Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (146 page)

The author obtruding ‘himself’ into the fictional action, like Alfred Hitchcock’s hallmark cameos in his movies, is no new device. If you go back to one of the fathers of the English novel, Tobias Smollett, one discovers him doing it. Christopher Isherwood (‘Herr Issyvoo’) also did it in
Goodbye to Berlin
. Philip Roth began introducing a whole regiment of para-Philip Roths into his fiction with
Deception
(aptly named). Is ‘Jeanette’ in
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson? Is ‘W.G. Sebald’ (the inverted commas are meaningful), the narrator-wanderer in
The Rings of Saturn
, ruminating about life as he ambles around East Anglia, Max Sebald? You shouldn’t do this kind of thing, protested Kingsley Amis, when young Martin went ahead and did it by introducing ‘Martin Amis’ into
Self
, ‘it’s breaking the rules’, ‘buggering about with the reader’. But who says novels have rules? It’s not association football.

Assuming that
Summertime
is a bona fide self-portrait, it’s the least flattering
since Dorian Gray’s. ‘John Coetzee’, his near and dear ones grimly recall after his ‘death’, was ‘scrawny’, ‘seedy’ and exuded ‘an air of failure’. He ‘had no sexual presence whatsoever, as though he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutralising spray’. His ‘teeth are in bad shape’. He is ‘sexless’. Intercourse with him, reports one disgusted lover, ‘lacked all thrill’. His cousin (with whom he has an arid fling in a broken-down pick-up truck) calls him ‘slap gat’ – an Afrikaans word for a loose anus (Americans have a homelier phrase). Another lover comes as near as dammit to accusing him of an unhealthily paedophiliac interest in young girls. Above all, John Coetzee has no faith in his art. ‘Why’, he asks himself, ‘does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?’ No answer is given.

But, to return to the question, is this sad apology for a man and a novelist ‘J. M. Coetzee’? Reviewing Philip Roth’s novel,
Operation Shylock: A Confession
(1993) – in which the principal character is ‘Philip Roth’ – Coetzee observed, in the course of an extremely subtle analysis, ‘We are in the sphere of the Cretan Liar’ (i.e. ‘everything I say is a lie, including this’).
Summertime
, one suspects, is in the same riddlingly Cretan sphere.

‘Autre-biography’, as what Coetzee does has been called, is a bent genre in which, like alloy, the elements of personal biography and impersonal fiction are so artfully intermingled that they defy disentangling. Is it a dead end, or one of the new mansions in James’s House of Fiction? An interesting dead end, in my view, but one should never underestimate novelists’ ingenuity in escaping the traps they set themselves. Like the magician, their next trick is always impossible.

I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of non-fiction as I could in any of my novels.

As novelists insert versions of themselves and the events of their lives more and more into the pages of their fiction, the boundaries between truth and make-believe,
fiction and biography, blur. No writer has taken the blur of autre-biography to a blurrier extreme than Bret Easton Ellis in
Lunar Park
(2005) and its successor,
Imperial Bedrooms
(2010).
Lunar Park
is supposedly named after the place where the main action happens. There is – I’ve checked – no town of that name in New York State, any more than there is a Stepford in Connecticut, or an Ambridge in Borsetshire. The hero-narrator of
Lunar Park
is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’: a real person of that same name wrote the novel set in the fictional place. In a long authorial preface to
Lunar Park
, Bret (let’s say ‘Bret’) confesses to gargantuan excess after the runaway success of his precociously early super-sellers,
Less than Zero
and
American Psycho
, had shot him to bestsellerdom, millionairedom and the ranks of front-page celebrity as the brattiest leader of fiction’s brat-pack.

