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56th book of 2023.

White got a lot of flak, and I see why; frankly, it would be easy to blab some crap about white privileged males, Gen X mentalities, whatever. Ellis is problematic, and that makes him interesting. Most artists are: they’re interesting. I’ve known some wonderful people in my life but the nice ones, the really nice ones you’d trust with anything, are usually the most boring folk in the pub. Ellis’s White is just a big rant about Millennials, Twitter, the portrayal of gay men, movies, DFW� and, though I was less aware of it in 2019 than I am now, cancel-culture. He doesn’t pull his punches and I’ll be typing out some of his longer and more deliciously caustic passages. There’s stuff I agree with, stuff I don’t. As ever (because, he is, only human, even if he is a writer-human), there are contradictions, hypocrisy, made all the more funny because Ellis seems to be approaching the reader with his hands up, fingers splayed, saying, Look, I’m being as honest as I can here, I’m laying it all bare. The voice of reason. One minute empathetic, pragmatic, the next sharp and a little excessive. Surprisingly, this was Ellis’s first non-fiction work, interesting for a writer who began at 21. Ellis is also the man who said he was ‘done with fiction� but here we are in 2023 with The Shards.

I’ve read most of his books, annoyingly not his supposed magnum opus Glamorama, but I’ll try and finally get to that this year. American Psycho has made a re-emergence on the internet, made fresh again by a new wave of young men (no doubt young men, if you’ll allow me to generalise), who pine—ironically?—for Patrick Bateman’s coldness/steeliness. Christian Bale is plastered over videos that only appear to celebrate loneliness and depression, in favour of being a ‘sigma male�. A sigma is a new desired type of dominance, forgetting the previous goal men seemed to have, proving themselves as being alpha-males, the sigma male is apart from the rest of the pack, not a leader, but a lone wolf. I suppose it’s leaning into personal strength, maybe even apathy; it’s hard to tell. Christian Bale himself came out and said the sigma ‘community� are all ‘losers�. I never adored American Psycho when I read it, nor did I adore the film, but I do think, now all the boycotting and banning is over with, it’s an extremely clever novel, and one that, clearly, is surviving. 90s yuppies to post-COVID teenagers imaging themselves on a murderer and rapist with no feelings. Even Ellis admits throughout the essays in this book that he didn’t know then and he doesn’t know now whether Bateman is doing all the things he’s doing or whether it’s all invented. Though a collection of essays, it’s all woven together. The writing and publishing of American Psycho is the beginning of his discussions on, essentially, cancel-culture. He, so he claims, had never considered the fact that he might get in ‘trouble� for the book. Why? Because, Ellis says, he’s never been offended by art. And so,

If you’re a smart white person who happens to be so traumatised by something that you refer to yourself in conversation as a “survivor-victim,� you probably should contact the National Centre for Victims and ask them for help. If you’re a Caucasian adult who can’t read Shakespeare or Melville or Toni Morrison because it might trigger something harmful and such texts could damage your hope to define yourself through your victimisation, then you need to see a doctor, get into immersion therapy or take some meds. If you feel you’re experiencing “micro-aggressions� when someone asks you where you are from or “Can you help me with my math?� or offers a “God bless you� after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it’s triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help. If you’re afflicted by these traumas that occurred years ago, and that is still a part of you years later, then you are probably still sick and in need of treatment. But victimising oneself is like a drug—it feels so delicious, you get so much attention from people, it does in fact define you, making you feel alive and even important while showing off your supposed wounds, no matter how minor, so people can lick them. Don’t they taste so good?
This widespread epidemic of self-victimisation—defining yourself in essence by way of a bad thing, a trauma that happened in the past that you’ve let define you—is actually an illness.

And this is riding the great wave of book-banning, trigger-warnings and celebrity hating that has swept through the Internet (and I say Internet because half the opinions I read online, I’ve never heard in the flesh; I have never had someone at a party turn to me and say, You know what, I think The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is awful and should be banned! (And you know what, I’ve only ever met women who love Ellis and his books, in fact, I lived with a girl for a year who had a huge poster of the Marshall Arisman painting that graces so many copies of American Psycho)). It’s not difficult to go online and find articles about Ellis and his essays/books; I found plenty that are written softly, incredibly limp, and have bizarre apologetic little prefaces that say things like ‘I’ve never read Ellis but…� or ‘I have no desire to read Ellis, now or ever…� before taking apart some essay of him, some drunken tweet, some secondary source they’ve found about one of his novels. Article names fall anywhere along the lines of Star Wars puns (THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK) and the usual BEE buzzwords: GAY, GEN X, WHITE, PRIVILEGE, etc. What’s interesting about Ellis is he does appear to have a level of self-awareness, at least on certain things (and, let’s be honest, he named this book WHITE); but I’m not convinced if this self-awareness, sometimes only half-arsed, makes things better or worse for him.

He also turns on DFW (as he’s done on Twitter, too [1]). I showed fellow GR reader and friend Alan one of his comments from the essay, ‘I often considered David the most overrated writer of our generation, as well as the most pretentious and tortured’� There’s not much to back Ellis’s adjectives. DFW just was ‘pretentious�. (As opposed to Franzen, who Ellis clearly thinks highly of because he, apparently, often says that The Corrections is a book he wished he’d written himself.) ‘I also think he was a genius�, Ellis also writes, in the same essay. There’s an arrogant remark about the obvious Less Than Zero influences in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System and there’s the smattering hypocrisy that shows itself. Ellis rants about the Wallace’s legacy, where the man is remembered as some saint. The movie, with Segal playing DFW, makes it even worse. Ellis reminds the reader that Wallace wasn’t a perfect person, far from it. His insistence over this is a little uncomfortable considering he also ranted, in an earlier essay, about people who were unable to sever the artist from the art. John Lennon hit women, but he was a great musician.

The essay collection should have been called Post-Empire. Ellis coined these terms, Empire and post-Empire; ‘If Empire was the Eagles, Veuve Clicquot, Reagan, The Godfather and Robert Redford, then post-Empire was American Idol, coconut water, the Tea Party, The Human Centipede and Shia LaBeouf� [2]. Or, as an easier marker, Empire is up to about 9/11; the world changed after that. It’s similar to the false quotation of Adorno that people always wrongly quote about there being no poetry/art after Auschwitz (in reality, Adorno said that to write a poem after Auschwitz would be barbaric, not that it could not be done). I found these terms and the exploration of them, namely through Charlie Sheen, the most fascinating part of the book. The rants are fun but, like all rants, get tiresome after a while. Ellis seems to be going for humble, whilst at the same time proving his importance.

He didn’t vote, he likes no one. I don’t blame him for feeling self-involved and prophetic after making Donald Trump Patrick Bateman’s hero back in the 90s. Who wouldn’t. I’ll just end it by saying again that I agree with a lot of stuff in here, and disagree with others, but of course I won’t specify what falls into what camp. Ellis will keep on Tweeting drunk. He may even keep on writing books now. My favourite Ellis tweet to finish: ‘Come over at do bring coke now.�

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[1] ‘DFW is the best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn’t able to achieve. A fraud.� � 6th September 2012, Twitter

[2] It’s also no real surprise that Ellis’s vision of post-Empiricism, his poster-boy, is Charlie Sheen. But not once does he reflect on his own self post-Empiricism, as if to say, It goes without saying.