Books - Brett Easton Ellis

                                                Books

White – Brett Easton Ellis

Lucian Pissarro, James Bolivar Manson (1879-1945)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] 

… “I never wanted,” he writes in it, “to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring.” Whether he intended the line to be funny isn’t clear but it certainly is, because White could just as easily have been titled Why I Hate Absolutely Everything About Millennials.

…I suspect Ellis went out of his way to sound unlikeable in White in order to defy what he calls the “cult of likeability”, one of the book’s chief complaints about modern culture. He thinks social media has turned us all into shiny actors, promoting our personal brands with an online performance of relentless positivity, and he is certain a book as dark as American Psycho would not get published today.

“Never. Publishing houses now have triggering divisions, where the manuscript has to go through a psychiatrist or psychologist and diversity people.”

A woman he knows wrote a novel recently about a Muslim girl, “and they said, ‘This is cultural appropriation, you’re not a Muslim girl’”

He is sick and tired, too of the American left’s nervous breakdown over Donald Trump, and the media’s “hysterical” obsession with the president. He is also dismayed by the millennial “cult of victimisation”, in which everyone must identify themselves through their misfortune or vulnerability.

“I did not know a single person growing up who was afflicted with 29 different allergies and needed to carry a badger onto a plane as a security animal. I see these kids in oversized sunglasses, clutching a poodle with a little yellow security tag. I even know people who have them!”

He can’t stand woke young social-justice warriors taking offence at everything on Twitter, nor their puritanically judgemental “cancel culture”.

“Someone said it about me today, ‘Let’s cancel Brett Easton Ellis.’ The word gets used all the time, ‘We’re going to cancel this person, she shouldn’t have tweeted that, she’s cancelled.’ Louis CK is cancelled, Michael Jackson is cancelled – it’s become part of the lexicon.”

All this he offers with a wry air of bemused exasperation. “I feel adrift and disillusioned by what’s going on. I’m looking at it, I think fairly clearly, and thinking it’s just ridiculous.

(Decca Aitkenhead, The Sunday Times, 21.4.2019)

                                All good fun.