Bret Easton Ellis / Features / Untitled Books

"if I look back on any of the books I’ve written, there are definite correlations between the narrator and myself, probably no more so than Patrick Bateman."

Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis is notorious for his disaffected characters and scenes of sex and violence. Controversy dogs him, fans adore him, universities teach him, and the enfant terrible shows no sign of mellowing. He's just trying to write through the pain of his childhood, he tells Viola Fort.

When Bret Easton Ellis comes to town, he generates the kind of buzz usually reserved for rock stars and Hollywood actors. He doesn't have readers so much as he has fans. Posters for his new book Imperial Bedrooms are plastered under tube tunnels alongside the latest album releases and festival line ups. A talk he gives at the South Bank Centre breaks attendance records and attracts the kind of crowd more usually found at headline gigs and movie premiers. Newspapers dedicate valuable column inches debating his importance as a writer while the diary pages zing with snippets of gossip sightings around town.

He plays the part well, sauntering in to the magisterial tea room at Claridges in full off-duty-celebrity uniform of jogging suit, baseball cap and dark glasses. He must be the last author in the business to be put up in Claridges but has the good grace to feel bemused at the five star treatment and huge media interest. At 46, he is still finding a new generation of readers as well as absolute loyalty from the kids who read his first novel Less Than Zero when it was first published, and are in middle age now.

Less than Zero was written in college and hit the book shops when he was only 24, and depicts a life unapologetically glitzy and shallow, a strong cocktail of entitled privilege, dispassionate sex and casual drug taking, spiked with the growing threat of violence. Clay, an eighteen year old college student returns home to LA for Christmas and sleepwalks through a series of bars, clubs and house parties with his friends Julian, Trent and Rip, and ex-girlfriend Blair. The book propelled Ellis front and centre stage from the off, despite meeting a hailstorm of bad reviews. His unsentimental portrayal of youth was shockingly nihilistic at the time, and remains so to this day. He seems to have presaged something of today's youth culture, with its twin pillars of celebrity and materialism.

Less than Zero, like American Psycho and Lunar Park to follow, has a flat, neutral quality, which has allowed it to age like Hollywood star with an excellent plastic surgeon, finding new currency with each successive generation of youth. A quarter of a century after it was first published, he has written a follow up, Imperial Bedrooms, which revisits the cast of the first book, who are all as dysfunctional, shallow and screwed up as their early years might have suggested.

It is written in the same affectless tone that permeates Less than Zero, with the paranoia levels amplified. The impression is of an excessively violent book, but in fact most of the violence is implied, or occurs off-stage. It strikes me that this lurking sense of threat must be the most technically difficult aspect of the book, but in fact, Ellis says, it was an inevitable externalization of what he was feeling at the time. "I was there. I was there the whole time. It was going on in my life; it just came out in the writing. I don't think I would have written that book if I had not been going through something similar to Clay. Now, I was not involved with a nefarious rich dude who can kidnap people and have them offed, or a drugs cartel," he laughs, "but there were definitely similarities between what was going on in my life and what was going on in Clay's. That's just always how it is. I mean, if I look back on any of the books I've written, there are definite correlations between the narrator and myself, probably no more so than Patrick Bateman."

Patrick Bateman, the yuppie serial killer, who posed and slashed his way through American Psycho, is Ellis' most notorious creation and by his own account, a version of himself. When it was first published in 1991, there was an "awful avalanche of negativity." Information about the contents of the novel had been leaked to the press and a campaign of a priori criticism snowballed to epic proportions. "But you know what? Once that book was published, it stopped; the controversy completely stopped. Because the months of controversy leading up to that book presented the novel as a mountain of violent pornography, like it was 400 pages of the Marquis de Sade, and when the book came out, I think there was a bit of disappointment that it really wasn't as awful as the press had made it out to be. People saw that there was actually an aesthetic plan to the book."

