It’s been a long time since Bret Easton Ellis produced a novel that impressed anybody: fifteen years, in fact, since the problematic but undoubtedly compelling American Psycho, in which the anti-hero was a yuppie serial killer. Nine years later, Glamorama, involving terrorists using the fashion world as cover, was generally seen as reflecting authorial burnout and a tendency to follow a work of pungent originality with an inferior effort in the same vein – before this pair of Nineties thrillers came the two Reagan-era updatings of Vile Bodies: Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction.

Fiction masquerading as memoir, his latest novel, Lunar Park, opens with a droll and engaging backward glance at this rollercoaster career, full of anecdotes about Manhattan bacchanals, publicity tours wrecked by narcotics, and the absurdities of fame when Ellis and Jay McInerney led the literary Brat Pack. The teasing mixture