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A troubled man who invented himself

In Lunar Park (Picador, £16.99) Bret Easton Ellis does that thing that very clever novelists like to do: he appears as a character in his own story. If the final effect is by turns baffling, intriguing, and, OK, rather moving, the beginning couldn't be sharper, and less playful - in short, less like a work of fiction.

Lunar Park starts as a memoir, with Easton Ellis detailing both his career (yes, he did become the enfant terrible of American letters with his first novel, Less Than Zero; yes, American Psycho turned him into a reviled writer) and the lows of his private life (yes, he's taken a lot of drugs; yes, he had a bad relationship with his father). It's compelling stuff.

Then, though, he lurches down the path of sub-Stephen King horror fiction, dragging us further and further from reality (no, Easton Ellis did not marry a Hollywood actress
Bret Easton Ellis is turning himself into a fictional character, says tim auld

and have a son; no, a serial killer has not - yet - begun to re-enact the scenes of torture and murder in American Psycho).

But storytelling's not really top of Easton Ellis's agenda. He's got messier psychological issues to run through his creative mill. At one point a character tells the novel's Easton Ellis, "I want you to face the disaster that is Bret Easton Ellis". The anxiety behind his writing is so palpable it would be churlish not to believe that the book is a cry for forgiveness: from his father, from the society he outraged.

But there's something else going on behind all the mucking around with genres: a clever joke at the expense of his readers, which you'll quite like, if you're quite a clever reader.


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