In my outside reading, I’ve found some remarakably mixed writing about Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis, ranging from “best of their generation” to “couldn’t write fortune cookies”.
I’m half-tempted to read one of their works, just to see what the fuss was about, but, before I risk my life and limb, I would like to put this question out to the rest of you.
How good (or, conversely, how bad) are these authors?
All of them write short books, so you won’t lose that much time if you give them a quick peep.
McInerney and Easton Ellis have their moments, but one gets the idea those moments are the result of countless hours of workshop feedback and then editing rather than any real spark on the part of the authors.
Tama Janowitz is sort of a lesser Irma Bombeck for the Cindy Lauper generation. (Or Cindi - can’t remember.)
Full disclosure: After reading the first books of McInerney and Easton Ellis and forming the above opinion, I became friends with someone who’d had both of them in creative writing classes or workshops. This friend like both of them personally, felt they worked very hard to improve their writing according to criticism and suggestions from instructors and classmates, but was not entirely gung-ho about the final product and more or less said that without the right connections neither of them would have been published.
I happen to love Bret Easton Ellis. I think American Psycho is brilliant satire that was misunderstood when it first came out. Ellis can seem disturbing in that his books often seem to lack a moral center. It’s like he just drops a camera into the middle of a bunch of amoral characters and lets it roll. The actions and attitudes of the characters speak for themselves. Ellis does not feel the need to point out that this or that is bad. His moral commentatry is expressed in the emptiness and desperation of the characters lives as well as the consequences of their actions. He’s one of my favorite writers.
I have to admit that I haven’t read their stuff, but several years ago Spy magazine put out a hilarious “Cliff Notes” parody of their novels, complete with an included “plot generator” machine. Well worth reading, if you can find it.
I’ve read Easton Ellis, and aside from some of the graphic imagery in Ellis’ books, I didn’t really he wrote anything groundbreaking. Technically, the books I read were well-written, but I thought them the equivalent of motel paintings: bland, insipid, and designed to please the masses. YMMV, of course.
Robin
It’s Cyndi.
Ellis: Liked Rules of Attraction and American Psycho. Lees Than Zero was OK. Glamarama and The Informers, ew.
McInerney: Read Bright Lights, Big City and was unimpressed.
Janawitz: Loved Slaves of New York. A Cannibal in Manhattan was OK. The other book of hers I read was awful.
So I’d recommend those I mentioned and forget the rest of them.
Whatever happened to Tama Janawitz anyway? She used to be everywhere.
I think American Psycho is a brilliant book; what little I’ve read of Ellis’s earlier work was far less impressive both in style and content. I understand why other people variously don’t get it, find it morally reprehensible, or don’t consider it a valuable thing to have been written. Appreciation of it probably depends on your view of human nature and culture, but I think it’s also very impressive as a literary experiment.
I’ve only read Bright Lights Big City and no other McInerney. He’s supposed to be a writer who’s matured since then. Personally I found BLBC to be good but not excellent: approximately on the level of Douglas Coupland’s less inspired novels. It has some good writing and interesting moments, but is definitely a book by a young man who doesn’t know too much about real life. Not essential reading, but if you’re looking for a book to pass a few hours while cluing you in on a part of recent literary and social history you won’t be disappointed.
I actually have that (it’s one of the reasons I thought of asking this), but without the “plot generator”.
And it’s Erma Bombeck.
I liked BLBC, although it’s not a great or breakthrough book. It’s one of the few major books to succeed with a second person PoV, which is a good reason to read it just for style.
Ellis’s work has never appealed to me. I couldn’t read enough of Psycho to have it turn from boring drivel into satire.
Copuland’s interesting book is Microserfs, which captures the feel of living in the old version of the science-fictional future better than most sf ever did.