Let us imagine that Evelyn Waugh moves permanently to Los Angeles in about 1960 and lives there, retaining all his faculties, up to the present day. Let’s say he loses his faith, leaves his wife, and becomes mesmerized instead by the power of cinema. He starts hanging out at premieres and magazine launches and the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards with Robert Downey Jr., Judd Nelson, and James Van Der Beek, partying so hard that he passes through every rehab clinic in the Northwest, where he starts reading Joan Didion and Raymond Carver. When he checks out, he is trailed by reporters from E! News wherever he goes, embroiled, whenever he speaks, in some kind of uproar. What fiction would he have written then?
The black, unhappy, disillusioned, absurd, remote, stylish, comic novels Waugh might have written have been written: by Bret Easton Ellis. Both are visionaries of a “late” phase in a culture, decadent artists who are deeply conservative, even reactionary, despite the surface immorality of their work. Waugh was, by all accounts, a difficult, often annoying man. It struck me reading Ellis’ new nonfiction collection, White, that he is the American analogue to Waugh: waspishly irritating, an eye-poker, a trickster, somebody who lights the fireworks and scuds away chuckling.
“I wasn’t very good at recognizing what would or wouldn’t tick people off,” Ellis writes. Such acidulous asides are scattered throughout White like little bomblets and booby traps, doubtless designed to provoke a certain type of reviewer. There is the moment when he describes a female dining companion as going “spastic” with rage after he criticizes the aesthetics of Black Lives Matter; there is praise for Candace Owens and Milo Yiannopoulos; there is a message for those who constantly whine about the president: “You are the biggest f–king baby I’ve ever f–king heard in my entire f–king life.”
At the surface level, these outbursts create a rather familiar argument: The freedom of the artist to create is under threat from a censorious millennial politics; art and literature are dissolving in the sugar water of insidious new technologies; public and even private life are increasingly defined by cycles of phony outrage and the desperate gaucherie of social media; perhaps worst of all, dinner party conversation revolves solely around the moral character of the president. Social and cultural arrangements, even America itself, are, in short, going to the dogs.
All of this may or may not be true, but it has never really been Ellis’ concern. He is not a political writer. The strongest parts of White — capsule reviews of Barry Lyndon and American Gigolo, a delicious assault on David Foster Wallace — have nothing to do with politics. In his novels, characters that are explicitly political, such as the model-turned-terrorist Bobby Hughes in Glamorama, are villains. Take this passage:
“The government is an enemy.” Bobby turns to face me. “My god, you of all people should know that, Victor.”
“But Bobby, I’m not … political,” I blurt out vaguely.
“Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby says, turning away again. “It’s something you can’t help.”
My only response is to gulp down the rest of the Cosmopolitan.
Politically, Ellis has been gulping down cosmopolitans and rolling his eyes for decades. If he has an ideology, it is a Wildean passion for aesthetics, chiefly inspired by the “God’s-eye neutrality” of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Ellis never wrote a novel to make people feel better about themselves or the world around them, or to give them hope. Never to win prizes, never to emancipate a group, never to promote a party or a candidate. “And I never succumbed to the temptation to give an audience what I thought they might have wanted: I was the audience and I was writing to satisfy myself and to relieve myself from pain.”
In White, Ellis gives a left-leaning culture industry exactly what he knows it doesn’t want: a polemic that defends free speech and condemns identity politics, especially as it relates to the creation of works of art. Yet the spectacle of a writer who has always written detached, surgical prose parachuting into the culture wars like this, with a bayonet between his teeth, is a disappointment. Even if you think he is largely correct in his assessments, as I do, the arguments he makes have been expressed with greater force and clarity by other writers.
Ultimately, there are two linked reasons why Ellis wrote White. He claims to have given up on the “fake enclave” of the novel, “a form that didn’t interest me anymore.” I suspect the form interests him less because novels appear to interest the culture less. The present day is not merely more favorable to literary nonfiction, it is a paradise for literary nonfiction that makes stars of those, such as J.D. Vance and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who capture the spirit of the times in this form.
Ellis, who had a book deal before he could legally buy alcohol and was a best-selling author shortly after he could, is used to a certain level of attention for his work. His sickening masterpiece American Psycho was so controversial that it’s still sold in a sealed wrapper in Australia, nearly 30 years after it was published there. He no longer believes a novel can generate that kind of excitement; his last three novels, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms, were mutedly received.
So an aging, largely apolitical provocateur takes what he sees as the only route to sustained notoriety left: offending people who live to be offended. Long after White is forgotten and Ellis has stopped tweeting, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman will still be trundled out to haunt Halloween parties. Young men in viscera-stained raincoats will stand in front of bathroom mirrors, inspecting themselves, only to hear a clear, chilly voice say: “There is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. … I simply am not there.”
Will Lloyd is a freelance writer from London.
