Lunar Park

I've been a hot and cold fan of Bret Easton Ellis for a while. I've found issues with his work and his subsequent success, but I've also gained a lot of insight from him as a young writer. However, I only intended to read Lunar Park as entertainment on my travels back from Vermont. This novel really surprised me. It played with the idea of artist and distance from artistic endeavors so well and in such a fresh way. It is written as, at least at first, a seemingly accurate autobiography. Ellis uses a first-person narrator, which is actually himself, and discusses his past success, mentioning books such as American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Less Than Zero. What is interesting in this beginning section of the book is the author is writing a fictionalized autobiography which satirizes the "reality" an audience tries to place on fiction. Eventually, these books, particularly the father in Less Than Zero and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, both characters based on Ellis' own real life father, begin to haunt the narrator (Ellis) literally. The novel turns into an almost sci-fi suspense story, where the author is attempting to deal with the "monsters" he has created rather than dealing with the problems in his life. I think part of what made such an impression on me in reading this book is that I had somewhat low expectations, and I say that without any disrespect. While Ellis might be a bit of a one-trick pony, he really did write in a style that was completely appropriate to his generation and more or less invented a new style. However, this was the first book of his that broke that mold, and it was such a creative approach, it surprised me quite a bit. The reason the novel works as well as it does is because it is a pseudo-autobiography that is established as extremely believable. In fact, the first 30 pages or so are almost actually autobiographical, talking about real people, real events, real books, real success. Throughout the novel, he discusses his agent "Binky," who is actually his literary agent at ICM. These facts thrown in amongst fiction make it almost believable when the house shifts to his childhood home, the bird doll he bought for his daughter comes alive and turns evil, Patrick Bateman exists and is murdering people, and the ghost of his dead father comes back to life. I'm not much of a science-fiction fan, but this (quite literally) literary sci-fi is a genre I could grow quite accustomed to reading.