Like revolution, fame has a nasty habit of eating its children. On one level Lunar Park explores the perils that an author faces when subjected to the sort of celebrity usually reserved for rock stars and supermodels. It’s not just any old author, either, but Bret Easton Ellis himself.
Or is it? The narrator of the novel is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’. ‘There’s one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands’, he assures the reader. ‘All of it really happened, every word is true.’ The early chapters of this book invite the reader to play the chic, post-modern game of Spot the Join. ‘Bret’ has published the same novels as his creator, shares many of the same friends (Sonny Mehta and Jay McInerney included) and has enjoyed the same extraordinary success as the leader of the literary Brat Pack. But has Bret Easton Ellis really frittered away so much money on conspicuously failing to have a good time? Did he really consume so many truckloads of alcohol and drugs? Is it really so ghastly to be Bret?
Somewhere along the line, Bret and ‘Bret’ part company. The reader knows this for sure when, some time after 9/11, America lurches into a mildly dystopian alternative present, in which the country is plagued with terrorist attacks and unexplained crimes. ‘Bret’ himself makes an uncharacteristically determined effort to put his past behind him. He forces himself through rehab. He marries Jayne, a former girlfriend who is now a movie star. She is also the mother of his son Robbie, whom ‘Bret’ now reluctantly acknowledges, and a daughter by a subsequent liaison.
The little family moves into a lavishly equipped ‘McMansion’ in a featureless suburb two hours from New York. Their address is 307 Elsinore Lane (Fortinbras Park is nearby). ‘Bret’ teaches creative writing one day a week at a local college. He even begins work on his new book, a pornographic thriller entitled Teenage Pussy.
But it doesn’t take long for it all to go wrong. ‘Bret’ is soon lusting after one of his students and swallowing steadily escalating quantities of intoxicating substances. The family dog hates him. So does the Terby, a bird-like doll which erupts into malevolent life. He is plagued by visits from an increasingly hostile young man who bears an extraordinary likeness to the young Bret (or ‘Bret’). The California bank which holds his father’s ashes sends him scores of mysterious emails containing a video of his father’s dying moments. The McMansion is changing insidiously into Bret’s boyhood home. A monster emerges, trailing slime, from the wood in the enormous backyard. Boys are vanishing from the neighbourhood — most of them Robbie’s age. And it seems that someone is replicating with hideous precision the murders that Bret himself created in his novel American Psycho.
It would be easy to dismiss this solipsistic exercise in American gothic as a mere designer-label thriller, a coldly calculated blend of self-referential meta-fiction and contemporary genre floating on a tidal wave of marketing. But this would be only part of the truth. Ellis observes at one point that ‘celebrity was a life lived in code,’ and in this hugely readable and carefully structured novel he makes a valiant but not entirely successful attempt to crack it.
His principal conclusions have a quaintly Victorian flavour: that the father-son relationship is crucial to a man’s development; that fame is a poisoned gift from fate; and that, yes, you really can have too much fun. Leaving that aside, however, you are left with something that has an equally old-fashioned taste: in his superb handling of horror, of the ambiguous terrors that lurk within and without, Bret Easton Ellis is oddly reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe.a
Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is Call the Dying (Hodder & Stoughton).
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