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.