End of the novel, end of the empire

The novel has lost its function, says Bret Easton Ellis, and it's all over for America, too. The author of 'American Psycho' is retooling for post-empire life, writes KEITH DUGGAN

ON THE flight over from London for his public reading in Galway, Bret Easton Ellis had a chance to catch up on some reading. His publicist had a stash of classics waiting for him: Ok! Hello! People. US.He passed the flight blissfully scanning gossip and photographs concerning the beautiful people.

“Every article was about some kind of pain,” he marvelled. “People’s pain! Madonna’s pain about her old hands that they can’t cover up. Or Jennifer Aniston’s constant pain about not being able to find a man. They did a horrible section about women and men who had bad plastic surgeries. And Sandra . . . who’s the one who won the Oscar? Bullock, right . . . and her pain about having to deal with Jessie James and how they are just going to be friends. Every article was about pain.”

Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis's new novel, deals with the full range of human pain, be it the explicit and gruesome variety inflicted on the doomed Julian Wells in a customarily numbed portrait of torture or the emotional anguish of his narrator, Clay. It is Ellis's seventh work of fiction and re-imagines the cast of characters from Less than Zero,the debut that transformed him from just another white, affluent, alienated young Los Angeleno to the rarefied group of American writers who have achieved the delicate trick of being championed and demonised all at once.

Ellis was 21 when he wrote his debut, the same age as his characters. Now, he is an exuberantly fresh-looking 46, old enough to look back at the angst of his younger self with wry amusement while remaining faithful to the themes and pop cultural obsessions his readers expect. He nods eagerly at the mention of a reading he gave in Boston in the autumn of 1994; of the hundreds of readings he has forgotten, this one holds a permanent place in his mind. It was one of his first public appearances after the infamy that followed the publication of American Psychoin 1991.

There were security guards positioned around the room that night, he says, because of the death threats he received and, although he read from The Informersand was pleasant, he found the experience unnerving. "I was petrified," he says, his eyes widening at the memory. Time has elevated American Psycho,Ellis's signature book, into the realm of modern classic and the idea of any novel now causing the storm it did back then seems both quaint and impossible.

Ellis’s remains one of the most marketable names in fiction but he claims to live a perfectly anonymous life. “I live a boring life,” he says, adding helpfully: “I am not . . . drinking blood or doing whatever people imagine the person who wrote those books would be doing.” And as he sits at a small white-clothed table in the foyer of the Meyrick hotel, where he will give a tea-time reading, it is perfectly believable. There is something of the chameleon about Ellis; he blends in.

On this afternoon, he is tired. "I am wrecked," he says conspiratorially. "I've been wrecked for two months." But he is sharp and engaged and mannerly. At tea time, he will draw a conspicuously hip crowd to a sell-out reading and will combine the kind of effortless courtesy not seen since Denholm Elliot was on television with urbane wisecracks that trade on the aura of notoriety that has followed him since he created Patrick Bateman. Ellis may have gracefully sailed from the shores of youthfulness but he is still hip with the kids. Imperial Bedroomsinvolves a monster publicity tour but when conversation turns to the demise of the novel as announced by Philip Roth, he nods gravely.

“He is right! It has happened. I remember when Philip Roth was making these statements. And it happened. Certainly within the last five years. The big serious American literary novel: what part in the culture does it play? The culture’s fragmented and fractured. We don’t need it. There is no need to have that kind of information handed to us by a novelist with made up people and that says important things about society. That is not good or bad. It is just a fact. The role that the novel plays now has become completely diminished.”

And Ellis has worse predictions. Sinking also is another establishment: America. He delights in referring to his native country as “the empire” and he feels certain its time has passed. “We are a post-empire world. What can I tell you? It’s all over. The empire is gone and it is not coming back.”

He did not share the general euphoria that marked the unprecedented surge to power of Barack Obama. “Disappointment at the naivete and the sentimentalisation that Americans have for narrative,” he says flatly when asked about his reaction to those few months. “That is what I was thinking about. And I was thinking about a young handsome black LAWYER who doesn’t have any EXPERIENCE. No! No! No! The sentimental narrative is what Americans respond to.

“The idea of liberal nobility at play with the election of Obama was too irresistible for Americans to really sit back and look at what the long term effects would be. So we’ve got a one-term president now and a disappointed country. I don’t even follow politics that closely but that was not politics: that was a story. And the jubilation was gone months after the election. It bothers me enough to talk about it because I was created in the empire. My consciousness was developed in the empire. So having to retool myself for the post-empire way is strange but it is also exciting.”

