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Summary
Summary
Own it, snowflakes: you've lost everything you claim to hold dear.
White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho , Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his provocations on social media, and here he escalates his admonishment of received truths as expressed by today's version of "the left." Eschewing convention, he embraces views that will make many in literary and media communities cringe, as he takes aim at the relentless anti-Trump fixation, coastal elites, corporate censorship, Hollywood, identity politics, Generation Wuss, "woke" cultural watchdogs, the obfuscation of ideals once both cherished and clear, and the fugue state of American democracy. In a young century marked by hysterical correctness and obsessive fervency on both sides of an aisle that's taken on the scale of the Grand Canyon, White is a clarion call for freedom of speech and artistic freedom.
"The central tension in Ellis's art--or his life, for that matter--is that while [his] aesthetic is the cool reserve of his native California, detachment over ideology, he can't stop generating heat.... He's hard-wired to break furniture."--Karen Heller, The Washington Post
"Sweating with rage . . . humming with paranoia."--Anna Leszkiewicz, The Guardian
"Snowflakes on both coasts in withdrawal from Rachel Maddow's nightly Kremlinology lesson can purchase a whole book to inspire paroxysms of rage . . . a veritable thirst trap for the easily microaggressed. It's all here. Rants about Trump derangement syndrome; MSNBC; #MeToo; safe spaces."--Bari Weiss , The New York Times
Author Notes
Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California on March 7, 1964. He attended Bennington College. In 1985, at the age of 23, his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published. His other works include The Rules of Attraction (1987), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), and Imperial Bedrooms (2010). His most controversial book was American Psycho, a book for which he received an advance in the amount of $300,000 from Simon and Schuster, who then refused to publish the book while under attack from women's groups in regards to the content of the book. It was later made into a feature film.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Political correctness is destroying America's mind and soul, according to this contentious manifesto. Novelist, screenwriter, and podcaster Ellis, whose American Psycho sparked a furor with its grisly rapes and murders, lambastes "the threatening groupthink of progressive ideology, which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions." He focuses on social-justice hysteria in the entertainment and media industries: critics of mediocre movies by or about women, gays, and minorities, he contends, get tagged with upholding white male privilege; social media platforms enforce "corporate conformism and censorship... stamping out passion and silencing the individual;" Trump Derangement Syndrome consumes Ellis's Hollywood associates and his boyfriend, who is obsessed with Russia-collusion theories. Ellis's loose-jointed essay weaves in scenes from his days as an alienated writer adrift in Manhattan, film criticism, and an impassioned defense of artistic transgression, arguing that "to be challenged... to get wiped out by the cruelty of someone's vision" promotes a mature understanding of life. Ellis's pop-culture preoccupations sometimes feel callow-he paints Charlie Sheen and Kanye West as America's last free men-and his critique of leftists as "haters" who "came across as anti-common sense, anti-rational and anti-American" is an unoriginal reprise of ideas commonplace to right-wing media outlets. Still, his vigorous, daring take on today's ideological wars will provoke much thought and more controversy. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Bitter rants and petty score settling drive this attack on political correctness in the Twitter age For reasons clear only to himself, Bret Easton Ellis opens his new book with an image of himself hunched over a screen, pulsating with uncontrollable fury. Minor incidents with strangers on social media had meant an "overwhelming and irrational annoyance started tearing through me up to a dozen times a day". Alongside this anger came "an oppression I felt whenever I ventured online". Worst of all, these feelings "could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress". But, he adds darkly, "silence and submission were what the machine wanted". It's impossible to read the rest of the book without this image of Ellis - sweaty with rage, contorted over a keypad, humming with paranoia about the demands of "the machine" - coming to mind. Because White , a collection of eight essays that respond to contemporary culture, has all the sound, fury and insignificance of a misguided rant posted at 3am. Except, inexplicably, it has been given the dignity of print publication. Ellis is best known for his provocative, bestselling novels Less Than Zero and American Psycho . White is his first non-fiction book, marketed as a "wide-ranging exploration of what the hell is going on right now". But Ellis's interests cannot be considered "wide-ranging". They are almost exclusively confined to his novels, his podcast, his Twitter account and a handful of fierce arguments he has had with friends at dinner at some point in the last three years. The rest of the world - politics, art, technology, culture - is merely glimpsed incidentally. Born in 1964, Ellis wears his Gen X identity with pride. He describes his 70s childhood with great nostalgia, calls himself a member of "the most pessimistic and