The negative reviews of Bret Easton Ellis's new book are almost enough to make one want to defend it. Perversity may be underrated as a motive for human behavior: Nothing makes me want to cut my lawn less than a prissy neighbor's complaint that the grass is growing long; nothing makes me want to defend a book more than a chorus of the self-righteous decrying it.
So, with White, the hip young novelist of the 1980s has produced an aging man's 2019 tirade against political correctness, and the denunciations of his nonfiction collection of essays have been relentless. Ellis baits readers into calling him "a sexist, a misogynist, a racist," the Washington Post casually opens its notice of the book. Ellis is "a resentful, bitter man still caught up in the heat of arguments, years after everyone else has left the restaurant," adds the Guardian. "For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist," and his latest book proves that "these things are true," Bookforum chimes in.
With reviews like that—so uniform, so sanctimonious: a choir of Pecksniffs, telling us how carefully they held their noses while they read the book—who wouldn't want to praise Ellis's White? At last we have an author who doesn't run scared of the Twitter mob. At last we have a book brave enough to mock the humorless drabs of professional outrage. At last we can read a courageous battle cry against political correctness.
Alas, even perversity won't carry a reader this far. Try as you can, Ellis's new book remains just plain bad. In the face of the denunciations, you might find yourself wanting to approve the idea of the book, but you won't get much help from the book itself. Political correctness and the economy of competitive victimhood are vile things that ought to be scourged from the public square. But Bret Easton Ellis isn't the man to do it, and White proves more an overcooked spaghetti noodle than the cat-o'-nine-tails we need.
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