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Rating: It is said that fish from the second decade are people turned inwards, that their way of being friendly and accommodating is just the mask of their inner negativity, a bit goofy, a bit depressed, certainly of a dual nature. Far be it from me to be interested in such practices, but I must admit... the sorcerer who tells these stories only spouts nonsense halfway; at least in my case, he got it a bit right.
Los Angeles, March 7, 1964, Bret Easton Ellis comes to light in a city he describes as having no climate, a city where the lack of recreation leads to understanding who one really is. He is aware of this, and in '85, he gives birth to a book that would definitively stir the waters of minimalist fiction with Less Than Zero, and thanks to this little book, he plants the seed that would influence other writers of the "transgressive" movement (I hope there's no need to name names). Immediately, he arouses some dislikes; it is no mystery that his "outrageous," "unaware," "goofy" attitude wasn't and still isn't well-received. Recall what David Foster Wallace (another genius who shared a mutual antipathy with our writer) said upon the release of American Psycho: « Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other.» (David Foster Wallace on American Psycho).
Thus, we could summarize most of Ellis's literary production: you either love him or hate him because he is disinterested, a butterfly, ambiguous, and above all, a casual provocateur; it is up to us to say whether all this is negative or positive. This first impression had partly destabilized me when I dived into his world; an attentive eye to the filth of politically correct, clean, emancipated, and sophisticated society that granted him considerable space in the most modern fringe of literary satire. However, unlike other more committed and "subversive" writers, he does not embrace any cause, he still doesn't care about all this. The armor he wears is worldly, dark, nihilistic; thanks also to the exhausting promotional tours at a young age that baptized him at the altar of vice and self-destruction.
It is essential to list these events because Lunar Park is the book of ghosts, the book of obsessions that return to disturb the author's mind who makes an enormous leap: the villains are not in human form, the villains are not bourgeois, the villains do not win, and above all, precisely because of this twist, the side of Ellis that permeates the pages is that of the victim. From shocker, he becomes shocked, weak, scared. Passive. If you seek fierce and nihilistic plots, paradoxically, this Lunar Park is not for you. A tribute to Stephen King's world, a world populated by nightmares, monsters, animated toys, crows, and tombstones. Darkness. Children with trembling hands, filled with psychotropic drugs, apathetic, dead. It speaks of inconsistency, a tribute to the lack of self-love, of being unable to improve situations (the marital conduct with the fictional actress Jayne is a great metaphor for this). On this valley of superficiality, inertia, and weakness, the lunar light reigns, among the black pines, the haunted fields, doubts, and above all, the return of evil. Ellis is a protagonist; he himself is a metaphor for the story (not to be seen as an autobiography). Peace is reached through pages and pages wet with tears... one wonders how dear the darkness must have been to him during the writing of the work. A real pact with darkness and tears.
PS: I am careful not to write a fan review, but... Have you ever had the feeling of being close to an artistic personality?
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