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Next Year's Model: Bret Ellis' New Novel |
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| "'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 had become overly complicated and ornate, loaded down with a heavy, useless emphasis on minutiae no matter how artfully composed. [quotes first lines from "Rules of Attraction," "American Psycho" and "Glamorama"] As anyone who had closely followed the progression of my career could glimpse-and if fiction inadvertently reveals a writer's inner life-things were getting out of hand, or to put it more precisely, resembling something that had become-according to The New York Times-"bizarrely complicated...bloated and trivial...hyped-up" and I didn't necessarily disagree. I wanted a return to that past simplicity. I had become overwhelmed by my life and those first sentences seemed reflections of what had gone wrong. It was time to get back to basics, and though I hoped that one lean sentence-"You do an awfully good impression of yourself"-would start the process, I also realized that it was going to require more than a string of words to clear away the clutter and damage that had amassed around me. But it would be the beginning. |