The writer who inserts himself unveiled into his own fiction is a writer asking for trouble; the reader is there to give it to him. Early indicators of imminent confrontation include eye-rolling and wincing. Then the cheek, in anticipation of future embarrassments, goes as vermillion as the critical ink about to be spilled. The sharks of the High Concept begin circling immediately. It’s hard enough to distract someone from conflating the characters on the page with the person who put them there, even though a successful distraction is one definition of artistry. But why on earth would anyone court bathos and masochism in a novel by having the name in the copyright stick around until its more regularly scheduled reappearance in the acknowledgements? Maybe because the payoff of this gimmick hasn’t always been slight. An enduring example is Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated aperture in the ‘Berlin stories’ of Thirties. Though the shutter malfunctioned in later years, Herr Isyvoo still managed to charm some of the fustier opponents of the racy new formalism who had been clamoring to turn back the clock ever since Ulysses. It would be presumptuous, then, to abandon hope once the more imaginative dramatis personae has been discarded. Consider two more recent toyings in this subgenre.

Martin Amis’ Money worked because the author snuck himself into the story as a deus ex machina, but never overstayed his welcome as an insecure apostle of postmodernism. ‘Martin Amis’ refrained from hijacking a narrative that the identity out from under inverted commas knew was best delivered in the first person of a separate protagonist – the bovine antihero John Self. Despite the surname, Self kept things at a safe distance from the common rupture-point of ‘experimental’ fiction, which excels in illuminating nothing except the experimenter’s clumsily concealed solipsism, the better to cast onto the bonfire any remaining vanities of that low, dishonest decade. And there was an Eighties distraction for you: the money was other people’s; Amis was free to spend it.

In a slightly different fashion, Philip Roth, long confined by audiences to the single dimension of the Jewish pervert-intellectual, took his vengeance by going ‘multi’ in a big way in the epic pseudo-memoir Operation Shylock. Roth had earned this cameo after years toiling under the misapprehension that he was penning fiction and not autobiography. It was recompense for the kind of laughter that has a concomitant forgetfulness: we forgot that, in stolen moments between rounds of jack-hammered masturbation, Portnoy actually straightened himself and made stuff up for a living. We thought we had him pegged after the initial complaint, but then came Zuckerman (with his “Carnovsky”), then Tarnapol, then Kepesh, then Roth. What kind of alter kocker had this many alter egos? In this cleft roman a clef, even those bickering tribal Gemini of last resorts – Diaspora and Zionism – got their wardrobes mixed and matched. Poseur “Philip” used his purloined celebrity to campaign for the removal of Israeli Jews back into liberalized Europe. Real Philip was liberal and Europeanized, but not so sanguine about the prospect of a reverse exodus. They were hot on each other’s trail through the Land of Milk and Honey and Mossad agents. It was what we deserved.

I wish I could say the same for Lunar Park. Like Amis, Bret Easton Ellis once published a zeit-feisty satire about the fin de siècle as it unfolds in the same overcommercialized cosmopolis. Like Roth, he feels he has some explaining to do. Ellis has called Lunar Park his public atonement for the “violent, pornographic” excesses of American Psycho, the sinuous road from which the reader has apparently been led to a haunted palace on a suburban American everystreet called Elsinore Lane. Ay, there’s the rub. The secondary function of this book is Bret’s private play at reconstructing, or expurgating, his fragile relationship with his dead father. Both propositions, creepily intertwined, strike the present reviewer as disingenuous. For starters we must ask: Just how fragile a relationship? Then we must wincingly follow up with: Just how dead a father? This is from page 13:

“[E]ven though I had planned to base Patrick Bateman on my father, someone — something —else took over and caused this new character to be my only reference point during the three years it took to complete the novel. What I didn’t tell anyone was that the book was written mostly at night when the spirit of this madman would visit, sometimes waking me from a deep, Xanax-induced sleep.”

Patrick Bateman was the titular psycho of American Psycho (three years I’d want back of my life, too). When Patrick wasn’t giving fugue-state recitations of the Saks catalogue as he shimmied and strutted down the streets of Manhattan, he was calmly letting starved rats gnaw their way through the uteruses of fashion models putrescing in his Upper West Side penthouse.