So far, so true. The young ‘Bret’ embarks on a bender of conspicuous consumption, fashion trashing, and self-indulgence:

I was doing Ray-Ban ads at twenty-two. I was posing for the covers of English magazines on a tennis court, on a throne, on the deck of my condo in a purple robe. I threw lavish catered parties – sometimes complete with strippers – in my condo on a whim (‘Because it’s Thursday!’ one invitation read). I crashed a borrowed Ferrari in Southampton and its owner just smiled (for some reason I was naked). I attended three fairly exclusive orgies … I dined at the White House in the summer of 1986, the guest of Jeb and George W. Bush, both of whom were fans.

The Bushes are real (too real for some) but I doubt that they were ever fans of
Less than Zero
– even in the hot days of their youth. And if the Bush boys were fans of Ellis’s ‘black candy’, it was very wise to keep it secret from the religious right, which voted one brother into presidency and the other into governorship of the conservative state of Florida.

Briefly for ‘Bret’, as chronicled in
Lunar Park
, it was ‘top of the world, ma!’ But, inevitably, under the glare and temptations of celebrity, he took to heroin, cocaine and vile sexual practices and ended up lying in a squalid hotel bedroom for seven days ‘watching porn DVDs with the sound off and snorting maybe 40 bags of heroin, a blue plastic bucket that I vomited in continually by my bed’. His descent to the blue bucket was, ‘Bret’ divulges, fuelled by the death in August 1992 of his father, Robert Martin Ellis, a couple of months after the publication of
American Psycho
. The portrait of Ellis Sr offered in
Lunar Park
is one that most sons would keep in the attic. He was a real-estate crook, and ‘careless, abusive, alcoholic, vain, angry, paranoid’. Chapter and verse is supplied for these paternal shortcomings. Bret’s dad was, apparently, the inspiration for Patrick Bateman, the sociopath hero of
American Psycho
. In
Lunar Park
, Mr Ellis Sr’s dead body ‘was found naked by the
22-year-old girlfriend on the bathroom floor of his empty house in Newport Beach’. He left, among many squandered millions, a wardrobe of over-sized Armani suits. When ‘Bret’ (who, like Bateman, is partial to Armani) took the clothes to the tailor to be altered, he recounts: ‘I was revolted to discover that most of the inseams in the crotch were stained with blood, which we later found out was the result of a botched penile implant he underwent in Minneapolis.’

Robert Martin Ellis was, so to speak, real. He was, I have read, a realtor. He did indeed die in August 1992 and
Lunar Park
is dedicated to his memory. Whether it was with a surgically enhanced penis that he went to the crematorium fire, or the unsullied member with which he engendered young Bret, literary history may never know. ‘Bret Easton Ellis’ – he of the novel – suspects that Robby, his love child by the woman who later became his wife, Jayne Dennis, was engendered by Keanu Reeves, ‘who had been a friend of mine when he was initially cast in
Less than Zero
, [before being] replaced by Andrew McCarthy’. So suspicious was ‘Bret’ of the actor that he launched a paternity case in which his lawyer asserted in court that Dennis’s child ‘bears a striking resemblance to a certain Mr Keanu Reeves’. Litigation was subsequently dropped, ‘Bret’ and Dennis were reconciled, married, and went to live in Lunar Park with Robby and a daughter born in wedlock. Reeves is, so to speak, real – although, as one reads
Lunar Park
, the idea of what is or isn’t real gets as hard to hold as a wet bar of soap. The real Reeves enjoys, one understands, cordial relations with the real Ellis. Before becoming a superstar Reeves was, initially, cast as the lead in
Less than Zero
and replaced by the equally real Andrew McCarthy. Jayne Dennis (although she had a website around the time of
Lunar Park
’s publication) is not real; nor is the dubiously sired Robby Ellis. They are figments of the fictional
Lunar Park
. Ellis is not married and has no child. In August 2009 he told the
New York Times
that he was bisexual, and that his best friend and lover for six years, Michael Wade Kaplan, had died in January 2004, aged thirty. That is not the history of ‘Bret’ in
Lunar Park
.

