White

I put it down about 90 pages in. I loved American Psycho and enjoyed Less than Zero, but the things I liked about those weren't in this. I was expecting an interesting perspective on the current state of media and pop culture but the 90 pages I read were more just Bret's personal anecdotes. It might be an interesting read for someone who is into the 80s-90s Hollywood rich kid scene, but that not is not me. It's also possible that I put it down before it got good.

This book is really incredible. Although Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction and American Psycho were really similar in tone, Bret has somehow collated a bunch of nonfiction essays together that read exactly the same, but with one difference: there is only one recurring character who is a sad nihilistic yuppie in the whole thing. Ellis goes to great lengths to describe various anecdotes of hysterics that are indicative of millennials being intellectual cowards, failing to note that most of his anecdotes are about people his age. It's almost as though all his books are really just bitchy exposés into mild dramas he experienced in his somewhat privileged upbringing. He compares his Twitter to "dada performance art" but perhaps his greatest performance is pretending he's not just passive nihilistic homosexual Clay, or cool-headed homosexual Paul Denton, or secretly violently angry closeted homosexual Patrick Bateman. It's not a convincing performance, but great nonetheless.