“Lunar Park” is Bret Easton Ellis’ fifth novel. I’ve read the four previous, all taking place in the mid-80s in LA and illuminating the glamorously pretentious lives of outrageous twenty-somethings. I expected nothing different from “Lunar Park.” However, the protagonist in “Lunar Park” is a character named Bret Easton Ellis, a writer who became wildly famous at a young age, centering his life around his ego.
Ellis the writer is writing about Ellis the character without any real distinction between what is fiction and what is not. Ellis told an interviewer that “Lunar Park” is the most autobiographical of all his books, given that the character and the writer have the same name, the same age and height, and have published the same novels.
But there are obvious, and not so obvious, places where the character is not modeled after the author: this Ellis, for example, is heavier, attended a different college and, among other attributes, is married not single.
“Lunar Park” is, in my opinion, Bret Easton Ellis’s best work to date.