Andrew Taylor

Cracking the code of celebrity

issue 15 October 2005

Like revolution, fame has a nasty habit of eating its children. On one level Lunar Park explores the perils that an author faces when subjected to the sort of celebrity usually reserved for rock stars and supermodels. It’s not just any old author, either, but Bret Easton Ellis himself.

Or is it? The narrator of the novel is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’. ‘There’s one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands’, he assures the reader. ‘All of it really happened, every word is true.’ The early chapters of this book invite the reader to play the chic, post-modern game of Spot the Join. ‘Bret’ has published the same novels as his creator, shares many of the same friends (Sonny Mehta and Jay McInerney included) and has enjoyed the same extraordinary success as the leader of the literary Brat Pack. But has Bret Easton Ellis really frittered away so much money on conspicuously failing to have a good time? Did he really consume so many truckloads of alcohol and drugs? Is it really so ghastly to be Bret?

Somewhere along the line, Bret and ‘Bret’ part company.

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