‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,' says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit of a joke. I never really imagined that was on the cards for me. And I really haven't done a lot of the things that you're supposed to do to stay famous.
‘I haven't published anything in 10 years. I haven't tried to write that novel that's going to give critical acclaim or a prize or two — which I've never won. And I seem to be continually controversial and rub people the wrong way. And this has been for 35 years now and I can't tell you why: I don't know. I mean the big joke is: cancel me. Come on, cancel me if you can't stand it so much.'
Yet here he is in The Spectator's offices to record our books podcast: a famous writer. Also one who gets more famous the less he writes and the more people try to ‘cancel' him. There's a good bit of the latter going on at the moment. The meandering autobiographical essays in his new book, White, have had some corkingly savage reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in response to passages where he inveighs against millennial culture and liberal hysteria about the Trump administration.
Ellis often seems to revel in poking wasps' nests. People have crossed the road to baseball-bat this book, I say. Was that what you were expecting? ‘No. Not at all. I've never written a more controversial book than this since American Psycho and I am stunned. I saw this as not a political book, and yet everyone takes it as a political book filled with rhetoric and political opinion.'
It's the first time Ellis has published nonfiction. What made him decide to? ‘My agent told me it sells better.' ‘Are you short of cash?' ‘Uh — taxes in California…' He alludes to a stillborn novel in the introduction, and he says ‘fiction had been leaving me for a long time'. He's done a lot of screenwriting, with patchy success, but ‘I didn't know what the novel necessarily was doing. It didn't really resemble what it had been doing in the analog era, where it was a source of news […] That was the kind of novel that I grew up with. The novel was a means of communicating not only aesthetics but a sense of a world that we don't know anything about. It's very hard to do now.' Hence, perhaps, Ellis's embrace of podcasts (much of the material in White started life as monologues for podcasts) and making salty remarks on Twitter.
One such, notoriously, was a tequila-fueled tweetstorm a few years back about David Foster Wallace — ‘the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation'. He says now that Wallace was ‘brilliant', but: ‘I don't believe that David was a fiction writer. I believe that he was a journalist. He was a nonfiction writer and I think ultimately the idea of being a novelist kind of killed, kind of destroyed him.'
Their difference goes to the nub of the question of the role of fiction. Wallace wrote, notoriously, that ‘irony is ruining our culture' — rejecting as a dead-end the pervading irony of (among other things) Ellis's then-lionized style. Ellis half-concedes the point, but says: ‘I don't know what he replaced [irony] with, and I didn't like what he replaced it with, whatever that might have been. It seemed like a gesture to me, like so much of David Foster Wallace seemed to me to be a gesture.'
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