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Showing posts from January 7, 2007

Things I've Been Doing

This last week I read Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. I'm normally a fan of Ellis - I find him funny, and I find his protagonists incredibly sad and touching (particularly Patrick Bateman of American Psycho and Victor of Glamorama) and I don't mind the sex and violence ( more about how I seem to identify more with male protagonists in another entry ). But I'm a little disappointed in Lunar Park. I think this is because the protagonist of Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis himself, and that ruins the charm for me. Obviously, the protagonist isn't actually Ellis - it's Ellis in the same way that Philip Roth is the protagonist in The Plot Against America or Operation Shylock - but the thing that made Ellis's protagonist's tolerable, even sympathic to me, was that they were ever so slightly exaggerated to make his point. They were not real. Their vacuousness and blank affects were part of what made them interesting and intriguing. But when the author puts himself