The Literary Brat-Packaverse
The worlds of Ellis and McInerney
At the start of the week, The Middlebrow reviewed Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel, The Shards for The Washington Independent Review of Books. LitHub accurately characterized the review as a “rave,” and why not desecrate the first long fiction from Ellis in 13 years with some enthusiasm? It is a highly skilled, very entertaining and thoughtful novel.
Since the review is out, The Middlebrow will instead muse about the intertwining fictional worlds of Ellis and his friend and fellow Gen-X novelist, Jay McInerney. It was a great delight for me, in my 20s, to realize that these two writers were sharing a fictional universe that has spilled into water dimension of reality we all live in.
First, we have the Ellis-verse, which begins with Less Than Zero. In that book, Clay visits home in Loss Angeles during his freshman year in college at Camden University. There, he straddles the worlds of adolescence and adulthood as well as home and away, as he falls in an out of old patterns with his friends, who have become increasingly lost in his absence. In Ellis’ second book, The Rules of Attraction, we get a glimpse of Camden and one of the narrators is Sean Bateman, brother of Patrick Bateman the (maybe) serial killer protagonist of American Psycho.
Patrick eventually murders Allison Poole (or does he?) who is the protagonist of Jay McInerney’s third novel, Story of My Life. But Poole lives on in the McInerney-verse, as the subject of a 2008 short story called “Penelope on the Pond.” She lives on in the Ellis-verse too, showing ups quite alive in Glamorama, which also has a visit from Sean Bateman. Ellis goes back to the original crew with a sequel to Less Than Zero called Imperial Bedrooms but that happens after Ellis crashes the boundaries of fictional and real life with Lunar Park, which features a version of Ellis as a protagonist as well as a version of McInerney. Bret is also the hero of The Shards and McInerney makes a brief appearance.
The shared character of Poole is based on Rielle Hunter, who is McInerney’s former girlfriend and unfairly described in real like as the woman who ended John Edwards’ presidential ambitions (for one thing, John’s an adult and is as as responsible for their relationship as anyone and for another, it’s Maureen Dowd who ruined his presidential chances by called him a “Breck girl”, which stuck).
McInerney’s novels tells a long and continuous tale of life in and around New York City, starting with the adventures of a young fact checker in Bright Lights, Big City and then extending through an attempt by editors at a publishing house to organize a leveraged buyout in Brightness Falls through the ordeal of 9/11 in Bright, Precious Days and then a look at the excesses of the Aughts in Model Behavior. There is a diversion to Kyoto in Ransom, his second and overlooked novel.
Taken together, the McInerney and Ellis novels are a sweeping survey of life in what Ellis has called America’s “Empire” era of the 1980s that has since faded into a post-Empire that affects the ways we think, act and entertain ourselves. While that observation has been captured in nonfiction, especially by those who write about foreign policy or who write cultural criticism (and Ellis did this in his book of essays, White), it’s really a story best captured by novelists who don't start with a thesis but who chronicle what is going on as it’s happening.
The McInerney and Ellis novels capture the indulgences of peak empire and also the alienation formed by all of the pleasure seeking. We then watch these characters grow up to realize that the promise of a safe world provided by American power and excess is, in fact an illusion (and on the wane, at that). How do these children enter adulthood as part of an inhospitable society?
Culturally, we do not take our contemporary novelists as seriously as we should. The release of Ellis and McInerney books were once commercial and literary events. But we don’t have so many of those moments around books anymore and academia has shamefully ignored the tableau these authors have created.
We would be better off engaging in the conversation these two authors have been conducting now for decades. It’s about us, after all.