|
||
|
|||
Book reviews |
|
|
RETURN TO PSYCHO CITY: NO ANGELS IN L.A.
|
|
Reviews |
WHEN I reviewed Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho about four years ago in my newspaper column, one reader wrote to me deploring the fact that I even gave space to such an horrific book. She had not read the novel but was reacting to the many critical press reports which highlighted the violence, misogyny and psychopathic behaviour of the first-person protagonist. My response was, as I had stated in the review, that while much of the content was nightmarish, I thought Ellis was writing from a moral point of view, that he was holding up a mirror to materialistic '80s yuppie society to show how it's me-Me-ME ethos had led to a tabloid/MTV culture in which self-gratification and active evil were rampant, a society deficient in ethics and humane values, veritably the neon-dark age of designer madness. I think that Ellis has been misread, for me he is a social satirist in the tradition of Swift, Orwell, Huxley and Burroughs. His grim purpose is to show the moral and spiritual corruption of America's ruling and drooling classes. Eliss's latest work, 'The Informers' returns from the rotten Big Apple of American Psycho to the laid-back LA of his first novel, Less Than Zero. It's a collection of 13 overlapping short stories, each told in the present tense by a different first-person narrator. Characters from one tale make cameo appearances in another, while the constant backdrop is the sleaziest city since Sodom was terminated with fire, brimstone and extreme prejudice. Ennui, addiction and ignorance are endemic - and, as the stories progress, the odd intimations of apparently random violence become more frequent and sinister - limbs found dumped in dustbins, bodies drained of blood. Ellis's West Coast bestiary features creatures as monstrous as anything in Psycho but much more diverse. Many of his characters are extremely funny, even if they are too dumb or vain to appreciate the ironies of their own banalities and Freudian slippages. In Letters from L.A., the macabrely vacant Anne is an out-of-town girl getting to know Sincity in naive, stoned- puppy mode. The implications of what she is observing seem to pass her by completely as she writes to a friend, Sean, who never replies: 'A friend of Carlos was found dead in a garbage can in Studio City. He had been shot in the head and skinned. How awful, huh? Carlos doesn't seem very sad but Carlos is a very strong person so that doesn't surprise me. Carlos just put in a new videotape. We've been watching Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead... Randy plays them all the time. I've seen them a lot since I've been here. They're both really fun. Carlos is trying to wake Randy up to watch the movie. Carlos says L.A. is swarming with vampires. I'm taking a Valium.' And later: 'Randy OD'd a week ago (I think it was a week ago). Well, at least that's what they say he died of... I saw the room where they found him and there was so much blood. It was everywhere. There was blood on the ceiling, Sean. How can blood get on the ceiling if you OD? ...I've been talking to my stepmother about staying here. I won't be living with my grandparents but at Randy's place (it's all cleaned up, so don't worry) with Carlos. And I also get Randy's Ferrari, so it's not like I'm left empty-headed.' The body count continues to rise in the next story, Another Gray Area: 'Christie mentions that Tommy from Liverpool was found somewhere in Mexico last weekend and that maybe there was a hint of foul play since his body was completely drained of blood and his neck was hacked open and his vital organs were missing even though the Mexican authorities were telling people that Tommy "Drowned" and if he didn't drown exactly then maybe it was a 'suicide,' but Christie is sure that he definitely did not drown.' This kind of toying with the details of death gets even more bizarre, but it is presented in such a deadpan way, juxtaposed with social trivia, that the characters' unconcern becomes almost psychopathic: 'Christie is eating Italian ice cream and telling me that Tommy is actually hanging out in Delaware and that it was Monty and not Tommy who was found hacked to death in San Diego, not Mexico, his blood drained, not Tommy's, like she heard, because she got a postcard with Richard Gere on it from Tommy but Corey was found sealed in a metal drum buried in the desert. She asks me if Delaware is a state and I tell her that I'm not sure but that I'm really certain I saw Jim Morrison at a car wash on Pico this morning. He was drinking soda and minding his own business. Christie finishes the ice cream and wipes her lips with a napkin, complains about her implants.' In one of Ellis's most accomplished satirical sketches, Discovering Japan, the 'I' of the story is Bryan Metro, a terminally dissolute rock star, who is as much a victim as a perpetrator of the nihilistic cultural imperialism that his 'art' has become. In Tokyo for the first time, Bryan is not having a good world tour - all his relationships with people back in the 'real world' of the USA are totally screwed up, his performances are deteriorating, and the only person who gives him even an approximation of the truth is his burnt-out manager, Roger, taunts him continually - ' "Long sleeves, man. Wear long sleeves. Something poofy." I look down at my arms. "Why?" "Multiple choice: (a) you look nice in long sleeves; (b) you have holes in your arms; (c) you have holes in your arms; (d) you have holes in your arms." A long pause that I finally break up by saying, "C?" "Good," Roger says, then hangs up.' His worst nightmare involves an attack on his hotel by Godzilla - but the reality of life on the road seems far worse. As the stories progress, the lurking evil crawls into focus - the human monsters. In The Secrets of Summer, the narrator is Jamie, one of the vampires, but he also fancies himself as a wit. However, one of his intended Valgal victims is too dumb to appreciate his poor taste: 'I tell her an Ethiopian joke. "What's an Ethiopian with a sesame seed on his head?" "What's an Ethiopian?" she asks. "A Quarter Pounder," I say. 'That really cracks me up.' Jamie suffers acute indigestion when the blood of one of his victims nauseates him- she's a junkie. He's a techno-yuppie vampire: his custom coffin is equipped with FM radio, tape cassette, digital alarm clock, Perry Ellis sheets, phone, small colour TV, video and cable. In a touch that recalls American Psycho, Jamie talks about his blood-thirsty activities to his shrink, who obviously does not believe him. Finally, with an arrogance echoing Bram Stoker's Dracula, he threatens and taunts the shrink, ending with: ' "Define the vanishing point." "You" - he's crying - "define it." 'We've already been there," I tell him. "We've already seen it. "Who's... we?" He chokes. "Legion." ' Ellis's American neo-Gothic satire with a sharp edge of Manson/Dhamer reality hits the jugular in the next tale, "The Fifth Wheel", the most disturbing in the whole collection. The narrator is surviving in a carwash job when a heavy acquaintance from his past, Peter, descends upon him with junkie girlfriend Mary in tow to crash and ask for cash. Peter has to 'pay off some guy out there' and he needs a lot of money. Mary lets him know that Peter is one mean dude and has pulled some very violent numbers 'out in the desert'. Peter and Mary pull a kidnapping, which doesn't work out. Finally, threatened by one of Peter's 'out in the desert' connections, they prepare to flee, and the narrator is told by Peter to kill the child. He does, and his anguished reaction to this gratuitous, horrific act of violence puts this bottom-of- the-foodchain loser ahead of most of Ellis's yuppie drones in moral and ethical awareness. The Informers probably won't cop the kind of vituperation heaped on American Psycho, and neither should it. While more muted, it is still satirising the same targets - the nether end of the electro-consumer society in which heavy intake of images and vicarious 'experiences' of violence, sexuality, idealised 'model' figures and instant gratification has spawned the pleasure-driven drones, the mindless materialists, the bi-coastal followers of fashion, the Me-Gen self-improvers who send their four-year-old kids to work out at the gym, and the new-age zombies who can't distinguish between an attitude problem and rampant evil. Indeed, the 'Brat Pack Author' tag is entirely undeserved. Ellis is a very fine writer, working on serious moral problems. Reviewed by Giles Hugo
|