The 1980s was the last sexy decade in American fiction. It was a decade on the make, all moussed up and ready to slay. Freshly hatched novelists and short-story writers popped up on the scene like teen-mag pin-ups, their sentences as photogenic as their faces. It was tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction'. The former fiction editor of Esquire, Lish was the chief tactician, technician and propagator of minimalism as a page-sized theatre of operation; his editorial pencil slashed like Zorro's sword through fatty tissue and descriptive frou-frou, the severity of his cuts to Raymond Carver's prose precipitating a controversy that still roils. Lish's pedagogical manner, however, was the opposite of his surgical style. A born showman and provocateur, he presided over workshops and private master-classes that lasted for hours, often with limited bathroom breaks. It wasn't the practical advice and forked-lightning insights that made the tuition fees and bladder discomfort worth it. Lish could make careers happen. As a book editor at Knopf and the editor of the Quarterly, he had the power to publish his protégés, the clout to be the casting director of a new generation. Working without a pulpit were other top-notch talent scouts and star-makers, such as Gary Fisketjon, the Random House editor who created the trade paperback series Vintage Contemporaries, the springboard for Jay McInerney's breakthrough novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and Morgan Entrekin, the editor at Simon and Schuster who acquired Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero. Lish had the cult cred, but their properties shone the brightest. Gary and Morgan, Morgan and Gary, Jay and Bret, Bret and Jay – how often we heard their names tick-tock together then, the cricket chatter of the zeitgeist.
Along with Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York), Jay and Bret were touted as the founding members of New York's Literary Brat Pack, Manhattan's bohemian answer to Hollywood's Brat Pack (Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals involved, but the thing about catchphrases is that once they click, they stick. And for a brief spell, Jay and Bret obliged the cameras and gossip columnists, reflecting the flashbulb daze and glaze of downtown party animals as they moved from table to table, sofa to sofa, cameras capturing their full range of blank expression, the Parsnip and Pimpernel of the post-punk demi-monde. They were compadres but very different writers. McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, a tale of coke squalor and eventual redemption, had a big schmaltzy heart beating in its pigeon breast. Less than Zero, a shockeroo begun when Ellis was a teenager and published while he was still a student at Bennington, fixed a clinical lens on its tribe of callow degenerates, a Warholian gaze devoid of Warhol's Catholic depth. As Jay and Bret evolved as writers, their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place in the pantheon, a penthouse view. Not Bret. He didn't seem to care about any of that traditional jazz. Whether it was a frosty pose or reflected a genuine disposition, Ellis didn't court establishment acceptance and audience affection, showers of rose petals. His persona, his literary approach, his interviews, carried a built-in take-it-or-leave-it shrug. This attitude outfitted him with a protective padding that would come in handy later during the mud-stomping rugby scrums he'd find himself at the bottom of.
The spare narrative of Less than Zero – as if the story was being dealt out in crime-scene snapshots, a succession of dirty Polaroids – seemed to denote Ellis as a Lishian minimalist. He soon dispelled that notion. Where the minimalist faithful, such as Hempel and Robison, persisted in their ivory inscriptions and tracings of psychological hairline fractures, Ellis took on larger canvases with a thicker application, deploying recurring characters à la Balzac and covering swathes of social action. For him, the primary unit of fiction wasn't the sentence, as it was for the minimomaniacs, but the scene, which Ellis indulged a tendency to turkey-stuff. The novels were crammed with incident and woozy excess, kaleidoscopic turns that didn't know when or how to stop. Such kineticism undercut the satirical intent of novels such as American Psycho and Glamorama, since satire benefits from formal rigour to pin it to the frame. American Psycho, which took the torture porn of Sade, suited it in Armani, gave it a facial peel and took it out for a prowl, installed its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, as an archetype of the metrosexual serial killer and elevated its author to public enemy number one in much of the literary world. The fury in the novel and the fury towards Ellis formed a feedback loop that has tramp-stamped his subsequent career. At the time American Psycho was defended as a satire of the designer brand narcissism and capitalist predation of the 1980s, the dankest of dark comedies, but there was so much hate and heat in its sadistic overdrive that any message got lost in all the viscera. Once a starving rat has been introduced into a victim's vagina, artistic licence seems a flimsy pretence. Yet for all its flaws, American Psycho was prophetic in its invocation of Donald Trump as aspirational monster-mogul and endures as an exhibit of slasher-film iconography owing to Mary Harron's screen adaptation from 2000. The film's spotless scene design (everything showroom shiny, the downtown loft as laboratory, anticipating the Soderbergh aesthetic), its Polanski-ish pacing and macabre devilry, and the hallowed hauteur of Christian Bale's cheekbones aestheticised the carnage and drained away most of the gory dreck. Glamorama, an extended caper involving terrorism, international intrigue and idiot models, its paragraphs bloated with celebrity names, designer brands and song titles, like photo-captions run amuck, might have enjoyed the same fate on screen if it had been given a similar crash diet.
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