Bad-Boy Blues

BRET EASTON ELLIS GROWS UP

Bret Easton Ellis is an alcoholic, cokesnorting, self-obsessed crybaby whose once promising literary career has been eclipsed by his celebrity. Since his abusive father died, 13 years ago, Ellis, a bloated Lothario, has been engaged in little more than a slow-motion, paparazzi-ready train wreck. But listen-you didn't hear that from me. This is how Ellis describes the character Bret Easton Ellis, the antihero of his fifth novel, Lunar Park (Knopf). After being scraped up from rock bottom by Jayne, an old girlfriend and now a famous movie star, Bret Easton Ellis finds himself not only newly married and pressed into caring for the son he abandoned 11 years before but also living in the suburbs, where, we all know, the real hell begins. The perpetually tanked Ellis can't connect with anyone, not the grad student he longs to bed, nor his wife, nor his old pal Jay Mclnerney, nor, most poignantly, his adolescent son, Robby. Add to this mix a murderous bird doll, a series of grisly crimes based on those committed by Patrick Bateman (the yuppie serial killer of Ellis's American Psycho), and, most puzzling, the disappearance of the neighborhood's teenage boys. By combining equal parts John Cheever and Stephen King, and infusing the novel with his own, distinct brand of social satirein this case upscale, uptight white angst and modern child rearing (Meds! More meds!)—Ellis has created a potent and intoxicating cocktail, one that affords us visions without the ugly hangover. E.S.