White

March 1, 2019
The author of American Psycho (1991) and a half-dozen other novels returns with a series of thematically related essays.Ellis (Imperial Bedrooms, 2010, etc.)--who also has a podcast to which he often refers and who has also worked extensively on various film and TV projects--will not endear himself to those who are politically left-leaning. Repeatedly, he assails liberals for failing to accept the election of Donald Trump--and for helping to make everyone hysterical about having to see, read, and think about things we don't agree with. The left, he writes near the end, has become "a rage machine." Ellis' text also displays aspects of memoir: One piece deals with his early (and continuing) fondness for films, which his father cultivated by taking him, even at a young age, to some very "adult" movies. These memories lead him to discuss Richard Gere, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Tom Cruise. American Psycho is also a leitmotif: Ellis tells us about the conception and writing of the novel, lets us know that the brutality existed only in the imagination of his protagonist, and makes other comments about the film and the subsequent musical, which lost money. He slowly leads us, as well, into a discussion of his sexuality and his various relationships. Ultimately, though, his principal interest is in the fractured American culture, political and otherwise. He rails against college students who demand "trigger warnings"; blasts the traditional media; tells stories about the excessive reactions to his tweets; and celebrates some current cultural outcasts, including Charlie Sheen, Roseanne Barr, and Kanye West. He lashes out at certain writers while delivering praise to others--e.g., he admires Joan Didion and Jonathan Franzen.Well-written pieces bubbling with attitude and self-confidence but, at times, as judgmental as those Ellis condemns.

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March 25, 2019
Political correctness is destroying America’s mind and soul, according to this contentious manifesto. Novelist, screenwriter, and podcaster Ellis, whose American Psycho sparked a furor with its grisly rapes and murders, lambastes “the threatening groupthink of progressive ideology, which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions.” He focuses on social-justice hysteria in the entertainment and media industries: critics of mediocre movies by or about women, gays, and minorities, he contends, get tagged with upholding white male privilege; social media platforms enforce “corporate conformism and censorship... stamping out passion and silencing the individual;” Trump Derangement Syndrome consumes Ellis’s Hollywood associates and his boyfriend, who is obsessed with Russia-collusion theories. Ellis’s loose-jointed essay weaves in scenes from his days as an alienated writer adrift in Manhattan, film criticism, and an impassioned defense of artistic transgression, arguing that “to be challenged... to get wiped out by the cruelty of someone’s vision” promotes a mature understanding of life. Ellis’s pop-culture preoccupations sometimes feel callow—he paints Charlie Sheen and Kanye West as America’s last free men—and his critique of leftists as “haters” who “came across as anti-common sense, anti-rational and anti-American” is an unoriginal reprise of ideas commonplace to right-wing media outlets.
Still, his vigorous, daring take on today’s ideological wars will provoke much thought and more controversy.

March 15, 2019
Ellis, still perhaps best known for his novels American Psycho (1991) and Less Than Zero (1985), offers his first nonfiction title, a collection of essays whose subjects include acting and authenticity, art and aesthetics, movies, books, popular culture and celebrity, Twitter, his own art, the lost art of having opinions, and the accelerating transformation of American society. If there's an overriding theme in this intelligent and briskly observed offering, it's that Ellis stands against what he perceives as the threatening groupthink of progressive ideology, arguing that different perspectives shouldn't make people enemies and that ideas and opinions are, perhaps, not the sum total of a person. (And he is clearly more interested in people than politics.) He's also an artist who engages deeply with works, and his takes on film, especially, are often fascinating. As his Twitter followers and podcast listeners will know, Ellis isn't afraid to be contrarian, and that's what makes this book so interesting. You might disagree with much of what Ellis thinks?but that, it would seem, is just fine with him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2019

Famous since debuting with Less Than Zero, perhaps infamous since the publication of the sexually charged American Psycho, which made some women want to spit, Ellis offers a first work of nonfiction meditating on the social-media age. The result is both a defense of freedom of speech and a critique of the likeability factor that can impede it.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.