Easton Ellis' Still Got It
Dont you wish the writers you like had blogs ? Now I've read Easton Ellis, seen the films and not the hugest fan overall, but he's necessary Gen-X reading and Lunar Park's supposed to be a great tell all book with a fictional twist. So, one year late and I'm finally reading it. 100 pages to go, couple days in. Thanks Tyson. Unfortunately I havent even got close to securing People of Paper, which (some compare to Lunar Park) as the lit-crit-clique of choice "author placing themself as a character within a hybrid autobiography cum fictional setting" genre which Lunar and People Paper fit into. Def to the record I say - I love non-understandable new mashedup genres that dont involve Google Maps, Ajax or DSL/WiFi. Given there is no easy cut'n'paste tool here I thought I'd old skool it and "type" an extract from the book, because I really like the obviously autobiographical parts of this book versus the suburban horror/psychosis :
"The idea of returning to a batchelor's life, and the condo I still kept on East 13th Street in Manhattan, was sliding towards me with an acid hiss. But a bachelor's life was a hard maze. Everyone knew bachelors lost their minds, grew old alone, became hungry specters who could never be sated. Bachelors paid maids to do their laundry. Another Glenfiddich ordered in a nightclub you were too old for, chatting up ponderous young girls who made you bristle and wince about all the things they didnt know. But in that chair on that deck I thought : Get out of Midland County, grow a goattee, smoke cigarettes again, seduce women half your age (but successfully), arrange a nice workspace in a sunny corner of the condo, become less maniacal about form, confide all your secret failures to friends. Free Bret. Start over. Get younger. Absorb yourself back into the world of teenage flameout and the curving murals of scoched corpses - the things that made you a youthful success. Continue your refusal to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality. Streamline yourself. Stop shrugging. Eliminate chic. Avoid all fey irony. Erase the jacket cover with the fuchsia lettering you had once desired. Get the full body wax and spray-on tan and the tattoo in serif scarring your biceps. Act like you've just blown in from nowhere. Push the gangsta attitude with a very smart face. Force them to take the cover story seriously, even though you knew how awful and fake it was." Now thats writing I digg (within the deprecating context of the book and Ellis' background etc), but any book that starts as follows is hard to resist (esp when you throw in the appearance of a Patrick Bateman doppelganger) : "You do an awfully good impression of yourself." This is the first line of Lunar Park and in its brevity and simplicity it was supposed to be a return to form, an echo, of the opening line from my debut novel, Less Than Zero.
The more I think about it, the more this book is reminding me of James Ellroy's My Dark Places. Dont even let me start on Ellroy. The Legend of Noir (black dahlia, american tabloid, LA quartet, cold hard 6 thousand, white jazz etc)
"The idea of returning to a batchelor's life, and the condo I still kept on East 13th Street in Manhattan, was sliding towards me with an acid hiss. But a bachelor's life was a hard maze. Everyone knew bachelors lost their minds, grew old alone, became hungry specters who could never be sated. Bachelors paid maids to do their laundry. Another Glenfiddich ordered in a nightclub you were too old for, chatting up ponderous young girls who made you bristle and wince about all the things they didnt know. But in that chair on that deck I thought : Get out of Midland County, grow a goattee, smoke cigarettes again, seduce women half your age (but successfully), arrange a nice workspace in a sunny corner of the condo, become less maniacal about form, confide all your secret failures to friends. Free Bret. Start over. Get younger. Absorb yourself back into the world of teenage flameout and the curving murals of scoched corpses - the things that made you a youthful success. Continue your refusal to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality. Streamline yourself. Stop shrugging. Eliminate chic. Avoid all fey irony. Erase the jacket cover with the fuchsia lettering you had once desired. Get the full body wax and spray-on tan and the tattoo in serif scarring your biceps. Act like you've just blown in from nowhere. Push the gangsta attitude with a very smart face. Force them to take the cover story seriously, even though you knew how awful and fake it was." Now thats writing I digg (within the deprecating context of the book and Ellis' background etc), but any book that starts as follows is hard to resist (esp when you throw in the appearance of a Patrick Bateman doppelganger) : "You do an awfully good impression of yourself." This is the first line of Lunar Park and in its brevity and simplicity it was supposed to be a return to form, an echo, of the opening line from my debut novel, Less Than Zero.
The more I think about it, the more this book is reminding me of James Ellroy's My Dark Places. Dont even let me start on Ellroy. The Legend of Noir (black dahlia, american tabloid, LA quartet, cold hard 6 thousand, white jazz etc)
posted by redbarren at 9:31 PM
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