Skip to content
Culture & Religion

L.A. According to Easton Ellis

“How does one come to have certain ideas about L.A. without actually experiencing it?” n+1 meditates on the sun, fun and doom captured in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

“For a postmodern novelist, Ellis had to deal early on in his career with a very modernist conundrum—of the Beckettian ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ sort—and after the seeming endgame of Less Than Zero, continue writing anyway. In the novels that followed, he went on by combining his interest in the surface of contemporary culture with an increasingly baroque and particularized literary style. If Less Than Zero approached the ethical and intellectual impoverishment of late 20th-century Los Angeles through pared-down nuggets of prose Ellis’s subsequent books became much more verbose and obsessive.”

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Related
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
13 min
with

Up Next
“Under our current system of campaign finance, there is a fundamental gap between the interests of voters and of contributors.” Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on the Congress’ institutional corruption.