ironic generation" ever, and sees his most successful novels as explorations of this generational pessimism and irony. But White 's argument (if it has one) is that the generation that followed - millennials - are crybabies and professional victims. Their PC, thought-police culture is ruining the world. Orwell is turning in his grave! "If gay jokes are taken out of the equation, what goes next?" he asks. "Should all ideas and opinions and content and language now be policed?" One rambling monologue - sparked by the withdrawal of his invitation to a Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation awards dinner after he had tweeted in poor taste about a gay actor - ends with him asking: "And, finally, can they police, ultimately, your dreams?" Ellis seems to find these questions original, profound and scary, but they read as narcissistic, reactionary and boring. Ellis tries to lend out-of-touch pronouncements an air of rebellion by labelling everything he dislikes as 'corporate' He prides himself on clinical distance in his writing, but distance is nowhere to be found here - Ellis writes with his nose pressed against the screen. He adopts a pseudo-factual tone and gives lots of detail, which results in some of the most dull anecdote openings in recorded history. "One of the more laboured podcasts I recorded was with Jason Schwartzman," a story begins. "In the late 1980s, when Tom Cruise and I lived in the same building in downtown New York, I saw him only twice - both times in the elevator," starts another. We are enticed to read on with such gems as: "In the fall of 2016, I happened to see two movies back-to-back." Each of these anecdotes eventually veers off at a sharp angle into hysterical responses to political correctness, resulting in a pitch-perfect parody of the Old Man Yells at Cloud meme. Teen Vogue exemplifies the "authoritarian language police", while concepts such as the male gaze prove we live in "a dystopian sci-fi movie in which you can express yourself only in some neutered form, a mound, or a clump of flesh and cells, turning away from your gender-based responses to women, to men, to sex, to even looking". His style is hyperbolic but without a trace of humour. Ellis tries to lend these out-of-touch pronouncements an air of rebellion by lazily labelling everything he dislikes as "corporate". The press is "highly corporate", Hillary Clinton a human representative of "the Corporation". When he recalls Simon & Schuster dropping him just before the publication of American P sycho they are referred to as "conglomerate-owned". Condemning gay slurs makes you part of "the corporate-gay overreaction". This impulse often results in bursts of self-aggrandisement. "What my podcast was fighting, I realised," he says at one point, "was the limitations of the new world order." And if Ellis can't tweet "an HIV joke" without facing criticism, then the entirety of humanity is "heading toward the corporate abyss". The great obsession of the book is Ellis's adventures on Twitter. In telling the story of the GLAAD dinner, he writes: "Hey, it's a Twitter account, guys, move on." But he seems unable to do so himself: my stomach sank when, almost 200 pages in, I saw that the sixth essay of the collection was titled Tweeting. How had we not exhausted the topic already? He recounts in painstaking, mind-numbing detail the times he tweeted stupid comments about David Foster Wallace and Kathryn Bigelow. When he writes, more than 20 pages later, that he is shocked that "anyone could really, deeply, care about a tweet", it's such an obvious case of protesting too much that it feels almost sad, like a recently dumped partner ranting about their ex for 90 minutes before adding that they don't care. At times he is even disingenuous enough to pretend his Twitter persona is actually "Dada performance art". "Twitter encouraged the bad boy in me," he says sincerely. The kind of bad boy who liked to sit at home alone arguing with strangers online, "at that time of night when all bets were off and the only things that seemed to matter for five minutes were the immediate responses my tweet received and that icy glass of tequila next to my keypad". Then there are the arguments over dinner. The accounts of these seem to have been written out of sheer petty score settling, so Ellis can retrospectively declare himself the intellectual victor of past tiffs. He saves particular venom for a female friend who "suddenly exploded into a spastic rage" during an evening at which he criticised the "aesthetics" of Black Lives Matter, "ranting, often nonsensically" in a way that was "so angry, so deranged". He appears to think these nasty caricatures of his supposed friends make him appear like the glacial saviour of logic in an age of hysteria, rather than a resentful, bitter man still caught up in the heat of arguments, years after everyone else has left the restaurant. Ellis seems increasingly agitated. He is insistent that "the widespread epidemic of self-victimisation ... is actually an illness". But he sees no problem with his own out-of-control anger. He admits that at times during conversations with friends he begins to hear an angry voice in the back of his mind, muttering: "You are the biggest fucking baby I've ever fucking heard in my entire fucking life." This does not particularly alarm him. "Maybe when you're roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgement, and then comes common sense," Ellis writes at the close of White , supposedly in reference to the "constant shrieking" of the left. Maybe that's also how we ended up with such a nonsensical, vapid book, written by a man so furiously obsessed with his right to speak that he forgets to say anything at all.
