Review of White by Bret Easton Ellis

Although he has published six novels and a collection of stories previously, Bret Easton Ellis’s reputation rests largely on a pair of novels whose popular culture-infused plots bookended the 1980s: his debut, Less Than Zero, an unflinching look into the nihilistic excess of the MTV generation; and American Psycho, a Wall Street satire which initially provoked outrage and disgust via one of literature’s most infamously unreliable narrators, Patrick Bateman, but later enjoyed success as a Hollywood film and Broadway musical. Readers have grown to expect from Ellis darkly comic social satire mixed with increasingly stylized prose and the author as a cultural gadfly. His most recent novel (Imperial Bedrooms) was published in 2010 and since then, Ellis’s focus seems to have shifted to posting provocative comments on Twitter and hosting his eponymous podcast. It is within the context of his four decades as a public figure that Ellis’s first nonfiction book White appears. Turning the old saw that “you can’t judge a book by its cover” on its head, the first thing one notices with this book is the minimalist cover, which is glaringly white apart from the title, Ellis’s name, and a series of reflective watermarked terms which could simultaneously describe Ellis himself and suggest some connection to the word white: writer, critic, lover, hater, tweeter, free-speaker, transgressive, privileged, and male. In aggregate, these terms could function as a word cloud illustrating perhaps how Ellis sees himself; or how Ellis is perceived by others; or to leverage a term Ellis deploys regularly in the book, they could simply be “poses” meant to garner attention or “likes.” The collection is organized into eight loosely conceived essays––“Empire,” “Acting,” “Second self,” “Post-sex,” “Liking,” “Tweeting,” “Post-empire,” and “These Days”–– which are primarily concerned with three interlocking issues: mapping the conditions in which Generation X went from childhood on to adulthood (and the attendant worldview from said upbringing); examining the farreaching effects of social media across artistic, political, and generational Text Matters, Volume 9, Number 9, 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.25