Do not write about Twitter in your book
Bret Easton Ellis' forthcoming new novel better make up for this
I just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis’ non-fiction book, White, from 2019. As many people have pointed out in critical reviews, it is not very good. I read it because I reluctantly identify myself with the niche demographic the author mentioned in his single most effusive bit of marketing for it: “this is kind of a book for a Bret Easton Ellis completist.” I would discourage people from reading it, unless you are happy just to sift for anecdotes about the novels and films you like. He goes on and on about Twitter – the mentioning of which in printed matter should be strictly taboo – and the many ways in which it eroded his First Amendment right to be annoying. White’s publication was a kind of light foreshadowing of J. K. Rowling1 writing a 1000-page detective thriller also largely about being criticised on Twitter, which, to Ellis’ minor credit, is a much greater sin. I also read it because I am anticipating the imminent release of his seventh novel, The Shards, and I want to keep up with what’s going on his head, but I should have been more careful what I wished for.
On the cover of my paperback copy, which I bought on a completionist whim from Hill of Content not long after it came out, the silly title appears in clear black text in a list of other identity categories which are printed in some kind of almost invisible reflective white text. The list is as follows: Writer, Critic, Lover, Hater, Tweeter, Free-Speaker, Transgressive, White, Privileged, Male. This should be enough to turn off any self-respecting reader, because it is obvious and strained edginess, unrescuable by irony.
However, I would like to point out that the word “straight” does not appear in the list, because, of course, Bret Easton Ellis is not straight. A significant proportion of this book consists of sincere and detailed, if occasionally contrarian, analyses of the representation of gay men and their sexuality in the films of our time. It’s both the screenwriter insider’s perspective and the genuine analytical passion of the long-time connoisseur of the medium and its men. A representative conclusion is this:
Moonlight is a labour of love while King Cobra might be one but doesn’t come off like it, yet I prefer King Cobra because this is the rare post-gay film in which no one is tortured about being gay, no one gets bullied, no one is ashamed, no one has tearfully passionate coming-out scenes, and there’s no gay suffering at all—there’s a murder, but it’s over money. And isn’t this, in our new acceptance of gay lives and equality, whether black or white, the more progressive view? (99)
Ellis is not exactly being hypocritical, because when he writes about gay representation it is usually to convey how much he doesn’t like Gay Representation, but I feel like this counts as engaging with the nuance of identity politics. He’s not trying to be contrarian by coming for Moonlight, which he respects technically but just can’t fully enjoy watching, because of his relationship to its categories of identity. It unintentionally reveals that Ellis (and he is not alone in this) throws the word idpol around to castigate other people mostly when they are talking about representation in a way that he doesn’t like, and that something necessarily isn’t idpol if it happens to be good.
White is mostly self-contained memoir, full of somewhat disconnected but variously interesting anecdotes concerning the creation of his novels, his work as a screenwriter, and his personal life. This includes accounts of his anxiety, an incident with a stalker, talking to his mother on the phone all afternoon on the day that 9/11 happened, and a one-off seizure. This struck me as suddenly and meaningfully vulnerable first-person writing that, in both tone and content, is bizarrely at odds with his random vollies against Generation Wuss. His even-handed reflections on his snarkiness towards David Foster Wallace was a genuinely interesting development, for example, as well as the revelation that Ellis loves Jonathan Franzen. He grudgingly respects and identifies with Wallace as an author who, beneath the ‘politics’ and the malformed reputation (Ellis seems to relish pointing out that the author of This is Water voted for Reagan), was concerned above all else with style, who was committed to “literary experimentalism,” and who in the end was a “genius” even if Ellis didn’t really like any of his stuff that much (176, 178).
I suspect a lot of the rants could have been cut from this book and we would have been left with a short topical memoir, drawing on Ellis’ immersion in the film industry as an industrious screenwriter, but mostly working through his not insignificant personal struggles and the inheritance of his novels in the contemporary moment. It might still have been a bit dry, and maybe the Twitter/idpol/‘are you triggered’ ranting was an attempt to thread something unifying through an otherwise disorganised autobiographical essay collection that would appeal to (or at least identify it to) the general public. If so, it was a tremendous failure. I was happy just reading about what it was like to tell Kanye West you’re too busy to write a film with him.
I think my favourite Ellis novel is Lunar Park, from 2005, and it’s relevant here to remember that it opens with a chapter which seems to be Ellis talking as the author – that is to say, that White is not really Ellis’ first print work of non-fiction self-reflective memoir. That opening chapter of Lunar Park is where he takes stock of each of the opening sentences of his novels up to that point, in an intimate synthesis of memoir and/as close reading. His ability to write a short opening sentence is something he loses after Less Than Zero, and Lunar Park is the semi-autobiographical struggle to get that aesthetic back – an aesthetic which is also a reflexive, even ethical attitude to a completely broken society.
Ellis is craving that self-control, that poise and discipline in the face of capitalist despair, in White, which is why he writes so lovingly of Joan Didion that
her style, her aesthetic, sold everything she wrote, and this belief in style, and the precision of her writing, seemingly erased ideology: she was a realist, a pragmatist, attuned to logic and facts, but a stylist first—as with all great writers, the style is where you located the meaning in her work. (171–172)
This centrist ‘facts and logic’ non-ideological thing is total nonsense; Didion is not good because she was non-ideological, which barely passes as a proposition, and there is no stylish way to be Ben Shapiro. But Ellis is at least onto something when he says that we find ‘meaning’ in the ‘style,’ if by ‘meaning’ what he really means is, in fact, politics. We have that sometimes in his novels, I think. Lunar Park’s first epigraph was a quote from Thomas McGuane’s semi-autobiographical novel Panama (1978): “The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.” I hope that Ellis gets a refund.
I would like to note also that Ellis mentions transgender people exactly once in the book and, given the incredibly off-putting blurb, cover, title, opening series of laments, and everything J. K. Rowling has been getting up to recently, one would probably be holding their breath to see what he has to say on the topic. Thankfully, it is a no-nonsense and explicitly empathetic, if brief, note on an unnamed TV show about trans women trying to achieve personal and aesthetic freedom:
It was a somewhat conventional prime-time soap, which seemed to take the characters’ lives seriously but their stories of pain and struggle took place in a world that didn’t want to acknowledge them; because they were somehow offensive and so should instead be erased, invisible, banned, and this had, for me, in the summer of 2018, a stress-inducing timeliness that had nothing to do with the show itself. (239)
It is funny both that he pretty quickly gets back to talking about himself and that what he takes from the experience of trans people in this case seems to be that he has something essential in common with them, on account of how dreadfully persecuted he is. This roundabout route to solidarity is usually completely impossible for reactionary writers today, who are almost universally deluded about what transgender people face as a demographic. After a refreshingly normal comment on this show about trans women, Ellis just gets right back to talking about Donald Trump and dinner parties and other important things.