White - Bret Easton Ellis

There was a time, back in the day, when I simply refused to give up on a book - if I started it, I finished it before I dared start another. Those days are long gone. Now if a book doesn't seem worth the effort within my having read 50-75 pages of it, it's a goner and I move on to the next one.  In fact, White by Bret Easton Ellis is already the eighth book I've abandoned in 2019.

I learned of White through a television interview of the author that focused on the cultural observations contained in the memoir.  It was made to seem as if the book was primarily a critique of the oversensitive world we all live in nowadays, a world in which reputations and images can be trashed with the single slip of a tongue or wrong opinion posted to Facebook or Twitter. I really wanted to read what Ellis had to say about this because he made so much sense during that interview. 

But as it turns out, the book is much the typical memoir of a man who finds that his interesting life and lifestyle is more behind him than in front of him.  And honestly, I'm just not very interested in the drug-driven partying lifestyle that Bret Easton Ellis has lived. Nor have I ever been able to make it through his best known novels Less Than Zero and American Psycho, so I don't have the patience to search for the pages in the memoir that do interest me, observations like these:

"This anger was new, something I'd never experienced before - and it was tied in with an anxiousness, an oppression I felt whenever I ventured online, a sense that I was going to somehow make a mistake instead of simply offering an opinion or make a joke or criticize someone for something.  This idea would have been unthinkable ten years earlier - that an opinion could become something wrong - but in an infuriated, polarized society people were blocked because of these opinions, and unfollowed because they were perceived in ways that might be inaccurate.  The fearful began to instantly see the entire humanity of an individual in a cheeky, offensive tweet and were outraged; people were attacked and unfriended for backing the 'wrong' candidate or having the 'wrong' opinion or for simply stating the 'wrong' belief. It was as if no one could differentiate between a living person and a string of worlds hastily typed out on a black sapphire screen."

[...]

"...this anger could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress.  But ultimately silence and submission were what the machine wanted."

 [...]

"But most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense, we've all become actors. We've had to rethink the means with which to express our feelings and thoughts and ideas and opinions in the void created by a corporate culture that is forever trying to silence us by sucking up everything human and contradictory and real with its assigned rule book on how to behave.  We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves." 

As I skim the rest of the book, I see that Ellis expresses his disillusionment and disgust with the approach taken by those on the left who so proudly label themselves the Resistance. He considers their whole approach to life to be both childlike and embarrassing even to the point that he cannot take any of it seriously.  Coming from a man like Bret Easton Ellis, someone who has lived and voted the liberal side of politics for his entire life, this is an almost shocking admission.  

The man does not mince words:

"Whenever I heard certain people losing their shit about Trump my first reaction was always, You need to be sedated, you need to see a shrink, you need to stop letting the 'bad man' help you in the process of victimizing your whole life.  Why would they do that to themselves?"

Ellis ends White with a couple of sentences that capture the state of mind he described in that television interview, life after his outspokenness has cost him friends and false friends galore:

"Or maybe when you're roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgement, and then comes common sense.  And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom." 

Scary thought, that.

Bottom Line: Bret Easton Ellis has a lot to say about our sharply divided country and world, but if you are as uninterested in his books and movies as I am, you may struggle to last long enough to find those comments. But this one is most definitely worth a hard look whether or not you agree with the man's opinions or his lifestyle.  You may find that you love it for the reasons I don't like it, and hate it for the reasons I like it. Who knows?