NP - Living Like Kerouac

[David Morris]

" I wanted to live like Kerouac, before I grew up and realised I
didn't want to live like Kerouac, but by then it was too late and I
was already living like Kerouac."

 Bret Easton Ellis

http://www.kultureflash.net/archive/139/priview.html

As Bret Easton Ellis knows, the danger of being precocious is to never
mature. Starting with Less Than Zero, a glittering and grotesque
odyssey of hedonism and decay in LA which Ellis sold to Penguin Books
at age 21, he has become one of contemporary literature's most
compelling icons and strongest talents. Since American Psycho was
first published in the United States in 1991, every cold-eyed
coke-fuelled i-banker suddenly seemed like Bret Easton Ellis was
feeding him his lines. However, creating searing satires of society's
soulless has also earned him the reputation of being a callow egotist,
loudly self-destructing in public.

Few writers have produced such sleek, slick and sharp representations
of their era. Now relatively grown-up and self-reflective he is
unnerved by being frequently confused with his chic sociopath
characters, and his just published novel, Lunar Park (Picador), shows
him questioning the depth of his own shallowness. At times facile, yet
overall insightful, the novel tells the story of a fictional
fashionable writer (named Bret Easton Ellis) whose suburban zip-code
does little to temper his drug-use or apathy until his past and
characters from his (and the "real" Ellis) novels begin to cross into
his physical reality requiring him to realize the difference between
being a writer and an adult.