LUNAR PARK
by Bret Easton Ellis
Picador, £7.99
The difficulty of trumping one’s early success is a theme available to few writers, but Easton Ellis is certainly one of them. Thus the first two chapters of this funny but flawed novel read like a chronicle of his career, listing his novels in order and describing the effect on his life of the celebrity that accompanied each one — particularly the infamous American Psycho.
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But what might have been an engagingly frank account — along the lines of Martin Amis’s Experience — of the trials and tribulations of being a famous writer turns into something else: a blatantly unreliable piece of literary game-playing, in which a character named “Bret Easton Ellis” settles in the suburbs with Jayne, his Hollywood actress wife and her two children, and attempts to reconcile this new role with the drugs and alcohol-fuelled hedonism of his“Brat Pack” days. Adding a tacky, low-budget horror feel to the mixture is the reappearance in his life of Patrick Bateman, the yuppie serial killer who was his most notoriouscreation and who may be responsible for several gruesome murders.
So far, so postmodern; but things get increasingly bizarre as the house in Elsinore Avenue is terrorised by vengeful ghosts and flying devil-dolls, and Bret and Jayne’s marriage becomes more and more unstable. The lyrical passage about the author’s dead father that closes the novel seems to belong to a different book — one in which the cheap sensationalism and lame satire of the rest has no place.
WINKLER
by Giles Coren
Vintage, £7.99
Fans of the splenetic humour displayed in Coren’s restaurant columns for this newspaper will find more of the same in his debut novel, whose eponymous hero spends much of the novel inveighing against the things he dislikes. This includes his colleagues, his flatmates, the Underground, dogs, puddles, and — crucially — fat people.
The first few chapters are full of laugh-out-loud moments, when Winkler’s simmering exasperation boils over into ludicrous confrontations with those — such as his belligerent Northern Irish girlfriend, Mary — who have occasioned it. Then the comic mood gives way to something darker. An encounter with an elderly Jewish veteran of the Warsaw ghetto convinces Winkler that his life has lacked intensity. The next day he performs a heroic action, saving a blind girl from assault, and the day after that a murderous one, pushing a fat woman under a train — both acts carried out, it would seem, in the same spirit of experimentation.
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From then on, things spiral out of control. Reading at times like an unholy cross between Will Self’s My Idea of Fun and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Winkler is nothing if not provocative. While its blacker moments may not be to every reader’s taste, it has much to recommend it — not least the sharpness of its character drawing and the deftness with which it skewers some of the more absurd aspects of 21st-century urban life.
THE VILLA
by Sarah Sands
Pan, 6.99
The pastel cover of Sands’s novel conjures a idyllic mood far removed from the bleak little tale of adultery and marital breakdown to be found within. The setting for most of this is the villa in Provence rented by a group of friends including Jenny Wentworth, second wife of Richard, who was once her boss. Ten years on, their once-passionate relationship is flagging, and Jenny, fearful of the onset of middle age, has become obsessed with maintaining her youthful appearance.
Bored by her shallowness, Richard turns for diversion to another member of the group — Jenny’s old schoolfriend Amanda, whose husband is an invalid. But while these two enjoy a guilt-free fling, Jenny herself has become more deeply involved with Ahmed, the villa’s odd-job man. The relationship between these two does not emerge until late on, when, after a series of disastrous mishaps, all the other couples have gone home. Only then does it become apparent that Jenny has jeopardised not only her marriage but her relationship with her young daughter, and that her holiday affair may turn out to be more life-changing than she imagined.
The Villa is full of entertaining moments, and its depiction of the complacent characters is very funny and cruelly accurate. But in making its central character so vapid, the author makes it hard for the reader to feel sorry for her, even when her “punishment” for straying from the marital straight and narrow turns out to be as severe as it does.