This month's book club selection was Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
The book club crowd was mostly divided between “didn't like,” “didn't get,” “didn't like or get,” or “it was okay.” In the end, a book which received great reviews—from an author with a cult following, now less, was met with Less Than Zero, er, two, stars. Less Than Zero, get it? lol
Lunar Park is a fictional autobiography-slash-horror novel. Told in the first person, its main character is Bret Easton Ellis, who spends the first chapter giving himself a “personal blowjob.”(Shout out to Vickie for that quote, btw.) After hearing how awesome and talented and better than you he is for 10 or so pages..where he recounts his earlier successes of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, we learn he went through a hedonistic phase, fathered a child with an actress a decade ago, went to rehab, and rebounded by marrying said actress and attempting to go “family man” in a posh NYC suburb.
Bret is teaching a class at the local college, trying to bed a grad student, doing coke and other drugs behind his wife's back, and, well, generally going berserk. His stepdaughter's Terby doll seems to be haunted. Then a student who is cross between Patrick Batemen (the serial killer from American Pyscho), his father (whom Patrick Bateman was based on) and Bret's younger self begins appearing random places and freaking Bret out for no apparent reason. Then young boys start disappearing. And there are these weird emails from a Bank of America branch in California. And a serial killer picking people off based by his previous writings (both public and private).
Annnnyyyyyyhoooo.
Is he crazy? Too coked up or drunk to be telling the truth? Is it all real? It goes on forever.
In the end, I recommend any BEE fan read this. Ellis incorporates writing techniques that have made a fan out of me many times over. He uses characters (using that term loosely) from different books in the new story (Victor, Mitch, and Donald Kimball). He leaves the end result ambiguous (as in American Psycho, where we didn't know if Bateman was a killer or a crazy, here we don't know if Bret is haunted physically or just mentally). And his social commentary is still riotously spot on. Kids pop Klonopin like candy and wear Posh Spice outfits for Halloween.
However, as I suppose I hinted at in the synopsis, the book feels like a giant run on sentence. It wasn't concise enough for me. Its ghosts aren't scary. Bret's issues don't make me feel sad...or even empathetic. And friends I spoke to who had never read anything else by him liked it even less than I did. Perhaps a few less subplots next time would work.
Bottom line: if you like BEE, read it. If you've never read anything by him, don't start with this (Rules of Attraction is my personal favorite).
