Lunar Park is a lurid "true" account of the author's unhinged debauchery and nightmarish parenting set in the grotesque American suburbs, featuring sex, drugs and murderous toys, so I took it on a weekend break to the Greek hamlet where they shot Mamma Mia!.
This turned out to be a very pretty collection of tavernas and hotels circling a sparkling Aegean cove. It looked like a film set. At least one local had a flower in her hair.
My friends were getting married. They are both ridiculously good-looking. Ellis, in his late 20s, unable to come to terms with the seedy death of his despised father and powered by "speedballs and cocaine and blotters of acid", would probably have hit on both of them.
As the novel opens, the supposedly handsome young playboy novelist has gained 40 pounds, gotten hooked on heroin, is drinking two quarts of vodka daily and had "technically died for three minutes" in St Louis. "I was smuggling propane torches and large quantities of crack on to Delta flights." On my first night in the Mamma Mia! hamlet, I took six Sudafed, drank two extra vodka shots and demanded the bride's friends tell me how many people they'd slept with. My girlfriend went to bed at that point.
At his most crapulent, Ellis was given a second chance by his ex-girlfriend, Jayne – the mother of his son, Robby. Ellis agreed to help raise the boy. He quit taking drugs. They moved to an obscenely huge and tranquil house in a wealthy suburb. I read all this the next morning with a shame-hangover by a three-storey beach house covered in orange blossoms.
But all was not well in paradise. Ellis had to familiarise himself with "the wide array of meds the kids were on: stimulants, mood stabilisers, the antidepressant Lexapro, the Adderall for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and various other anticonvulsants and antipyschotics that had been prescribed". Also, Robby hated him. As the waves hissed at my feet, I read how Ellis got back into cocaine. He seduced female students. He fought with Jayne. Then Jayne's daughter's toy bird became possessed by an evil spirit. And was that Patrick Bateman, the serial killer yuppie from Ellis's novel American Psycho, driving his father's convertible and murdering real people? Why were Robby's friends vanishing? Why was Ellis's house transmogrifying into someone else's? What was the slobbering beast tormenting his family? Why wasn't the Klonopin working any more? Were his attempts to bond with his son artificial and self-serving? Was he just as vile as his dad had been? "Who was going to buy the pitch I was making to save myself?"
My friends got married by the beach to a low sun. At dinner, the groom's tearful words about his father, who died when he was a teenager, were oddly exalting. Lunar Park speaks just as darkly and movingly about fatherhood. Does Ellis even have a son? Does it matter? The novel is true, and so was the wedding, even if they both took place on a set.