And as he describes it, it is not exactly penance either. He has fled New York, complaining that all his friends have had to move out of Manhattan to other less expensive boroughs. “The only friends I have who can afford to live in Manhattan are Jay McInerney and Candace Bushnell,” he sighs, sounding a valedictory note.

“I still have my place in Manhattan which I sub-let but . . . I dunno. LA seems to be the future. It is very global and not in a high-end, European, Eurotrashy way. It is global in a much more classless way than New York. And plus, I am working here. You have to be here to get the work.”

He has made his peace with Los Angeles, city of a troubled childhood, source of his material and burial place to the estranged father whose spirit acts as the furnace for his work. Now, he brightly points out the major advantage it has over the eastern metropolis: the weather. For some reason the comment John Banville made on a television documentary to the effect that he could not write outside of Ireland because of the light comes to mind. Ellis looks enormously pleased when he hears this.

“John Banville is so cute,” he purrs. “He’s just so cute! When he says things like that, it’s adorable. It is just adorable. Oooooh. What a sweetie! I remember hanging out with him the night he won the Booker. I had just done a huge signing at . . . the Southbank? And there was a party for John at the Groucho club. He seemed so miserable even though he had won the Booker! I dunno. Anyway. I just went off on a tangent there. But it makes me happy to hear someone said that. I think it is mildly ridiculous . . . but it is romantic at heart.

“There is a romance to that,” he repeats, turning solemn again. “There is. But then he is of a different generation and I think he is looking at the idea of the novel maybe differently than I am. He probably has a more romanticised view of the novel than I have ever had.”

And this is the thing about Ellis. He is much too masterful a player of the publishing game to ever try to disown the spectre of Patrick Batemen, instead incorporating his Wall Street monster into other fictions. But beyond the 15 pages of horror that earned him his notoriety, Ellis has deadly serious ideas about the novel. And 25 years after he was accused by Norman Mailer of “handing the novel over to a madman”, Ellis has stayed the course, persevering through the years and producing fiction through various “meltdowns”.

IN GALWAY, ELLIS suffered through an obligatory five-minute reading from Imperial Bedroomsbefore conducting his own public interview. It was clear the crowd adored him and although the mirrored roof and chandeliers in the ballroom evoked something of American Psychodécor, the only suitable venue for an Ellis reading would be a cocktail bar with a tasteful 1980s soundtrack.

A 25th-anniversary edition of Less Than Zerowill be published later this year. Ellis admits he has no idea why the book has endured or why it calls out to contemporary 18-year-olds.

“There were better books published that year,” he says dryly.

But his best novels, despite the polarised reviews, still strike a chord and few American writers of Ellis’s generation command such strong opinion. Conversation turns to David Foster Wallace, the revered writer who was born two years before Ellis and whose writing shone with the compassion so starkly absent in Ellis’s work. Wallace took his own life in 2008.

“I didn’t know David,” Ellis says evenly.

"Never met him. Never responded to the work. I pretty much read everything he wrote because you were kind of supposed to. He is a big deal in American letters and . . . I never really liked anything he wrote. I tried to read Infinite Jestthree or four times and never cracked it. I found the stories didn't interest me. And I am in the minority: I didn't like the essays either. He suffers from a kind of midwestern earnestness that I found unbearable. And I don't think it is too soon . . . but I find his earnestness very irritating. I just finished reading this long book of interviews he did and . . . you can be too smart for fiction.

"The way he spoke about a lot of things is just not my school of thought. And yes, he was probably a genius. And yes, I was very moved by his death. I was very touched by his pain. I really was. It was a shock. And there was a really moving account of it by I think it was DT Max in the New Yorker. And, you know, I was in tears. But! Let's just get real and separate the man, who I did not know, and the work."

Of course, that distinction is not so easily made. Few writers have so skilfully and showily written themselves into their fictions as Ellis has done, ghosting through the society of anguished brats that populate his books so that when readers actually see the man, they can easily believe they are witnessing up close one of those characters made flesh.

"Look, I am Patrick Bateman," he smiles in the Meyrick Hotel and nearby, a child starts to cry. "That was me. I was living the Bateman lifestyle and everyone was telling me this is what it means to be a young man now. I was attracted to it and I was repelled by it and that is what caused the rage in American Psycho.But, you know, look what happened. I mean, Patrick Bateman may not even be considered to be well-groomed nowadays." And the sound of Bret Easton Ellis laughing fills the room.