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" READING BRET EASTON Ellis is like watching a brilliant dive into a very shallow pool: We admire the technique while awaiting the splatter. His most impressive novels, American Psycho and Glamorama, with their murderous yuppies and brain-dead celebutantes,were note-perfect parodies of the &amp;#039;80s and &amp;#039;90s. His critics cried &amp;quot;Excess!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Misogyny!&amp;quot; but both novels are only as excessive and misogynistic as the decades in which they were set.  I expected his new novel to continue in that direction, to teach me how to hate the new generation of powerful American white males. But Lunar Park (Knopf, $25) is a sad departure from his best work. The novel takes place in what for Ellis must be the final frontier--the suburbs--and is narrated by an endearing doofus named Bret Easton Ellis. The fictional Ellis--married with kids, doped up, just a little gay (did I say the fictional Ellis?)--is writing a novel called Teenage Pussy. The descriptions of wealthy children are top-shelf Ellis, the ubiquitous celebrity lists of his previous novels replaced by Zoloft-stocked medicine cabinets. But then, for some reason, a ghost story is grafted onto the proceedings. Slime trails and paranormal investigators and even a hairy evil doll supposedly illuminate the difficulty Ellis has in exorcising the tormented spirit of his father. Psychological insights are grudgingly dispensed; the tongue sometimes skirts the cheek. But all too often we&amp;#039;re left with a literary adaptation of Ghostbusters II. Ellis wants this novel to be about Fathers and Sons. But a 21st-century Turgenev he&amp;#039;s not. What we really want is more Teenage Pussy.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a2375/esq0905breteastonellis/>