Book review: Bret Easton Ellis - Lunar Park

Going right back, I've always associated Bret Easton Ellis with the Manic Street Preachers. Perhaps - probably, in fact - they were the first to nudge my attention in his direction, part of the endless barrage of quotes, references, iconography that comprised much of their early assault on the world. They shared more than that too, maybe: a certain youthful attitude, striking poses, causing fights, burning bridges and then disappearing. You could see the mutual attraction.

The comparison still holds, pretty much. The beauty of the Manics, of course, was they'd have to grow up - well, with one notable exception - and we'd have to grow up with them. Together, we've grown a little chubbier, we've mellowed and settled and survived...and we know that we'd bore the living hell out of our former firebrand selves. That's the essence of the Manics' art, right there: youthful invective turning to sensible middle age. It's not a sell-out, it's just how things go.

And thus, twenty-or-whatever years on, we get a Bret Easton Ellis novel about domesticity, about recovery, about compromise, about his relationship with his family. About not being a twenty-something it-bloke any more. It is, naturally enough, not nearly that simple, but neither is it the taut, barbed sneering with which he made gazillions of dollars and an entirely justified reputation. It'd be brave, if it wasn't an inevitable part of the process of growing up, something unavoidable. He can't write the same novel again, much as we might wish him to.

That's fine, then. What's hard to swallow is the mediocrity. Because there's a lot of middle ground between the glassy, dead-eyed prose of Ellis' best work and the tumbling, gulping confessional that comes out of the last pages of Lunar Park. Once you've got beyond a startlingly audacious opening chapter, and before you reach that highly emotive conclusion, you have to live with one overwhelming truth for several hundred pages: Bret Easton Ellis confronting American suburbia turns out to be a whole lot less interesting than you'd imagined.

Too much of Lunar Park is filled with surprisingly weak satire and lazy, obvious observation; too much of the rest comes across as frantic horror schlock rather than, as admirably intentioned, a breakdown into surreal, delusional paranoia. Having abandoned his old voice, and quite understandably so, Ellis never finds a new, distinctive style to replace it here, and never comes close to matching the compulsive, stunning rush of his early novels. It feels uncomfortable, almost unfinished. It feels recycled. Too much time in the studio, perhaps.

And thus, we have something unprecedented: a Bret Easton Ellis novel that's merely all right. Not great, not awful, just all right. It had to happen, in the end.