Shattered Youth

Loving Bret Easton Ellis’s work has long meant having to justify your reading pleasure from a yes, but defensive crouch. Yes his prose is flat and derivative, but it carries with it a modern music. Yes his narratives are hollow and his characters are vapid, but sometimes society is hollow and its people are vapid. Yes the outlook of his novels is nihilistic, but it is expressed with moral purpose. Even if this kind of polarization, consistent over the course of a nearly four-decade career, is so rare in literature as to be refreshing, it also stops just short of conferring Ellis with the assurance of enduring literary merit.