White-Bret Easton Ellis

Off the top of my head, Bret Easton Ellis is within my top five favorite authors. Aside from Cormac McCarthy at the top, the other four, in no particular order (also off the cuff) Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Don E. Westlake, and Neil Strauss. Although I am sure I would revise that group if I were to get up from the keyboard and peruse my library real quick, where Stephen King, Hubert Selby Jr., and Ayn Rand may like to have a chat. But for the sake of this moment, those are my top five. Neil, Bret, Kurt, Cormac, & Don. With 75% of that list deceased, Neil and Bret are my favorite active writers.

Neil has never delved into the world of fiction. Being one of the more approachable celebrities, he regularly responds to his inbox dm's and I once asked him if he would ever consider it, which he said he would and wanted to, but the workload in front of him didn't permit the time to pursue that avenue of his career (yet).

This leaves Bret Easton Ellis as the lone gunman fiction writer whose work I gobble up at every chance.

Like Cormac, I try to restrict my favorite authors' books to one a year to honor my self-imposed code of expanding beyond my self-centered atmosphere of comfort to explore other galaxies of thought. As much as I would like to devour the entire library of Cormac and Bret, I rather enjoy the one-book-a-year pace of devouring their works, looking forward to each novel as one would a holiday meal at a high-end steakhouse.

Interestingly though, White is the first novel of Bret's I read that happened to be non-fiction.

I bought this book from Barnes and Noble hot off the press, and outside of when Heat 2 came out, it will probably be the very last time I ever buy a book from a large chain conglomerate.

*With the multitude of opportunities available to the consumer to purchase books severely underneath the established market value, it simply serves as a smack in the face to your bank account to purchase novels at retail price.*

White sat on my shelf for the better half of two years. It wasn't as if it were one of those impulse purchases that someday I intended to read and would never get around to completing the said task. I was pretty sure I knew what the content of White would be, and having completed the novel, none of it took me by surprise.

Bret hosts the only podcast I listen to. In my antiquated technological sphere, I only downloaded his podcast through Apple iTunes, where it was free, onto my (still functional) Nano. Once the gigs were maxed out I would delete the last episode and search for a new one to take its place. I jealously listened to Bret conversate with some of the greats most always when I was door-dashing or going on road trips and thoroughly enjoyed the exchange of dialogue which, to me, was worth its weight in gold. James Van Der Beek, Andrew McCarthy, Walter Hill, Paul Schrader, and Moby, among others, provided a fascinating insight into both their careers and stories that I passionately revered and inspired me to pick up the pen.

Long before the advent of Donald Trump, cancel culture, and a generation of gender-confused children embraced newspeak gibberish and a state of being perpetually hyper-offended by everything, I noticed a slight shift beginning to develop.

From my early teens through to my mid-thirties, a lot of the artists I listened to espoused progressive politics. The Dead Kennedys, Insane Clown Posse, Non-Phixion, Rage Against The Machine, Immortal Technique, and Jedi Mind Tricks were bound together by a similar tether that hated the police, idolized Che Guevara, and despised bigots/racism. Most of which I was on board with. I was always causing trouble in my youth, so yeah eff the police. I had no clue who Che Guevara was but knew he hated the government and looked pretty cool in his iconic beret silhouette, so yeah, Viva Che! And those who me and my friends knew that casually dropped n-bombs and ripped off racist jokes mostly considered such characters as Uber-douches who never got a taste of the real world.

But eventually, I came to see that once certain milestones had been reached, the very party my ideals had once aligned with, seemed to search out and even pick at the wounds I thought had been healed. It all started at a bar in South Carolina when a mutual friend of my cousin mentioned George Zimmerman and the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and how it served as the exposure of a fissure within the construct of America's foundation. And revealed the intentions of a massive amount of white people's true longings: to shoot black people and get away with it.

I dismissed this as completely illogical and never thought much about it.

But then incidents similar in nature began to follow. Ferguson, MO, Baltimore, and even Cleveland began to experience the turmoil that followed what seemed to be an uptick in racial disharmony.

A sudden epidemic of Police brutality had swept the nation, and the only antidote available was groupthink mentality. Then, in 2016, as if to validate the suspicions of my mutual friend, the country elected Donald Trump and it was as if everyone who had prepared themselves through the subterfuge of communist practices had received a license in Orwellian characteristics and could now shout "two legs good, four legs bahhhhhd!" with absolute certainty that it was the truth.

Intuitively, I felt that this entire tribal mentality had not only fallen way off the tracks but was digging beyond the crust of the earth seeking only to sink into the abyss with their ideologies.

They were so completely whacko that I was unable to align myself anymore with what they espoused.

This, in essence, is what White is mostly about.

Bret's gradual shift, as a gay man, from one side of the aisle to the other.

As a writer, it is an obligation of the craft to be perceptive, and through both his podcasts and White, I saw that he saw the same things as me. Free speech was subject to party mantras. Money was the motivating factor behind artistry, and unless it towed the line, it could be cut off through online hate brigades. People seemed fake. Condemnation replaced disagreements. Banter could only be exchanged within an arena of speech the size of a piece of sewing thread.

And these were the authoritarian rules of a supposed progressive resistance?

Yeah, right…

While not admitting it in White, I'm willing to bet that Bret jumped the progressive ship right around 2012 and hasn't looked back since.

*Especially since November 5th when an overwhelming fraction of the country joined our once independent schools of thought and blatantly rejected the socialist sphere of idiocy both in the popular and electoral vote.*

I saw this gradual shift of new realization happen with a lot of my friends. Mostly those who were approaching their early to mid-40s and were faced with what kind of future they wished to see for their children. Suddenly, the ardent advocacy of gay rights (the focus of which had fallen way off its rocker) waned in favor of telling your children that there are only two sexes. Pro-choice, once the thought of one's daughter undergoing an abortion entered the minds of liberal parents, dissolved in favor of pro-life. The cops we used to irritate in our youth, maybe weren't so bad after all. America was no longer such a bad continent to be blessed to have been born into. Being pissed off all the time was exhausting and inconvenient.

Maybe our parents and grandparents knew what was up?

Intersperse this with a pepper and salt dab here and there of his personal history in how he became a writer with some pop culture commentary and, in a nutshell, you have White.

Bret articulates these progressive-disillusioned conservative-leaning quips in a much more eloquent fashion, but for the most part, I feel as if what I have written encapsulates the book with a fair degree of accuracy.

For me, as an unabashedly admitted Bible-thumping, free speech advocating, pro-life, pro-America, anti-communism, Republican conservative capitalist writer who loves the art scene but hates their politics. I loved this book. But if any of those characteristics strike you as offensive, you'd probably hate this lovely slice of literature.

Tough shit.

Grow a set.

Grade: A

Verdict: Read