Kirkus Review
The author of American Psycho (1991) and a half-dozen other novels returns with a series of thematically related essays.Ellis (Imperial Bedrooms, 2010, etc.)who also has a podcast to which he often refers and who has also worked extensively on various film and TV projectswill not endear himself to those who are politically left-leaning. Repeatedly, he assails liberals for failing to accept the election of Donald Trumpand for helping to make everyone hysterical about having to see, read, and think about things we don't agree with. The left, he writes near the end, has become "a rage machine." Ellis' text also displays aspects of memoir: One piece deals with his early (and continuing) fondness for films, which his father cultivated by taking him, even at a young age, to some very "adult" movies. These memories lead him to discuss Richard Gere, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Tom Cruise. American Psycho is also a leitmotif: Ellis tells us about the conception and writing of the novel, lets us know that the brutality existed only in the imagination of his protagonist, and makes other comments about the film and the subsequent musical, which lost money. He slowly leads us, as well, into a discussion of his sexuality and his various relationships. Ultimately, though, his principal interest is in the fractured American culture, political and otherwise. He rails against college students who demand "trigger warnings"; blasts the traditional media; tells stories about the excessive reactions to his tweets; and celebrates some current cultural outcasts, including Charlie Sheen, Roseanne Barr, and Kanye West. He lashes out at certain writers while delivering praise to otherse.g., he admires Joan Didion and Jonathan Franzen.Well-written pieces bubbling with attitude and self-confidence but, at times, as judgmental as those Ellis condemns. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ellis, still perhaps best known for his novels American Psycho (1991) and Less Than Zero (1985), offers his first nonfiction title, a collection of essays whose subjects include acting and authenticity, art and aesthetics, movies, books, popular culture and celebrity, Twitter, his own art, the lost art of having opinions, and the accelerating transformation of American society. If there's an overriding theme in this intelligent and briskly observed offering, it's that Ellis stands against what he perceives as the threatening groupthink of progressive ideology, arguing that different perspectives shouldn't make people enemies and that ideas and opinions are, perhaps, not the sum total of a person. (And he is clearly more interested in people than politics.) He's also an artist who engages deeply with works, and his takes on film, especially, are often fascinating. As his Twitter followers and podcast listeners will know, Ellis isn't afraid to be contrarian, and that's what makes this book so interesting. You might disagree with much of what Ellis thinks but that, it would seem, is just fine with him.--Keir Graff Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
When i tell a close friend that I am reading a book by Bret Easton Ellis, he makes the face I made when I tasted kombucha for the first time. "Isn't he ... bad?" I imagine that Ellis would find this reaction delightful. That it is uttered by a purebred coastal elite with a crush on ?.?.?. and a refrigerator full of overpriced organic produce would make it all the more delicious. Because here is the caricatured target of Ellis's new book: a millennial who borrows many of his cultural opinions from woke Twitter; who experienced something close to shell shock when Robert Mueller's report was finally completed and impeachment proceedings did not immediately commence; and who - sin of sins, as far as the author is concerned - confuses aesthetic differences with moral failing. Ellis has been a public bad boy since 1985, when his debut novel, "Less Than Zero," was published while he was still a college student. In those days, the author's vices were obnoxiousness and large quantities of cocaine. Now he is sober. And the obnoxiousness has migrated, naturally, to a podcast and a Twitter feed. If the author's name rings a bell for the members of "Generation Wuss," as Ellis has dubbed millennials, including his longtime (and surely long-suffering) boyfriend, it is likely because of one of his various headline-making tweets. Perhaps you'll recall the one about the Oscar-winning director of "The Hurt Locker": "Kathryn would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she's a very hot woman she's really overrated." Now, at least in theory, snowflakes on both coasts in withdrawal from Rachel Maddow's nightly Kremlinology lesson can purchase a whole book to inspire paroxysms of rage. "White" - even the title is a trigger - is a veritable thirst trap for the easily microaggressed. It's all here. Rants about Trump derangement syndrome; MSNBC; #MeToo; safe spaces. He thinks "Moonlight" only won the Oscar for best picture over "La La Land" because voting for it could be seen as a "rebuke to Trump." He thinks that Black Lives Matter is a morally significant movement, but says its "lurching, unformed aesthetic" is why it never reached a wide audience. Had the "millennial mess" mimicked the look of the Black Panthers, he suggests, it would have taken off. I'm not exaggerating. Speaking of Black Panthers - yes, you guessed it - the author thinks that movie was insanely overhyped. It will not escape reader notice that the author of a book called "White" happens to be particularly fixated on black culture. Oh, and in case you were wondering: Ellis didn't vote in 2016. "Not only because I lived in rest-assured California, but also because during the campaign I'd realized I wasn't a conservative or a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, and that I didn't buy into what either party was selling." I put the book down after that particular riff. (I did the same after his take on the tragic case of Tyler dementi, the gay Rutgers student who killed himself after he was bullied online by his roommate.) Ellis recently told The Times that "this is kind of a book for a Bret Easton Ellis completist." Perhaps he is right that superfans will love to hear him go on for pages about "American Psycho" being transferred from page to stage, where it closed after two months and lost $14 million. I did not. But one suspects that his editor must be one. Nothing else justifies seven pages on Charlie Sheen's 2011 breakdown. Ellis summons more detail and color about Alex Gibney's 2015 HBO documentary about Frank Sinatra (three pages) than he does in the two paragraphs he dedicates to snorting coke and talking about race with Jean-Michel Basquiat on a random October afternoon at the Odeon in 1987 - an anecdote that any person with a pulse would be interested in. Ellis told The Times Literary Supplement that this book was "a lament from a disillusioned Gen X-er" and I think to read it as anything more than a sustained wail would be a waste of energy. That is not to say that I don't share some of Ellis's bugbears. I think those writers who boycotted PEN for honoring the surviving staffers of Charlie Hebdo are moral midgets. I think it's a very bad sign about where we are as a culture when friendships are unable to survive elections or the appointment of Supreme Court justices. Indeed, many of the topics Ellis blithely skates over in this ranting, stream-of-consciousness book would be rich fodder for a real analysis of the Great Awokening and its excesses. On the face of it, it would seem Ellis would be the ideal person to write it. He was canceled decades before canceling became a thing. It was November 1990 and Simon & Schuster was set to release "American Psycho," Ellis's anticipated third novel, until it caved in the face of criticism, much of it internal. "The noise from the offended was too loud," Ellis writes of the episode - a concise phrase diagnosing our current cultural malady. Back then, outrage had not yet become our dominant mode. A more prestigious publishing house swooped in within 48 hours and "American Psycho" became a best seller. Today, young-adult novels deemed politically or culturally insensitive are pulped before they are even put out. And one of the earliest casualties of our fun-deficient, conformist age (Ellis is entirely right about this) has been the intellectual gadfly. Ellis is one of them. Yet he refuses to own the role he has chosen. "I was never good at realizing what might offend someone anyway," he writes. And you want to throw the book across the room because you know that the very reason it was written was to offend. This move - starting a fire and then feigning surprise when people accuse you of being an arsonist - is like a boxer slipping to avoid the counterpunch. It's particularly grating when plenty of others - more driven, more disciplined, more principled - are in the ring. If Ellis wants in, he would do well to follow his own advice: "It was time for everyone to pull on their big boy pants, have a stiff drink at the bar and start having true conversations, because ultimately we shared only one country." Bari weiss is an Op-Ed staff editor and writer at The Times.
Library Journal Review
Novelist Ellis (The Rules of Attraction; Lunar Park) presents his first work of nonfiction, expounding that society has created a rampant overreaction epidemic in large part owing to opinions posted on social media. And, by the way folks, the 2016 presidential election is over, so move on. The author begins this skillfully crafted collection of essays by recounting his 1970s childhood, a time of nonchalant instead of helicopter parenting, when he could spend his days at the theater viewing horror movies. In several pieces, Ellis charmingly describes his life through the films he watched and the books he read. He then examines his literary career, beginning with the publication of his first novel, Less Than Zero, as a 21-year-old college student. Amid reflections on his life as a gay man, his writing career, and the current political climate, Ellis opines about Charlie Sheen, Tom Cruise, and Kayne West, among other celebrities. He also deconstructs his novel American Psycho, and discusses its film and Broadway musical adaptation. VERDICT Regardless of their opinions about social media, readers will be captivated by these provocative essays and then move on to rereading Less Than Zero and American Psycho.-Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.