Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [0]
EASTON
ELLIS
LUNAR
PARK
table of contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Beginnings
2. The Party
3. Morning
4. The Novel
5. The College
6. The Shrinks
7. Robby’s Room
8. Halloween
9. Outside
10. The Mall
11. Detective
12. The Dinner Party
13. Parent/Teacher Night
14. The Kids
15. The Attachments
16. The Wind
17. Couples Counseling
18. Spago
19. The Cat
20. Kentucky Pete
21. The Actor
22. Interlude
23. The Phone Call
24. The Darkness
25. The Thing in the Hall
26. The Meeting
27. The Haunted
28. Los Angeles
29. The Attack
30. The Awakening
31. The Endings
Other Books by Bret Easton Ellis
Copyright Page
for
ROBERT MARTIN ELLIS
1941–1992
and
MICHAEL WADE KAPLAN
1974–2004
The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.
—THOMAS MCGUANE, Panama
People who have made up their minds about a man do not like to have their opinions changed, to reverse their judgments on account of some new evidence or new arguments, and the man who tries to compel them to change their minds is at least wasting his time, and he may be asking for trouble.
—JOHN O’HARA
From the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there.
—Hamlet, I: v. 98
1. the beginnings
“You do an awfully good impression of yourself.”
This is the first line of Lunar Park and in its brevity and simplicity it was supposed to be a return to form, an echo, of the opening line from my debut novel, Less Than Zero.
“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”
Since then the opening sentences of my novels—no matter how artfully composed—had become overly complicated and ornate, loaded down with a heavy, useless emphasis on minutiae.
My second novel, The Rules of Attraction, for example, began with this:
and it’s a story that might bore you but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.
The following is from my third novel, American Psycho.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
This, from my fourth novel, Glamorama:
Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer’s name is—a master craftsman not—mistook me for someone else so I couldn’t register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don’t look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don’t want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don’t leave out why, though I’m getting the distinct impression