American Psycho writer Bret Easton Ellis tells Eileen Battersby he finally feels grown up - but loneliness haunts him
Famous since the publication of his first book 20 years ago, and notorious on the publication of his third, American Psycho in 1991, Bret Easton Ellis is more weary than languid, as he sits down in a plush armchair in his smart hotel suite and sighs. It's not with dread. He is definitely not cynical; he doesn't seem to mind interviews, or flights, or even the strangeness of a writer's life. The unease comes from within.
What's bothering him far more than anything a journalist might write about him is the feeling of loneliness. "I don't get it. I'm successful. It's not even being 41. Lots of guys I know are 41 and having a ball, they say 'it just gets better', maybe it does? But I also know lots of 41-year-old women who are feeling suicidal . . . But no, it's not the age thing. This could have happened to me at 34, it's just these feelings. I'm lonely, and well, sad most of the time." Having become famous at 21, he now knows, was not such a great thing. It prevented him from growing up. Now at 41, affable and pleasant, neatly dressed in a suit, he is no longer young and that is difficult when you have been famous for being a boy wonder.
"I have only now begun to feel grown up. I was, like this protected child, for so long. I didn't have to worry about anything. I've no children. No, none that I know of . . .
"There was always relationships. But then things began to happen, in January 2004, all at once and I had to do something. Mom had medical problems, one of my sisters was seriously into drugs and then, my best friend, my very best friend, Michael Wade Kaplan, suddenly died back in New York when I was in LA. It makes you think. I couldn't do anything. I stayed on in LA, having come for Christmas and stayed on through January and on to September, polishing the book, but didn't, couldn't do much. I read a lot, books I should have read years ago."
His fifth novel, Lunar Park, has just been published. It is an event. Although, as he says, the US reviews of Lunar Park have been mixed. "The supernatural stuff didn't go down all that well. I think they thought I wasn't taking it [ the book] seriously enough."
But it is serious. Ellis, whose expression shifts between relaxed and despairing, and who looks like a young, less intense and slimmer Orson Wells, can be good-humoured but not slickly witty. His fiction is funny and the new book is often horribly funny, but like all of his books, it is about serious things.
"I'm writing about feelings. It's funny with the new book I was going to write a genre book, a spooky thriller, a real ghost story, but like always I ended up writing about feelings. I don't write about ideas, I write about emotions." He picks up a cushion from the sofa near his chair and begins kneading it.
For all his time in New York, he remains a west coast native who still respects the differences between New York and Los Angeles. He describes himself as more of a reporter than a storyteller. It all makes sense, his fiction does have the feel of reportage. It is about the society that created him. He is a moralist, not a satirist.
"I've learnt a lot about America in the past four years, I'm disappointed. The news makes everything - 9/11 or what happened in New Orleans - look like a movie." Most importantly, if surprisingly, his books chronicle his personal search for self-understanding.
"All my books seem to be about various stages of my life as I went through them. I wrote three novels before Less Than Zero: they weren't published. I was always writing, I was trying to make sense of things, the fighting, the yelling."
His parents battled their way through an unhappy marriage in a household at the mercy of Ellis's father, a chronically unhappy character intent on making everyone else share his misery. "Mom always tried to make it work, she loved him. She still does." Such was the unhappiness at home that Ellis, on leaving high school, decided to look for a college that was as far away from home as possible. He found it, Bennington in north-east Vermont, where your academic record didn't matter, "as long as you could pay the fees".
LIKE MANY A Californian before him, arrival in the foreign land of the east coast was a culture shock. "I had felt I was this, well, sophisticated guy from LA. I would fit in." Assimilation was not that easy. "It was terrible, they made fun of me but then it was okay."
Admittedly he arrived at Bennington with a suitcase of complexes courtesy of Dad, a man obsessed with the physical appearances, and who consistently undermined the confidence of his son and two daughters, Ellis's sisters.
"I think they sorted out their problems with Dad their own way." Ellis senior died suddenly in 1992, at 50, from complications related to drug use, diabetes and general neglect. If ever there was a candidate for suicide it was Ellis senior, to whom Lunar Park is co-dedicated. "I used to tell people my father had killed himself," says Ellis flatly. "I've forgiven him now, but wow, it took a long time."
Lunar Park draws on the themes of father and son; son and father, the narrator as son and as father. "It's all parts of a fractured self. I re-read American Psycho two years ago when I was working on Lunar Park and I realised I'm Patrick Bateman [ the disturbed narrator of American Psycho]."
Equally, I suggest, while the narrator of Lunar Park is named Bret Easton Ellis, the son character Robby with whom he is trying to form a belated bond, is the real-life Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis agrees, Robby escapes, as did the young Bret Easton Ellis.
But there was no escape. "I was haunted by my father, and all the stuff, and I knew this had to stop. The only way I could do it was to write about it." Much of what he says in conversation may appear more obsessive in print than it actually is. Ellis wants to be truthful. His fiction may shock precisely because of this. There are moments when he stretches this candour thin such as early in Lunar Park when the narrator intones: "Regardless of how horrible the events described here might seem, there's one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands: all of it really happened, every word is true." The haunted house in Lunar Park is the mind of the narrator.
Truth teller or witness, Ellis the novelist is a survivor of an era in which feelings became redundant. The Me generation looks at the world with an empty, blank stare. There are no tears. He saw that blank stare and recorded it.
"I've never seen myself as a story teller, I'm a reporter. And I don't see the novelist, or the role of the novelist as that of an artist. A musician's an artist; a painter's an artist. I don't have any answers. I don't have ideas either. If I were a 'professional' writer, I'd have a book out every two years, with the paperback in between. I've only written five novels in 20 years. Yet the back list must be selling as my hotel rooms have got pretty good."
And the evidence surrounds us. A hotel suite with a marble fireplace and more space than the houses in which many parents have raised children. No one could accuse Bret Easton Ellis of being smug: bewildered yes, smug never. He has had his demons, to which Lunar Park, the study of a mind in torment, certainly testifies. As with American Psycho, much of the darker aspects of Lunar Park (admittedly a funnier book) are metaphorical. The pornographic excess in his fiction lurks in the minds of most of us - we just don't admit it.
Ellis has arrived at the pornographic in ways similar to paths taken by the great JG Ballard, who appears a likely kindred spirit. "I'd only read him recently." He enthuses about the pornographic masterpiece Crash and says he can see similarities between the veteran Ballard and his own depiction of the soullessness of society.
MORE INTERESTED IN rock and pop music and cinema than literature, which he confirmed in his fashion adventure romp, Glamorama, he has lived his adult life in a designer-clad, yuppie world, yet doesn't sound like a yuppie. Traces of the insecure boy, conscious of having done some of the right things, yet still eager to please, linger. You can take the boy out of LA but you can't fully remove LA from the boy.
"The peer pressure you suffer in school is something you never forget." He agrees his fiction is social commentary, "but I don't write comment pieces. I never come out and say anything, I don't review." Famous writer without being Writer as Public Man, Ellis was never going to be a Tom Wolfe, who still has some historic relevance as a journalist and who should have abandoned fiction after The Bonfire of the Vanities. The process of finally become an adult at 41 may be testing Ellis, but the chronicler of social and emotional nihilism found his salvation by writing about emotions.
"It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things." Unlike most writers, Ellis says things without making them sound like statements. He is not trying to present himself as an innocent, and believes in his personal bewilderment. Of his work he says, "I can't really answer intellectual questions about it, because the business of writing it comes from emotional not intellectual experience. I want to write fiction that is about trying to live, and trying to make sense of things."