Hailed, then buried, then read again.
Landmark reviews from 1985 to 2023, each with its critic, its outlet and its date.
The arc matters more than any single verdict. The debut was taken seriously at once. The third book was condemned three months before anyone could read it, by a critic working from excerpts. Then the same New York Times critic who launched him found feeling in him twenty years later, and by 2023 he was being reviewed as a novelist again rather than as a scandal.
Less Than Zero
« One of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality. »
Michiko Kakutani · The New York Times · 1985
The debut is taken seriously at once, and placed in a lineage: Kakutani hears Chandler, Didion and Nathanael West in his Los Angeles.
American Psycho
« The journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore. »
Roger Rosenblatt · The New York Times · 16 décembre 1990
Written three months before anyone could read the book, and approving its cancellation. The most consequential review of his career, and it was a review of excerpts.
American Psycho
Henry Bean · Los Angeles Times · 17 mars 1991
What Ellis has called the only good review in the national press. The paper answered it with three pages of subscription cancellations.
Lunar Park
« Shot through with longing. »
Michiko Kakutani · The New York Times · 14 août 2005
Twenty years after the debut, the same critic finds feeling where she had found flatness.
Lunar Park
« Both unnerving and moving. »
Mark Lawson · The Guardian · 30 septembre 2005
On the novel's self-absorption, which the review treats as its subject rather than its defect.
White
« Well-written pieces bubbling with attitude and self-confidence but, at times, as judgmental as those Ellis condemns. »
Kirkus Reviews · 2019
The non-fiction turn is met coldly, including by outlets sympathetic to the fiction.
The Shards
« The novel's climax and denouement ultimately fall flat. »
Melissa Broder · The New York Times · 14 janvier 2023
A serious, divided review: she finds the book invites the reader further into feeling than any Ellis before it, then judges the ending a failure.
The Shards
« Two disparate novels. »
Publishers Weekly · 2023
The recurring objection to the late work: a fictionalised memoir and a serial-killer thriller that never fuse.