The Life and Times of Bret Easton Ellis

Via notanexit.net, the LA Times has a lengthy article examining the life, work and times of Bret Easton Ellis, author of, among others, Lunar Park, The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho. Times staff writer Scott Timberg sits down to dinner with Ellis to discuss his place in the word of books — he’s long been derided as actually embodying the figures he constructs in his novels — and the (limited) success he’s enjoyed dipping his toes in the celebrity-obsessed lake that is Hollywood. Timberg also talks with Jonathan Lethem, one of Ellis’ contemporaries.

The image of Ellis as a nihilistic 1980s golden boy — guzzling gallons of champagne at Nell’s with Jay McInerney — took awhile to fade. It led many — including a few stricken with cases of envy — to see him as a lightweight. It didn’t help matters that the 1987 movie of “Less Than Zero” was a hit as well, cementing the story’s place in the culture as an archetypal tale of lost and debauched youth.

“What do you learn more from, being celebrated or being reviled?” Charlie Rose, surveying the author’s career, asked in 1994.

“Neither,” Ellis replied. “You learn nothing from either.”

»  Read the rest of “Bret Easton Ellis, two decades beyond ‘Zero’“…

~ by Hugh on March 24, 2008.