This Week's Reads

Lunar Park
By Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf, $24.95)

Even an enfant terrible has to grow up sometime, though Bret Easton Ellis has been putting it off for as long as possible. Now 41, his author photo for his fifth novel and the face in recent magazine spreads don't correspond too well. He's obviously done some living since Less Than Zero made him a star in 1985. Yet the discrepancy between the handsomer bad-boy novelist and his present, middle-aged self isn't a form of denial at all. In his best and most enjoyable read since Zero, Ellis has created a much more ambitious book that mocks his callow youth ("raving, coked-up, sucking back another Stoli"). He does this by writing Lunar Park in the first- person, assuming the voice of one Bret Easton Ellis, a bad-boy novelist coasting on his old reputation and wrestling with some even older personal demons.

Despite this literary device (tried often before by much better writers), Lunar Park isn't exactly a literary novel. Yet it is highly entertaining—particularly in its long "autobiographical" opening chapter. However much the real Ellis has been trashed by critics and gossips in the past, he outdoes them all here, sending up his alter ego without mercy. "Look, being America's greatest writer under forty is a lot to live up to," whines this petulant Ellis. One of his college writing students has to correct his reference to Proust and the tangerine. (Madeleine? D'oh!) He passes out at the Golden Globes; the FBI keeps a file on him; he greedily contemplates a lurid new novel called Teenage Pussy, declaring, "I would still be enjoying huge success and notoriety while my better-behaved peers were languishing on 'Where Are They Now?' Web sites."

This Ellis also now has a sullen teen son, Robby, fathered in an old fling with a Hollywood actress. Craving stability for herself, she asks him to marry her. Needing stability for himself, he agrees, and they set up a kind of family recovery ward in the leafy green suburbs outside New York, on a street called Elsinore Lane. Is something rotten in the state of Ellis' cul-de-sac? His son barely acknowledges him. He and his wife aren't sleeping together. And the creepy toy bird he got—through his drug dealer—for his stepdaughter seems to be slaughtering neighborhood pets at night. Oh, and a gruesome killing spree has broken out in his quiet enclave, modeled on American Psycho. A cop comes calling, and Ellis falls off the wagon.

Ellis our narrator insists every detail of a 12-day breakdown is true, including the Steven King–style horror and family ghosts (chiefly that of his remote, drunk, disapproving father). By the time his McMansion has started acting like The Amityville Horror, Ellis decides, "I understood there was another world underneath the one we lived in." He's right—that nether realm is memory. Unlike Stephen King, Ellis the writer has family wounds to heal. The goal is forgiveness, not gore. Says Ellis, "I was now my father. Robby was now me."

It's a rather late turn—for both Ellises—into sincerity. Lunar Park is dedicated to Ellis' dead father and dead lover, and there's no denying his ultimately heartfelt intent. (In Zero, some may recall, the hero had issues with his dead mother.) I can't say it's successful, or that he carries off his final big showstopper of a run-on sentence successfully, but you can at least respect his intentions. He hasn't exactly embraced family or middle age or the suburbs or maturity, but he does evince a certain disgust toward American Psycho, Columbine kids, and his own puerile, famous self. And you're not sure which Ellis, the author or the caricature, has this to say: "My wistful attitude about drugs and fame—the delight I took in feeling sorry for myself—had turned into a hard sadness, and the future no longer looked even remotely plausible. Just one thing seemed to be racing toward me: a blackness, a grave, the end."

Instead, I'd call Lunar Park a beginning. Maybe it's taken Bret Easton Ellis five novels to finally begin his second act. BRIAN MILLER

Bret Easton Ellis will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7:30 p.m. Tues., Sept. 6.

A Sudden Country
By Karen Fisher (Random House, $24.95)

Northwest author Karen Fisher's debut is literary fiction based loosely on old family documents—not a historical novel, as its setting might lead you to believe. A Sudden Country is a dreamy, ethereal story of two wayward souls who meet by chance during the 1847 Oregon migration, bringing scandal to the dusty trails of covered wagons and tired children.

After his Nez Perce wife leaves him for another man and his children die of smallpox, James MacLaren begins the bitter trek to find her in Oregon. During a secret, violent act, MacLaren meets Lucy Mitchell, who is traveling west with her husband and children. The pull between MacLaren and Lucy is instantaneous, and he is hired to accompany them during the passage.

MacLaren's grief is unrestrained and blazing, and he is initially wary of Lucy's fierce but equally sad presence. Physically energized by him, Lucy wishes she could be so free. A Hudson's Bay Company trader, he marries a Native American, lives from the land, refuses to respect religion or convention. MacLaren has "seen things Adam never named," we're told. For her part, Lucy is neither a prim 19th-century wife nor a burgeoning feminist. She is a pioneer mother who skins buffalo, bathes in streams, feeds and clothes her children, and tries to preserve the spirit left inside her—a spirit jolted awake by MacLaren.