I picked this up thanks in large part to Megan Abbott’s review. It’s not her fault, though, that I didn’t like it.
For Goodreads, Abbott talked about the book’s similarities to Robert Altman’s movie The Long Goodbye, mostly in terms of aesthetics, a forgotten Los Angeles, as well as the narrator’s anxiety.
The Long Goodbye is one of my all time favorite movies, Chandler but better. So I had to grab this. And yeah, she is right that it gets the aesthetics well. I deeply felt the experience of early-80s Los Angeles while reading it. And the narrator’s anxiety was well-considered as he prowled around the city, following the classmate he thinks is a serial killer.
The problem is: it’s written by Bret Easton Ellis.
This is my third Ellis novel (American Psycho and Glamorama) and the one constancy is nothingness. Ellis consistently writes about living in a gilded void and hating every second of it. And he’s quite effective. What saves American Psycho from its brutal misogyny is Ellis’ portrayal of a vacuous Wall Streeter who can only fill the void with violence because he is so full of self-loathing and envy.
And that would be fine if this clocked in at around 250-300 pages. But there were almost 600 and halfway through, the book went from interesting to tedious, and tedious to exhausting. Finishing it was a chore, though I really liked the ending. There’s just not enough interesting material about a factional Bret Easton Ellis and his rich kid cohorts to make me invested for that much time.
I don’t really regret finishing it but like a lot of Ellis’ work, it left me wanting something different.