by JULIET WATERS

Bret Easton Ellis, I’ll argue, is less a writer one likes or dislikes, than a writer one gets or doesn’t get. Unfortunately there are too many readers out there who stay away from him based on his reputation as sensationalistic, jaded, soulless, etc., all the while missing out on the pleasure of reading serious, fearless satire.

That is, if you get him. Of course now that I’ve said this, somebody is going to pick up Lunar Park, his latest novel, read about 40 pages and start hating me almost as much as they’ll hate the main character. He’s a boorish, narcissistic addict, incapable of love and always just a little out of style. His name is Bret Easton Ellis. That’s right, I did say “novel.” If you already hated Ellis before reading him, you’ll probably hate him even more as a fictional character—although you may appreciate the scathing critique of his own work in the first chapter.

Fictional Bret is a lot like real Bret. They both published bestselling first novels called Less Than Zero before graduating college. They both became relatively wealthy party boys and insufferable celebrities. Fictional Bret, however, ends up marrying a fictional (really fictional) Hollywood starlet, and I’m guessing that real Bret probably doesn’t have a longstanding feud with Keanu Reeves.

A lot of the fun of reading the first half of Lunar Park is trying to sift the real Bret from the parody Bret. Has he ever worked on a novel called Teenage Pussy, about “a guy who loves to give love and loves to get loved back” and that will contain at least 100 sex scenes (“I mean, Jesus, why not?” I guffawed to my editor over lunch in the bar at Patroon…”)? Could the real Bret’s parties really be this embarrassingly suburban, and could a writer this constantly wasted write a book this readable?

Then there’s the fun of sifting satire Bret from existential Bret. The novel is dedicated to the father who the real Bret has claimed abused him. If what fictional Bret tells us is true, his father was the inspiration for the serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Robert Martin Ellis died in 1992, and somewhere around chapter three of Lunar Park it becomes clear that he’s haunting fictional Bret’s house on 307 Elsinore Lane. In case you didn’t get that, his father once lived on Claudius Avenue, and scenes between fictional Bret and his (really fictional) son, Robby, take place at the Fortinbras Mall. (If you’re still not getting this, rent Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke.) But while there are some obvious nods to Shakespeare, the central writer Ellis pays tribute to in Lunar Park is Stephen King. Evil pets, toys and cars run amok through chapters, relieved suddenly by passages of lucid social satire. Possessed pets are hardly the only problem in a world where kids’ birthday parties have rehearsal parties and a pediatrician in attendance to monitor the children’s meds.

Sadly, all good times must come to an end, and unfortunately there are serious problems with the book, not just the world it takes place in. As the novel shifts into its last act, the King-type horror becomes more Kubrick, and a self-conscious surrealism sets in. As Ellis gets closer to the catharsis that he’s set up with arguably the most formulaic novel of his career, the material feels wooden, and the writing gets, well, bad (“were we really looking at each other, or were we looking at who we wanted to be?”). Ellis pulls through in the end with some pretty passages that one day someone will use in a thesis comparing him to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Real Bret’s real achievement, however, has never been great writing. It’s been writing entertaining bestsellers that manage to maintain a kind of cult cachet. Lunar Park shamelessly revels in this achievement and there’s no doubt his latest will please his fans as much as it will displease his detractors.

LUNAR PARK BY BRET EASTON ELLIS, KNOPF, HC. 308PP, $34.95