It was a chance encounter with a long-coveted title—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—that led me to Fully Booked at Gateway Mall. There, among the fiction and nonfiction, was Capote’s so-called “nonfiction novel,” a genre-defining work that continues to cast a long, chilling shadow over American letters.
Haruki Murakami’s 1988 novel Dance Dance Dance, was my very first foray into his peculiar world (on the recommendation of my former and late officemate named Fae), turned out to be a strange, fascinating initiation.
In Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis turns the scalpel inward, dissecting not only his persona but the legacy of his fiction. The novel opens with the style of an autobiography, recounting his meteoric rise to literary stardom at the age of 23, following the publication of Less Than Zero. Hollywood came calling (the novel was adapted into a film starring Robert Downey Jr.), and Ellis was soon anointed a literary figurehead of the so-called Brat Pack, chronicler of the hollow glamour and nihilistic indulgence that marked the Reagan era. With American Psycho and Glamorama, he established a signature style drenched in sex, drugs, and a nihilism sharpened into satire.
If
On the Road was Jack Kerouac’s ecstatic hymn to youth, movement, and rebellion,
then The Dharma Bums is its quieter, more contemplative sibling. Published in
1958, just a year after On the Road transformed Kerouac into a reluctant icon,
The Dharma Bums trades the open highway for the high trails, the jazz-inflected
chaos of cities for the peace of mountaintops.