Had planned to base Patrick Bateman on his father. Well, I wonder what games of catch must have been like in the old Ellis household. We’re told in the introductory chapter that Bret’s father was one of those wealthy, self-obsessed, distant types. On a bad day I might say the same about mine, though I don’t go putting severed heads in his freezer. Nor should you go letting that illusory “someone – something – else” bit fool you. As to the provenance of Ellis’ troublesome and notorious third novel, it’s like everything in his troublesome and forgettable fifth: all gothic legerdemain, the synaptic industry of a candy-fed imagination belonging to one seriously fucked-up child. The candy has become cocaine and the child now has a man in front of it, but that’s about it. Overweening Hamlet allusions happen for a reason. So we get Fortinbras Mall and Voltemand Drive – though why what should be the Osric Motel is spelled “Orsic” is perhaps a typesetter’s contribution to the spine-tingle. Supernatural plot-movers happen for a reason, too.

To state the case at its mildest, Ellis had his work cut out for him in the filial recompense department, authorial division. Lunar Park is a snide, scrambled mess that seems to revel in transfiguring any traces of emotional sincerity into their smiling, blood-boltered ghosts. Let’s hope the next Knopf advance isn’t for a forthcoming apology for this one.

As with Psycho, this confession too has meant nothing, but it is more intimate and bizarre for being the signposted life and times of one Bret Easton Ellis. He’s rendered here with striking verisimilitude as a drug-addled, neurasthenic former “It” boy of the brave new American lit scene, which I’d better let him tell you all about:

“It was the beginning of a time [after Less Than Zero came out] when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore – publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour and good-looking authors reading finely honed minimalism to students who would listen rapt with slack-jawed admiration, thinking, I could do that, I could be them. But of course if you weren’t photogenic enough, the sad truth was you couldn’t.”

You getting all this, Gertrude? How about you, Claudius? Ellis finds himself contrite about his former high-octane escapades and antsy about his present low-burn domestic ones. But contrition – which perhaps Ellis had planned on basing on genuine remorse – is really a masquerade for the braggadocio, the folly nostalgia, of a creeping has-been. It’s what undergraduates are routinely and mercilessly subjected to at campus alumni gatherings. Bret the character is hurtling fast towards irrelevance, and Bret the novelist is here to give him all the help he needs, starting with a manuscript called Teenage Pussy:

“The book was the story of Michael Graves and this young, hip Manhattan bachelor’s erotic life — ‘a guy who loves to give love and loves to get loved back’ is what I promised my publishers — and I had envisioned a narrative that was elegantly hardcore and interspersed with jaunty bouts of my trademark laconic humor. It was going to contain at least a hundred sex scenes (‘I mean, Jesus, why not?’ I guffawed to my editor over lunch in the bar at Patroon while he idly checked his blood sugar) and you could read the novel as either a satire on ‘the new sexual obnoxiousness’ or as the simply story of an average guy who enjoys defiling women with his lust. I was going to turn people on and make them think and laugh...”

“Guffawed” is the mot juste. And self-parody is a narcissistic sister to unhyphenated kind. Chapters of Teenage Pussy include: “Her Boobage,” “Hairy Pinkish Tacos,” “Am I Too Big for You?,” “You Know, I Really Don’t Want a Girlfriend Right Now,” “Look, I Have to Catch an Early Flight, Okay?” Which almost makes you wonder what discriminating pen crossed out “It’s Not You, It’s Me” and “What Do You Mean This Happens to Lots of Guys?” We can excuse a character’s aborted attempts at scrubbing himself up – they just didn’t take, that’s life imitating art for you – but the novelist doesn’t get away so easily. The novelist has responsibilities, whether he likes them or not.

Character Bret is married to a famous and beautiful Hollywood actress named Jayne Dennis, whose film credits – according to a website devoted to Lunar Park, and probably conceived by the same editor at Patroon – include The Back Room Deal, Sunstroke, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I suppose it’s only fair that the lone hint of referential subtlety in this book occurs outside of it, in the bombinating cultural vacuum of cyberspace. Jayne’s last project is the eponymous debut novel by Michael Chabon, who along with Ellis made an early name for himself as a bright young exponent of what might be called the hetero-flexible Gatsby subgenre. (Unlike Ellis, Chabon has talent to spare.) But yes, for our brooding prince, it’s fair to say that man delights him some, which fact scarcely bodes well for an already turbulent union with Jayne, not to mention an already stalled affair with a (female) graduate student, who will wind up murdered… in Room 101 of the “Orsic” Motel. See what I mean about referential subtlety? It might also complicate things down the line with his stepdaughter and son who, for all the clangorously rung daddy issues in here, are having their own tell-all cathexes predetermined by Bret. The stoppered bisexuality, the rampant alcohol and drug abuse, the dog-eared copy of Fatherhood for Dummies... All this, and still he felt the need to toss in some demoniacally possessed real estate and a homicidal bird doll named “Terby.” Try spelling that backwards, by the way.