After such a storm of aspersion, American Psycho has gone on to assume a revered position in the Canon of Modern American Literature, a twist that has delighted Ellis, even though he insists the excoriating reviews never bothered him. "I feel vindicated, yes I do," he says. "I always believed in the book. I always thought it was what I intended it to be and I thought sooner or later people will ultimately get it. I also thought the book was very funny, a comedy of manners. I wasn't quite sure if the murder sequences were actually happening or these sick fantasies in his head, you know...whatever," (his conversation is salted with these slightly camp, Californian whatever's), "I always thought that a reader was going to read this book at some time in the future and get it and all would be, if not well, then at least the controversy would have died down. And it has, it really has. There is no more controversy about that book."

Ellis grew up in a wealthy Californian household dominated by an overbearing, violent father, who cast a long shadow over his son. Even now, close to twenty years after his death, Easton Ellis refers repeatedly to "daddy issues" and cites his malign influence as an ongoing source of unhappiness that continues both to corrode him and fuel his need to write. His books are saturated with paranoia, fear and violence, which he admits is a familiar state of being, stemming directly from "the darkness of my childhood, the monster in the house."

As a child, he was drawn to books as a means of escape, to comics and Stephen King novels, before moving on to Hemmingway and Joan Didion (indeed, Less than Zero has a more then a little in common with Play it as it Lays.) But it was The Sun Also Rises that turned Ellis from a reader in to a writer after staying up all night to cram for a test aged 14. "I read it in one sitting. I couldn't put it down. It was electrifying, it changed my life," he remembers. "I read it again, I didn't sleep at all that night, I read it twice in one night. It was a kind of fantastic experience looking back on it. You only have that experience once or twice in your life. It was a moment, it was a huge night, and it was like, 'I'm going to write novels now.'

Each of his books have grown out of experiences or issues in his own life, "usually associated with pain, stress, chaos; someone doesn't love you. My problems with dealing with the futility of life." But despite the many close parallels between the lives of his characters and his own, Ellis seems to have little affection for his creations. They are weak, shallow, without morals or principles. Few of them seem capable of joy. Few find a happy ending. "The act of writing has nothing to do with caring about the characters," he points out. "It has nothing to do with whether they're fantastic or vile or whatever; it's just a need."

Like his character Clay in Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis moved back to LA from New York, where he realised he'd "stayed at the party too long." He felt, in his last years there, a growing impatience and annoyance at the East Coast literary scene. "All my friends were writers and there was always another reading to go to, always another PEN dinner I had to attend - I didn't have to but everyone was going and if I didn't it would be so much more complicated than if I just went to the fucking thing and dealt with it and endured it. It was like the last gasp of glamour in the publishing industry was happening and I went along with it, but I don't know that I ever fully felt it." A dangerous kind of boredom ensued and "very bad habits began to announce themselves," he says. "I was doing a lot more drugs and I was hanging out with people I would never have hung out with before. You just hit a point where you just think, 'what the hell am I doing?'" Breaking point came when his friend Mike Kaplin died in 2004. The two were extremely close ("I hesitate to say I was with him, but we had a very close relationship.") and Ellis still sounds shocked at the loss, "Out of the blue this healthy 30 year old guy dies of a massive aneurism and it was like, boom!" Ellis packed his bags and left New York immediately.

In LA he seems to have found, for the time being at least, some degree of sanctuary and stability. He admits there are far fewer parties, and feels relieved of some of the pressure he felt in New York; "Not as much is required of you, you don't have to be so smart." Fittingly, given his new location, his new work is all for film and TV, "that to me right now is the novel I'm most interested in." If the medium is a departure, the material isn't. The series he's currently developing is about surveillance technology and stalking, and follows a group of young people in New York as they negotiate relationships in the digital age. It's familiar, but by no means tired, ground, and Ellis' particular specialism, "So much paranoia," he laughs, "so much anxiety!" He sounds positively gleeful.

...............................................................................................................................

Imperial Bedrooms is published by Picador.

...............................................................................................................................

Thursday, 5 August, 2010