Yahoo News White by Bret Easton Ellis - review
Bret Easton Ellis was just 21 when his first novel, Less Than Zero, became a bestseller in 1985 — and still only 27 when he published his classic shocker, American Psycho, in 1991.
In White, Ellis admits that he was never happier than he was back then, in the summer of 1991. His career since has never matched up to his promise, many agree. Having been the writer who seemed most brattishly in touch with his own epoch, he has turned into a derider of the millennials he sees around him (including his thirtysomething boyfriend).
White is a freewheeling mix of memoir and polemic. There’s never been a simple, centred self in Ellis’s writing, and there isn’t here either, but there’s a unifying theme — his disdain for what the digital world has done to us all lately.
“Everything has been degraded by what sensory overload and the supposed freedom-of-choice technology has brought to us and, in short, by the democratisation of the arts,” he harrumphs. He laments that movies no longer have the magical power they had in his youth. “All this is over: reality TV and Instagram have replaced it.”
Sex he finds equally diminished by ultra-availability. “When nudity and the idea of sexual gratification become so routine that you can instantly hook up with someone and see naked pics of that soon-to-be sex partner within seconds, an exchange as casual as ordering a book on Amazon or downloading a new release on Apple, then this lack of investment renders everything the same.”
Victim-culture has flattened art. “Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or misogynist.” To prosper on social media, we have to be likeable and relatable all the time, always “on the same page, the better page”.
He is particularly contemptuous of the babyish inability of “Generation Wuss” to accept that Donald Trump won the US election and get over it. He points out that he had made Trump the figure that Patrick Bateman was obsessed with, the man he wanted to be, mentioned more than 40 times, in American Psycho all those years ago. “Maybe this was why I felt prepared when the country elected Trump.”
He himself never believed that “politics can solve the dark heart of humanity’s problems and the lawlessness of our sexuality, or that a bureaucratic band aid is going to heal the deep contradictory rifts and the cruelty, the passion and the fraudulence that factor into what it means to be human.”
But now, if he says anything like that, he finds himself forced into the bubble of white male privilege. “Identity politics of any kind might be the worst idea in our culture right now,” he moans. He had never considered whiteness or maleness to be defining aspects of his identity. But now that’s precisely how he is defined. So that’s what the curt title of this book signifies.
Enfants terribles rarely age well. Eloquent and contrary though it is, White is the work of a punk now overcome with nostalgia for his own youth.
White by Bret Easton Ellis (Picador, £16.99)
