Fiction: How sick, how strange, how disturbingly real - Lunar Park, part crazed joy ride, part modern parable, is a novel you tend to endure rather than actually read. Can society create narratives such as this? The answer is overwhelmingly, shockingly, yes.
Here is a book that records the way an imagination implodes by balancing individual sleek self-absorption with cynical, all-seeing social commentary.
It is 20 years since literary brat-packer Bret Easton Ellis, a founding father of the Me Generation and author of the anarchically non-rebellious Less Than Zero, set out to chronicle the extraordinary selfishness of rich young things who expended vast amounts of their parents' money and of their own laconic zeal on indulging themselves with bored abandon. Less Than Zero, published in 1985, made its author immediately famous for having airlifted - or should that be hijacked? - the ethos of The Great Gatsby into a more vicious epoch.
Fitzgerald's eloquent study of heroism corrupted appeared to have been fast- forwarded at such a pace that the 60 years of US life separating The Great Gatsby from Less Than Zero disappeared in a puff of smoke. Ellis rendered the appalling into something approaching the uncomfortably profound. Not by art, and not through the devices of formal storytelling, but through the relentless recording of life as lived courtesy of drugs, alcohol, experimental recreational sex and a terrifying amount of free time.
No one could accuse Bret Easton Ellis, least of all himself, of being an artist; he is too preoccupied by looking. Looking is his central activity.
He does not search, he just looks very closely at everything. And on this depends the success, if not quite the triumph, of conversational narratives that tend to read as quasi-confessional police reports crossed with psychiatric transcripts. Through the life and times of Bret Easton Ellis we discover what happens to social history when it simply becomes the continuous present.
Lunar Park, his fifth novel, is an account of a famous writer called Bret Easton Ellis on the often surreal run from his personal history, his dead father and a sinister toy bird which may well be a metaphor run riot. It slips in and out of fact and fiction with a cool glee that makes Philip Roth appear charmingly old-fashioned, almost innocent.
By the end of page one, Ellis has done what no other novelist in the history of fiction has dared do: mention his first two novels. And this after quoting Hamlet by way of apology: "From the table of my memory/ I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,/ All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/ That youth and observation copied there."
Page two, by the way, includes the names of novels three and four, not forgetting his short story collection, The Informers.
Alongside quotes from American Psycho and Glamorama, Ellis helpfully reminds us how the New York Times decided his work had become " 'bizarrely complicated . . . bloated and trivial . . . hyped up' and I didn't necessarily disagree". He wanted, he informs us, "a return to that past simplicity".
"Simplicity" may not be the initial word one reaches for when considering either his work or his image as writer/ commentator. Yet he does manage to lure us along on what appears to be a resumé of his life and times as a famous writer famously damaged and adrift on the hellish waters of celebrity.
Believe all of it, some of it; even so, it is all overshadowed by his damaging relationship with his late father, of whom he writes: "My father had blackened my perception of the world, and his sneering, sarcastic attitude toward everything had latched on to me. As much as I wanted to escape his influence, I couldn't. It had soaked into me, shaped me into the man I was becoming. Whatever optimism I might have held on to had been swept away by the very nature of his being."
It all reads as the life and times of the no longer young but not really all that old jaded writer seeking personal salvation. Having provided an almost, but teasingly not fully true, version of his story, he gives central stage to his third novel, the pornographic fantasy, American Psycho (1991), of which he can justifiably remark: "What's left to say about American Psycho that hasn't already been said? And I feel no need to go into great detail about it here."
Except that he does. Lunar Park is as dogged by American Psycho and its amoral anti-hero, Patrick Bateman - based on aspects of his father, himself and all of us - as Ellis claims his life has always been dominated, and continues to be dominated, by his now dead father. Lunar Park may be a novel within a novel but it is also a novel based on revisiting both the devices - and subsequent impact - of American Psycho.
Much of the action of Lunar Park is shaped by the text of that earlier novel. Equally, Bret the character and narrator of Lunar Park stumbles through his daily life as a man who has accepted the offer of domestic sanctuary from his former lover, famous actor Jayne Dennis, with whom he had had a son he refused to acknowledge.
Now he is living with her and that son, as well as her daughter from another relationship, and is half- heartedly trying to bond with the boy.
Invariably exhausted by his drug habit, Bret drags himself through the days fuelled by alcohol and his hyperactive self-disgust. There is a token job, teaching at a local college, as well as a lust object. But the narrator is ultimately a famous guy who is famous for having been really famous. His attempts at playing a suburban dad in drugland suburbia, a surreal place in which six-year-olds are on drugs in order to get through their day, and are auditioned for suitability before being invited to parties, are queasily funny.
While his relationship with his father becomes a horror story, his relationship with his son is also harrowing - and unconvincing.
"And now it's time to back into the past" announces the narrator early in the novel, and just prior to a pivotal setpiece, the Halloween party which introduces the theme of ghosts and hauntings.
Lunar Park is knowing and offbeat; it musters its energies from the burden of memory as well as the guilt of a survivor well aware that in our depraved society everything and anything is not so much possible as embarrassingly plausible.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Lunar Park By Bret Easton Ellis Picador, 308pp. £16.99
