Alas, I knew him Bret Easton Ellis’s Hamlet complex BY JOHN FREEMAN
	Lunar Park By Bret Easton Ellis | Alfred A. Knopf | 309 pages | $25

Like all satirists, Bret Easton Ellis is a moralist. His coked-up, empty- headed LA kids (Less Than Zero) and Wall Street serial killer (American Psycho) are examples of what happens to a society that breakfasts on pharmaceuticals, lunches on celebrity, and dines on whatever it fancies. That critics mistook psycho Patrick Bateman’s murders as entertainment rather than indictment says it all.

Ellis didn’t just write these books; he seemed to be auditioning for a role in them. He conducted his first interviews at pricy restaurants lubricated by vodka, traveled on tour with a bodyguard (after American Psycho there were death threats), and flitted through glossy magazines amid rumors of hard drug use and flamboyant sexual escapades. It sometimes seemed he was becoming ripe for a savaging by Bret Easton Ellis.

Now, when he’s 41, this has come to pass. Lunar Park is a novel about a novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who has washed up on the rocky shores of middle age with a faltering career, lingering drug habits, a son who will not accept him as his father, and some unresolved feelings about his own paterfamilias, who died mysteriously (was he murdered?) in a welter of debt. What begins with the look of an autobiographical prologue ("When I was a student at Camden College in New Hampshire I took a novel-writing tutorial and produced during the winter of 1983 a manuscript that eventually became Less Than Zero") soon shifts into Roth-like meta-fiction. Lunar Park is set in a generic American city, where Ellis lives with his family on Elsinore Lane, and it’s planted with allusions to Hamlet. There’s a club called Fortinbras, and Ellis’s father even makes a night-time appearance to his son. Except that he has come to scold. "I want you to realize some things about yourself," the specter says by cell phone. "I want you to face the disaster that is Bret Easton Ellis."

Lunar Park may be a prurient and fascinating literary exorcism, but it’s no Shakespearean tragedy. Hamlet’s father was murdered, and if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had not been so ineffective, he would have been as well. The fictional Bret Easton Ellis faces similar threats, only they’re phantoms of his well-sozzled cranium. If he could lay off the Xanax or cocaine or half-bottles of Ketel One, he might just have the clarity to face his demons.

Or perhaps it’s not just the drugs talking. After all, as Ellis (the character) describes, there is a copycat murderer on the lam modeling himself on Patrick Bateman, and a young man floating around the college where Ellis (the character) teaches who calls himself Clayton (after the protagonist in Less Than Zero). This young man later morphs into Bateman, and from him into Ellis’s father. It is not just this novel that is an exorcism, Ellis suggests, but writing itself. For a writer, fantasy is reality — even in the real world.

Ellis has a happier time of playing this postmodern game of literary three-card monte here than in American Psycho. The early sections of Lunar Park are cluttered with real-life people (or their personas), from Ellis’s editor at Knopf to fellow Brat Pack novelist Jay McInerney (the character Ellis refers to him as "the Jayster"), who does lines off the hood of Ellis’s Porsche with a rolled $20 bill. Perhaps fêtes with Bret involve such activities, or perhaps he’s commenting on a literary world where such off-the-books-page antics have become the main show and the work itself is almost an afterthought. Lunar Park, like all of Ellis’s novels, attempts to report and reflect this state of affairs. But it’s a thin bailiwick. Who besides Ellis (the real one) can appreciate the extent to which he has been distorted? To judge by the tears its main character sheds throughout, this novel is an apology, Ellis (the character? the man?) admitting he is in part to blame.