Lunar Park: Bret Easton Ellis - Review..

There has not been a time in recent memory that a modern novel has held me captivated to such an extent as Ellis' Lunar Park. Ellis has taken the first person narrative in the novel to a new level, cleverly mixing realism and the supernatural, confessional writing with celebrity gossip and urbane, suburban humour with the utterly macabre. The author's talent for writing terror is without question, i.e., American Psycho and particularly some of the short stories in The Informers, however, Ellis' true talent is his ability to satirize modern western culture, pointing out its inconsistencies, hypocrisies and insanities, revealing the irony in our values and making his observations seem very funny, uncomfortably funny. Lunar Park is horror in the suburbs with a humorous twist, yet at the same time, it is a serious and moving portrayal of drug use, personal loneliness and the dysfunctional modern family.

Ellis begins the tale in a confessional style, giving the reader an inside look at his instant success with the novel Less than Zero, and his rocket ride into celebrity, including all the debasement - cocaine, orgies, literary groupies, twenty-thousand a week condos in the Hampton's - that one associates with major rock stars. Ellis did become a literary sensation, the alleged spokesperson for the young debauched 80's generation. The story of his last book tour is particularly painful as he was stoned and plastered most of the time. His father dies in 1992, and his world really crashes, when his ex-girlfriend, movie star, informs him that she's pregnant with his child. Of course he denies responsibility, blaming another man, but the tests proof he's the father, and eventually he marries her as she whisks him off to the suburbs to save him from himself, with promises of sobriety.

Everything seems to going fine, writing a new book, a teaching job at the local Arts college, except he doesn't get along with his 11 year old son, he and his wife are in marriage counselling, (he sleeps in the spare room) and he is trying to have an affair with one of his students. At a Halloween party at their home, he packs his nose with a drug store, slugs down the vodka and attempts to seduce his student in the bathroom, and suddenly strange things start to occur. His stepdaughter's robotic toy bird becomes nasty, a man shows up to the party looking exactly like Patrick Bateman, the famous serial killer in his novel, American Psycho, and the lights in his home begin to do strange things. Is it the drugs and alcohol making him paranoid or something more sinister? In fact the novel just gets stranger and stranger until poor Ellis free falls almost into oblivion.

What I found most enjoyable about this novel was the fine line Ellis walked between the incredible and so-called reality (are these events really happening) and his caustic observations on suburban middle-class values. These observations are curiously disturbing and hilarious at the same time - he knows how to write black comedy.

I believe this is Bret Easton Ellis' best work to date.