Ellis claims not to particularly care for children, which certainly conforms to his treatment of them. There are some oases of delight in this book; mainly lampoons of the prepubescent status anxiety and industry of ‘self-esteem’ consecration which is said to pass for good parenting these days. Here Ellis is at his most gimlet-eyed. He bridles over his stepdaughter’s attendance of a “rehearsal” birthday party, and over another kid’s discussion of carbohydrates as if they lurked under beds and in dark close spaces. Why isn’t it enough, he asks – probably invoking the nearby shade that engineered his own agita – to just let the little people be themselves, without forcing them to embody pallid idées fixes of our own egoism? Good question, though I wish it came from another guidance counselor of disaffection. Ellis claims to be irritated with children’s speech patterns: the “and-then-what-happened?” cadences get to him. But this is odd given that his prose often sounds like mesmeric backchat heard over an X-Box tournament. A characteristic passage:

“Male undergrads were slithering around her, merely outlines in the darkness, and her face was streaked orange by the glow of a lava lamp and an hour later I had followed her around the entire room without realizing it and she was now smiling the while time, even when I walked away since it was late and I was a family man who had to get home and it was wrenching and I had already lost my faith.”

This is anti-style, the beaded perspiration of an overworked artlessness. (And hang on to that “darkness” for a spell, would you?) What is Ellis playing at, exactly, with this interminable prosodic drum roll? Why won’t he slow down and grow up already? Arrested development has its rewards in literature, especially in satire, as master craftsmen like Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse have attested. But it’s an axiom of the horror fable – even the wised-up and witheringly ‘self-conscious’ version – that any real campfire chills mandates adult supervision. Once the campers get their chins under the flashlights, the spookiness instantly wears off:

“The night was drenched in darkness and the darkness really was dazzling… I just kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn towards the darkness as I always had been…. ‘Hello darkness, my old friend...’ It looked as if the entire world were dying and turning black. The darkness was eclipsing everything.”

Careful now, Bret. You might give the distinct impression of there being a complete absence of light. Are we waiting for the other shoe, or the other testicle, to drop here? Now add to the raconteur’s grab-bag such items as recalcitrance, “fey irony” (Ellis’ term, not mine), and silly fits of denial – make it, in other words, a horror fable told by Bret Easton Ellis – and things will go bump in the night as often as bumps will get done in the night. You want scary? How’s this for scary? Dialogue between a couple of aging voices of their generation, having a snortfest out in the garage:

“‘Ready for a little accion?’
“‘Indeed.’ Jay rubbed his hands together eagerly.
“‘I have brought us some very pure Bolivian Marching Powder, ’ I said, rummaging through my pockets.
“‘Ooh – the Devil’s Dandruff.’”

“Jay” – or the “Jayster” – is Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City, also garbed by nothing so constrictive as dignity in Lunar Park. The “Devil’s Dandruff” is what even your stockbroker long ago consigned to the dumpster of démodé narcotic euphemism.

Amid all the yawning infinite jests, the canny Oedipal torments, and the more-in-apathy-than-in-anger Gen-X countenances, the only apposite Shakespearean endnote to the life and work of Bret Easton Ellis at this stage is nothing so sententious and morally ambiguous from Hamlet. It's this strophe from Macbeth:

“I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er…”

A regicide can’t double back, and there’s little redemption for him in forward motion. He's in blood stepp’d so far as well as so deep. It’s all over for him. But this isn’t true for a writer. A writer has options; he can double back, he change course, he can clean up his act when, by his own admission, that is exactly what he purports to be doing. The trouble with “Bret” is Bret. They both languish in the shallows, yet still manage to drown anyway.