White
Bret Easton Ellis
(Picador, 288 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064
What happens to a literary wunderkind when they’re no longer a Kind – or are 55, to be exact? In the case of Bret Easton Ellis, who achieved fame at the age of 21, they become grumpy older men. In White, his first non-fiction work, Ellis takes aim at the snowflake generation, “Generation Wuss” he calls them, whom he chastises as over-opinionated, uptight, latter-day Puritans, addicted to uncovering thought crimes and endowed with an exaggerated sense of grievance. Remarkably, one of his targets is his own boyfriend, whose crying jags and weight loss as a result of Donald Trump’s election are lampooned without mercy.
Ellis is unlikely to be dismayed by any tut-tuts his book, part memoir, part broadside, draws from a literary establishment he has been goading ever since he burst on to the scene with Less Than Zero. A sensation with younger readers, this depiction of nihilistic drug and sex-crazed teens in California appalled The New York Times, and a good many others, partly because it signally failed to ascribe to the young any of the virtues usually expected of them, such as hope, and a desire to change things.
