As the decade draws to a close and my reading habits slow down to a trickle of Us Magazine and the occasional novel bought in a fit of fear that my brain is going soft from all the reality television I watch instead of reading, I’ve decided it’s time to memorialize the weirdest, craziest book I’ve read in the last ten years. Mostly to prove to myself that I once read actual literature, but also to let the rest of you know about perhaps the most messed up, most beautiful book written in the last decade.
And that book is Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis.
I’ve been a fan of Ellis ever since I read American Psycho over the course of two weeks (when I say ‘read’ I mean mostly read with occasional skimming because a girl can only take so many detailed descriptions of mutilated prostitutes). I liked his style, how he didn’t seem to care about what people were going to think about the blatant narcissism and the way women were treated (or disemboweled) in his words. His satire was so tightly wound a lot of readers thought he actually meant everything he wrote about, but I never worried. He was literary and readable with a slam-bang energy that I admired. Plus, he wasn’t scared to just go where his brain took him.
When I picked up Lunar Park a year or so ago I knew nothing about it except that it was a psudo-autobiographical novel about his rocky relationship with his father. I like memoirs, and found it interesting that he was writing a story that was at once true and completely untrue. So I spent the 11 dollars or whatever and started reading one night before bed…and didn’t stop.
I read for hours. And for hours the next night. I read and then slept with the light on and kept reading even when I wasn’t reading – I couldn’t get the story out of my mind. Why? Because it was so. F*&^ked. Up. Ellis put his imagery skills to work and created the scariest scenes you have ever witnessed, even if you’ve read every single Stephen King book ever written. Quite honestly, you have never imagined in your wildest nightmares the sort of things Ellis put down on paper. Take American Psycho and add a dash of hideous fear in it and that’s Lunar Park. But it’s also touching. Touching, sad, and ultimately beautiful. It was so beautiful that after I finished the last page, I couldn’t move from my bed. I started crying. I felt genuine emotion. …Which hasn’t happened since I was 14 and on my second Titanic movie outing.
Never before and never after Lunar Park have I had my mind so warped by a novel. It’s true but it’s not. It’s a terrifying horror story but it’s also a beautiful memoir about forgiveness between a father and son. It’s a great read but also an important book in terms of what’s possible if you stay true to whatever you want to say, no matter the outcome.
He may not be Tolstoy, but Bret Easton Ellis isn’t afraid to dump the very contents of his brain onto the page, paint with his blood, and serve himself up. That, to me, is weird, frightening and the most intriguing thing I’ve read in the last ten years.
