Bret Easton Ellis — the enfant terrible who finally grew up

John Self looks at a “Brat Pack” writer who, after four decades in the wilderness, has at last lived up to the promise of his early work

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN ENFANT TERRIBLE GROWS UP? The literary world is littered with the corpses of former wunderkinder — and many of the deceased are still alive. Martin Amis’s fiction started with sex, then drugs, but with late work like The Pregnant Widow and Lionel Asbo, dwindled into self-parody — making a mockery of what used to be satire — and found a subject to meet his mature style only when he stopped trying to be funny. Meanwhile Ian McEwan, known early in his career as Ian Macabre for his frisky tales of incest and sexual murder, has developed into the elder statesman of English letters, who can say with a straight face, “It’s an aspect of getting older that I find in my social circle a handful of…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2023

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