from the LA Times
Bret Easton Ellis, two decades beyond ‘Zero’
The onetime enfant terrible, now 44, still has no patience for critics, but some of his colleagues say Ellis’ writing may one day get the respect it deserves.
In his 1985 breakout novel, Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis, then all of 21 years old, created young, jaded Angelenos who just didn’t care about anything: They recounted cocaine 
scores and semi-anonymous sex in the same tone with which they lamented their fading suntans. That ennui became Ellis’ literary signature, and as he began to grow up in public, he became known as a photogenic and glamorous figure who liked booze and excess.
More than two decades later and almost four years after returning home to L.A., the city in which he grew up as the offspring of affluent Goldwater Republicans, Ellis himself claims to be in a phase in which he just doesn’t care about anything — a middle-aged wrinkle on the old Ellis ennui. “The only thing I care about,” he requested when setting up a dinner interview, “is valet parking and a full bar.”
Ellis in person is witty if often deadpan, good company, discussing the literary novel and popular music with enthusiasm and authority. His classic good looks have become almost conventional as he’s aged. He’s more down-to-earth, and more intellectual, than his party-boy image would suggest.
He can be uncomfortable as well: Sitting down at a tighter-than-expected Campanile one recent Wednesday night, wearing a black jacket over a casual shirt left mostly unbuttoned, he was unnerved by a slightly raucous, beret-wearing family at a nearby table, until his first drink arrived and he found himself in a spirited defense of Elvis Costello’s “Imperial Bedroom.” As he leaned into the argument — the album, which he called “sonically, an absolute ’80s masterpiece,” will lend its name to a new sequel to “Less Than Zero” — it was easy to see that he’s more engaged with things than he lets on.
But while he spoke with enthusiasm about “The Wire” and Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” — “the novel of my generation” — he’s truly uninterested in talking about his own career, his own place in the literary firmament. “I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I never really did care.”
That’s probably a good thing too: In most of the important conversations about contemporary American literature, Ellis doesn’t show up. Academia doesn’t take him seriously: He’s not taught or written about critically like his generational peers Franzen, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Chang-Rae Lee or Lorrie Moore.
His work is often savaged by critics: His last book, the 2005 quasi-autobiographical novel “Lunar Park,” was deemed “the worst novel I’ve ever read” by Steve Almond in the Boston Globe. And almost a quarter-century into his career, he’s never won, or been within shouting distance, of a major literary award. Back in the ’80s, he was even dissed by his idol Elvis Costello.
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