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).

Dead Men are Heavier Than Broken Hearts

My first run-in with Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler. Having recently seen the film for the first time, it hard to shake thoughts of Bogart's crackling delivery. It seems like a role he was born to play.

Although I enjoyed every word of the novel, in some ways perhaps the film is more interesting, or at least more complicated. The mystery of the novel is almost straightforward when compared to the opaque twists and turns of the film - a lot of that is due to the limitations of the Production Code, and the fact many of the subtleties used to get around those limitations are lost on a modern audience (ie, me). Still, I find it interesting the film is able to create a shadowy, almost occult noir-land of organised (and disorganised!) crime and ultimately ends with Marlowe all loved-up, whereas the novel is much less... spooky? But it concludes in rather a different way. Maybe I'm overstating this; of course the film would've been less useful as a Bogart/Bacall vehicle had they not wound up together in the end. I don't think it rings false though, their deadpan "I suppose I'm in love with you"s seem true to Chandler's form.

Get up angel, you look like a Pekingese.

It can be difficult to overcome the book/film obstacle - whichever you have encountered first will likely inform your experience of the other. In this instance, my reading of the novel had a little more Bacall in its Mrs Regan, a little more smoke and fog, and no doubt my next watching of the film will seem a little less romantic, if it was romantic at all.

I think my current studies have seeped into my reading so that I can't think about this novel without thinking about what its implications are for the idea of the American social order. There's plenty to say on that note, but I'll save that for the essay.

None of This Is Made Up

The Age of Innocence

"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergences as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation."

Edith, you slay me! And everyone else, for that matter. It has been about eight years since I last read this book. When thinking of it since I've been mostly preoccupied with that melancholy final scene and I had entirely forgotten how funny and brutal she is.