| Bret Easton Ellis |
BOOK OF THE DAY
White by Bret Easton Ellis review – sound, fury and insignificance
Bitter rants and petty score settling drive this attack on political correctness in the Twitter age
Anna Leszkiewicz
Wed 24 Apr 2019 07.30 BST
F
or reasons clear only to himself, Bret Easton Ellis opens his new book with an image of himself hunched over a screen, pulsating with uncontrollable fury. Minor incidents with strangers on social media had meant an “overwhelming and irrational annoyance started tearing through me up to a dozen times a day”. Alongside this anger came “an oppression I felt whenever I ventured online”. Worst of all, these feelings “could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress”. But, he adds darkly, “silence and submission were what the machine wanted”.
It’s impossible to read the rest of the book without this image of Ellis – sweaty with rage, contorted over a keypad, humming with paranoia about the demands of “the machine” – coming to mind. Because White, a collection of eight essays that respond to contemporary culture, has all the sound, fury and insignificance of a misguided rant posted at 3am. Except, inexplicably, it has been given the dignity of print publication.