Bret Easton Ellis

The Valley

Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, and went to the Buckley School in the same suburb. Money, absent parents, cars, cocaine and film: the material of the first three books was in place before he had left home. He has gone back to those exact years once, deliberately, in The Shards, forty years later, with the same street names.

Twenty-one

Less Than Zero was written at Bennington College and published in 1985, while Ellis was still an undergraduate. It sold in numbers no student's first novel is supposed to sell, and it fixed him at once as the spokesman for something (a generation, a class, a mood) which he has spent forty years refusing to be.

The cancelled book

In late 1990, weeks before publication, Simon & Schuster dropped American Psycho after excerpts circulated in the press. Vintage picked it up; the National Organization for Women called a boycott; Ellis received death threats and, for most of the decade that followed, no serious critical hearing. The reversal came from the cinema: Mary Harron's 2000 film read the novel as comedy, and it has been read that way since.

The sentence

What holds the books together is not the subject matter but the register. The prose refuses to modulate: a brand name, a meal, a body and a murder all arrive in the same tone, at the same speed, with the same absence of comment. Readers who find the books immoral are usually responding to that flatness rather than to the events.

The podcast

Since 2013 Ellis has run a weekly podcast: monologue, interviews, and eventually a novel. The Shards was serialized there, chapter by chapter, before any publisher was involved. It is the clearest illustration of a career that keeps moving sideways out of the industry it belongs to.