The main narrative of
Lunar Park
chronicles the disintegration of the Ellis–Dennis marriage. Patrick Bateman, the murderous, paternally inspired, serial killer of
American Psycho
, comes to life off the page and haunts his creator – a lunatic. Bateman is not real, while his author is – but perhaps not entirely, in
Lunar Park
. Ellis’s epigraph to
Lunar Park
explains what he is doing. Celebrity – such as he has been exposed to – means that the traditional aesthetic categories of subject and object dissolve into one thing: ‘image’. Images can be real, as in a mirror, or chimerical, as in a drug-induced hallucination. But images are all that there is. ‘The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul,’ Ellis says, ‘is that at some point you buy a ticket too.’ If, that is, you live inside enormous celebrity,
you become the spectator of your own spectacle and indivisible from it. Or, as the pungent idiom puts it, you start believing your own shit, and living it.

Ellis goes further into the autre-biographical maze in his 2010 novel,
Imperial Bedrooms.
The narrative picks up from Ellis’s first published novel, the hugely successful
Less than Zero
(that novel and
Imperial Bedrooms
both take their titles from Elvis Costello songs – trendier, perhaps, in 1985 than 2010). The sequel opens, twenty-five years later, with the hero, Clay, ruminating about what the ‘author’ (i.e. Bret Easton Ellis) did to ‘us’ in the earlier novel and what the movie industry (
Less than Zero
was filmed in 1987) had done to ‘us’ in its adaptation of Ellis’s novel:

They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away.

As it goes on,
Imperial Bedrooms
emerges as what, in the ‘decadent’ 1890s, would have been called an
étude
– a study of prodigiously moneyed, modish and privileged
ennui
. It is not, one may be confident, a factually reliable portrait of the author as a no longer young man.

Despite the ostentatious self-display and plays with his name in his fiction Ellis is a secretive man. One’s expectation is that posterity will – once Henry James’s posthumous exploiters get to work – have a more trustworthy sense of who Bret Easton Ellis actually is than his current readers do. Until then we must be content to be merely dazzled at the self-images he throws up.

It would be a refreshing change to write something where I’m not attacked.
Michael Crichton, 1994, after the furore about the ‘anti-scientific’ bias of
Jurassic Park

All that California has given the world, Woody Allen bitterly jested, is right on red. For a generation of thoughtful popular novelists and film-makers, it has in fact given the world something else – the theme park. It was the annual trip to Disneyland and ‘Autopolis’ that inspired young George Lucas –
Star Wars
was born on that excited little boy’s ride. Ira Levin’s
The Stepford Wives
is a riff on the ‘animatronics’ of the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ ride at Anaheim. As, of course, is
Pirates of the Caribbean
, the movie. Michael Crichton saw the Californian theme park as the material embodiment of the Great American Dream – cross-hatched with nightmare. His miniature masterpiece,
Westworld
(1973), a film over which he had total artistic control, fantasises a theme park which takes over the world that made the theme park: which (in the brooding inhumanity of Yul Brynner – inspiration for James Cameron’s
Terminator
) unleashes not merely the joy, but the ineradicable violence in the American soul. The film
Jurassic Park
(1993) is bigger, but suffers from the statutory five lumps of Spielberg sugar added to its mordant, Crichtonian, mix. He was not, given his artistic freedom, a cheerful sage.

Crichton was – in intellectual pedigree if not artistic practice – one of the more academically distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. The son of a Chicago journalist (sometimes described as a ‘corporate president’), whom he later called in print, somewhat paradoxically, ‘a first-rate son of a bitch’ and child-beater, Michael seems to have had an unhappy but materially comfortable childhood. Whatever the misery he endured, young Michael was precociously clever: he had a column published in the travel section of the
New York Times
at the age of fourteen. Other glittering prizes followed. He graduated from Harvard
summa cum laude
, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in natural sciences. He went on to do research at Cambridge University in anthropology. He eventually took an MD from his alma mater and did post-doctoral work at the Jonas Salk Institute in California. He could have spent the rest of his life publishing in learned journals like
Materia Medica
.