Bret Easton Ellis was 21 years old and still not finished her university studies when her first novel, Less than Zero (1985) starring disaffected, rich and white teenagers, revolutionized the American narrative from their base in Los Angeles. Three years later, from New York, on the other coast of the country, Jay McInerney completed the demolition work with Neon Lights . Disenchantment, nihilism, malaise, glamor, sex, rivers of cocaine, pessimism and irony within the privileged class.
The publishing sector immediately took note. The literary brat-pack was born, the bad boys of Generation X. Success, fame and a need to provoke disguised as social criticism. The group included women like Tama Janowitz, author of Slaves of New York or Jill Eisenstadt, but although their literary merits were even, they made less noise and took less time to be forgotten. Ellis's second book, The Rules of Attraction (1987), a fairly conventional novel, was received with indifference. The essential ingredient of the scandal was missing.
Things changed dramatically with American Psycho (1991), a New Yorker noir starring 26-year-old Wall Street executive Patrick Bateman, rapist and serial killer. This time the scandal preceded the publication of the book. The appearance of some snippets in Time and Spy magazines caused such a stir that the publisher rushed to cancel the publication, which immediately capitalized on a rival label. The complaints came mainly from feminist organizations, which denounced the author's brutal misogyny. An attempt was made to boycott the book and Ellis received death threats.
The writer has secured a place in literary history for having been able to effectively portray the social blots of the Reagan era, although there have always been doubts about the artistic value of his work. Someone as difficult to scandalize as Norman Mailer said of the American Psycho author who was a fairly competent narcissist. A detail of the novel that today acquires a peculiar value is that Bateman's idol is Donald Trump, who had just published The Art of Negotiation , at the time the book of the moment on Wall Street.
Later Ellis published stories and novels such as Glamourama and Lunar Park , whose impact was very limited. The novelist has long lived a prudent and conventional life and has transferred his discomfort to the platforms that are his podcast and his Twitter account. Last year, after almost a decade of editorial silence, he published his first non-fiction work in the US: Blanco , a set of eight essays, including some autobiographical reminiscences, and which together are supposed to constitute a complaint of contemporary American culture in the form of an attack on the values of an imprecise liberal left. In the spotlight are what he considers unfocused obsessions when dealing with issues such as racism or diversity.
Ellis is proud of the achievements of Generation X and laments the millennials' bland warfare, with his blind defense of patent political correctness in movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, or Hollywood's waiver of the thought police . These are questions that are important to examine well, but Ellis does so ambiguously. Thus, when he criticizes Trump's critics it is unclear whether he is sympathetic to him or not. The author's first foray into non-fiction has been met with strongly mixed opinions. He has accessions, but the majority accuse him of having appropriated a speech that in the end turns against him.