Lotus-Eaters and Literati

For all of University of Miami president Donna Shalala's talk about a new spirit of academic rigor, no one's going to mistake her school's palm-lined environs for Oxford anytime soon. Strolling across the Coral Gables campus last Friday, past fresh-faced coeds padding off to class in their flip-flops, shorts, and halter tops; cutting through student parking lots filled with BMWs, Mercedes, and hand-me-down SUVs, Kulchur could see that the mood was more than set for novelist Bret Easton Ellis's appearance at the University bookstore. It was Ellis's latest stop on his national tour to promote Lunar Park, the most recent dispatch from one of the literary world's foremost chroniclers of the young, rich, and dissolute. Of course, few of the 150 or so enthusiastic fans who showed up fit the profile of Ellis's fictional characters -- to play out that role, they should have been crashed out in their dorm rooms and sleeping off the previous night's club crawl across South Beach, not packing into a bookstore at the ungodly hour of noon.

Yet it's these undergrads -- and their love for tales of the louche life -- who have turned Ellis into a wealthy cult figure, one who has sold more than 1.5 million books. In fact his 1991 novel American Psycho, with its graphic depictions of a Wall Street lothario cum serial killer, continues to sell nearly 2000 copies each month, according to Publishers Weekly. True, those are hardly John Grisham-size numbers. But they still eclipse the tallies of many of Ellis's more "serious" contemporaries, authors who have eschewed a fascination with celebrities and designer gear for a Cheeveresque concentration on inner drama -- writing tomes, he jokes, that might as well be called The Millipede's Lament.

Ellis's current admirers seemed unaware of that sizable chip on his shoulder. For them his status as the critical whipping boy of the Eighties Brat Pack was forged before they were even born: Released when the Los Angelino was only 21, Ellis's notorious debut, Less than Zero, first arrived in stores back in 1985. As for New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani's complaint that the bulk of Ellis's work portrays a Los Angeles "in which drugs, aerobics, sex, and narcissistic navel-gazing seem to be the only activities in town," that may have been an indictment two decades ago. Today it sounds like a chunk of knowing social reportage. Indeed, substitute yoga for aerobics and (if it doesn't already fall under that category of navel-gazing) add in the odd Kabbalah session, and you have an excellent approximation of South Beach.

All of which begs the question: Given that Ellis's writing has already plumbed Los Angeles and New York, why hasn't he tackled the similarly privileged families of South Beach? We've seen stacks of Miami novels that explore the immigrant experience and the meaning of exile, as well as a multitude of South Florida crime thrillers that have even spawned a nationally recognized genre. Yet not a single novelist has dealt with South Beach as anything more than a mere backdrop.

There's enough raw material here, from this city's high-heeled fashionistas and Latin arrivistes to its slumming movie stars and would-be gangsters. Hollywood hasn't been shy in mining the Beach for plot lines, most recently with the television series Nip/Tuck and CSI: Miami, as well as Michael Mann's cinematic update of Miami Vice. The glossy press hardly needs convincing either: Us Weekly maintains a larger Miami bureau than that of Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report combined. Even the video-game industry has jumped on board -- the best-selling Grand Theft Auto: Vice City shoot-'em-up not only careens around a block-by-block replica of Miami, but it also features a soundtrack that lampoons public radio station WLRN-FM (91.3), right down to its interminable pledge drives.

Sitting with Ellis after his bookstore reading, Kulchur put the question to him: When can we expect your South Beach novel?

"It should have been written already," Ellis asserts -- but not by him. "South Beach doesn't fascinate me, not at all," he says. "What does fascinate me? The past. That's what haunts me as I get older: What did I miss? What could have happened? By comparison, South Beach is just --" He stops short and wrinkles his nose, as if a foul odor had just wafted by. "The morals and mores of a bunch of people on South Beach?" He stares silently at Kulchur as if nothing could be more ridiculous.

Beach novelist Brian Antoni shares some of Ellis's ambivalence. Flip through a stack of yellowing issues of Ocean Drive, Antenna, or Wire, and you'll spy his face in dozens of party photos, roaring through clubland with visiting New York friends such as Ellis, and eventually celebrating the release of Paradise Overdose, his 1994 story of sex and drugging across the Bahamas. But more than a decade later, Antoni is still reworking his followup, Venus de Milo Arms, a fictionalized account of South Beach's -- and his own -- early Nineties heyday.