Defending Bret

Meghan O’Rourke writes for Slate that “I really like Lunar Park, the tricky new novel by Bret Easton Ellis. In this I seem to be nearly alone.” You’re not alone, Meghan, I thought there was a lot of good stuff there as well.

But be sure to read Meghan’s defense of Ellis. She makes a number of good points, including the closing one of “Ellis has never won a literary prize, or, according to him, even been nominated for one. Meanwhile, his readership is a wide one: Less Than Zero still flies off the shelves. American Psycho has sold some 600,000 copies since its publication in 1991, and it continues to sell nearly 1,000 a month in the United States???more than many literary novels sell in a year. The novel has sold strongly in its first week in stores, and several bookstores have already placed reorders. The guy at the bookstore I bought my copy from looked up and said, ‘This is a really good book.’ Popularity, God knows, isn’t a test of quality. But in this case the readers are onto something the critics have missed.”

And if you haven’t gotten yours yet, you can buy Lunar Park here.