Fear never shows up and the party ends early

I decided to re-read Less Than Zero when I found out that Bret Easton Ellis' forthcoming novel will be a kind of sequel, Clay and Friends 20 years on (great interview here). I have a bit of strange relationship with Ellis' books, in that I don't find them at all pleasurable to read but for some reason, I keep coming back. Is it because I want to cultivate hipsterish literary taste, or is there really something more there?


My first introduction - and I'm sure I'm not alone in this - to Ellis' work was American Psycho. I picked it up in my late teens in order to tick some late-20th-Century controversial literature boxes (see also: Trainspotting, which, incidentally, remains one of my favourite re-reads today as well - there goes that hipsterish taste again). American Psycho is a kind of good/bad introduction to Ellis' work, as it is what Ellis does best, but obscured, or maybe so grotesquely magnified it is difficult to recognise when you look directly at it. I recall being astounded, not by the violence, although that could be pretty heart-stopping at times, but by the absence of... something. Humanity? I don't think that's quite right, because really, on reflection I think Patrick Bateman could be embued with more pathos and desperation than any other character I've encountered. His lack of humanity is humanising, if that is ever possible. Whatever that absence is, I found it far more terrifying than any of Bateman's acts of unbelievable violence.


It's been a few years since I first encountered Less Than Zero - I first picked it up in 2005, which I realise now was 20 years after its first publication. It's hard to conceive of 1985 as being that long ago, but now that I revisit it, it strikes me as a surprisingly modern novel, despite the characters' continual discussions of The Human League. It could be yesterday, or this morning. It's vicious and funny and thoughful. But the lack, that gaping, suffocating black hole of emptiness that he somehow captures by cataloguing the minutiae of his characters' actions and reactions is everywhere. In this second reading of Less Than Zero I am choking on it. I have read and re-read that passage where Clay describes his dream of being sucked underground, fear and paranoia of the house sliding down into the canyon during the nights of rain, prank calls, a dead fish in the jacuzzi. The city is a monster and we are all monsters.

I'm not sure what has changed - my expectations, my tastes? - but this is incredible.

Waughgasm

I suppose my impromptu Evelyn Waugh festival might have something to do with work avoidance - my current course on American literature regrettably doesn't appear to cover English authors, so my sudden obsession is of no use to all those other things I'm meant to be writing.

He is pretty flippin' great though.

As a missionary priest making his first pilgrimage to the Vatican, as a paramount chief of equatorial Africa mounting the Eiffel Tower, Dennis Barlow, poet and pets' mortician, drove through the Golden Gates.

The weekend started with A Handful of Dust (I can't fully explain it, but I go to pieces with love for this novel! Surely it has been medically substantiated that one can die from Dickens and loneliness [ok, and malaria]?) and now I have found myself among the English in Hollywood, in The Loved One. If I am still seeking to avoid study later in the week, I think it could be time for a Brideshead revisit (terrible puns optional).