'White' Bret Easton Ellis

I was in a bar in my early twenties when one of the first publishers I ever met scolded me for naming Bret Easton Ellis as one of my favourite writers. American Psycho had yet to be published. She said Ellis was overrated waving her arm though the air – her rose gold bracelets jangling. Ellis’s record stands. So does hers. And Ellis won. For me Ellis is up there with the Marquis de Sade and Oscar Wilde – ferocious dandy stylists of their times – writers who refused to pull their punches. It landed De Sade and Wilde in jail – Ellis fared better but American Psycho still came wrapped in plastic and generated typhoon levels of hysteria. Interestingly for a text written by Ellis, White seems to have generated barely a ripple in what Ellis refers to as the post empire bubble. Apart from the laughable interview where some NYT staff writer with a Trump obsession tried to back Ellis into a group think corner there’s been very little reaction. Maybe that’s what happens when you very calmly and adroitly point out the ridiculousness of the machine – it greets you with silence. Which is a shame because that nobody staff writer missed the point about White entirely – this isn’t a book about Trump – this is a book about the importance of artistic and intellectual freedom in an era when it’s routinely AND insidiously compromised. A roll call of anti-PC musings from the mind of an artist, someone who once wrote a perfectly pitched and timed fake memoir (Lunar Park), an artist who prefers aesthetics to ideology and freedom of speech over identity politics. He makes a lot of sense. And while this is certainly not the best thing he’s ever written it’s kind of wonderful to hang out in his mind for a while – especially if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, Ellis writes beautifully about generational politics and film, his musings on his millennial lover’s Trump induced meltdowns are hilarious and heartbreaking and his teenage fantasies about Richard Gere in American Gigolo sublime reflections on how much cinematic immersion has infused his writing. He can swing from surreal descriptions of his own artistic stasis, to accidentally ordering drugs on Twitter, to the outrage storms generated by Kayne West and Charlie Sheen – all of it wrapped up in his often bemused but in the end very sharp critique of the thought police. As someone who really enjoyed Ellis’s take down of Ramona Koval at the Byron Bay Writers Festival years ago (he refused to answer any of her breathlessly condescending and judgy questions instead talking about how gay Music Max was) – that interview is still available on the internet BTW – ‘not everyone’s cup of tea’ as Ramona described him, I liked this book. I certainly know who I’d rather have a cup of tea, or a very, very dry martini with.