does share with the dark webbers is the conviction that everybody in the educated elite is too sensitive, especially those squishy-soft SpongeBob millennials. Ellis has turned his live-in millennial boyfriend into a character in his podcasts and interviews, a cartoon proxy for Generation Wuss, that tender wad of neurotic idealists curled up into foetal balls and sucking their vape pens like pacifiers, unable to cope with the slightest scrape of adversity or opinion that hurts their foo-foos. As a member of Generation X, Ellis is offended by this bunch of baby bunnies, just as many Baby Boomers were exasperated by the grungy sofa slugs of Gen X. Such generational stereotypes are of course gross caricatures of dubious utility, but they generate a useful friction and fodder for gripe sessions about kids today. And there does seem to be a consensus, at least in the States, that millennials truly represent a distinct mutant species of crybaby.

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