Contrasting Styles:
Jay McInerney & Brett Easton Ellis
Jay McInerney & Brett Easton Ellis
Comparing Modern American Authors
Written by DJ Hadoken
Reading just the onsets of Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney, 1984) and Story of My Life (McInerney, 1988) and the onset of Less Than Zero (Ellis, 1985), one can immediately observe the radical contrast between Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis’s writing styles. Where one is approachable and understandable, the other shoots phrases and sentence clauses like a machine gun.
McInerney is the more traditional author with a longer winded and more descriptive craft. Where Ellis will state situations in single sentences, McInerney will spend a page describing one of Alison’s pitiful ex-boyfriends. “But when the sun hit him in the morning he was a shivering wreck” (Story of My Life 4).
McInerney adds humor to his work and uses allusions to the real world “...let’s just say this Famous Blind Musician, right?” (Story of My Life 144). Ellis has no humor and primarily alludes to songs.
McInerney’s characters speak in detailed, more descriptive internal monologues. Clay, in Ellis’s Less Than Zero, aside from the occasional acidic nostalgia of Palm Springs, has none.
The structure of the novels is also distinctive between the authors. McInerney’s novels clearly consist of a beginning, middle and end. Ellis’s novel shows no such distinction. McInerney separates the text into more intrinsic chapters, where Ellis separates his novel into short sections. Ellis writes in first person, McInerney utilizes second person to tell the tale of the heartbroken narrator in Bright Lights, Big City.
McInerney bestows his characters with unique personalities. The reader is able to see Francesca’s wit, “She’s wearing a button over her tit that says THE DESSERT CART STOPS HERE” (Story of My Life 100) and Didi’s horrible addiction to drugs in Story of My Life.
McInerney’s characters show progression and change throughout their respective novels. However, Ellis’s characters remain as only slightly different versions of one other. Everyone is a drug addict living the high life with no real direction.
The reader is able to witness Alison and the narrator of Bright Lights, Big City (along with supporting characters) stumble, hurdle and leap across pitfalls. They have more of a grasp over their own lives. Allison’s desire in life is to become an actress, and she works for it. Aside from that, despite the filthy lifestyle she leads, she holds no desire to change. Clay, in Ellis’s Less Than Zero, does not show any purpose nor any desire in life.
McInerney’s novels offer a form of closure for the characters and the reader. One is able to infer from the text that the character has finally been set free from the monotonous loophole of their life. In Ellis’s writing, the reader only sees that the loop continues and that salvation may never reach the character.
Both writers present a downward spiral accompanied by an ideology. One is the ideology that salvation is possible for those willing to be saved. The other is the ideology that life does not change, and once one is stuck in this downward spiral, one will never be saved. Each of them has the potential to be true depending on the choices one makes in their own life.
Works Cited
Ellis, Brett Easton. Less Than Zero. Simon and Schuster, 1985.
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. Vintage, 1984.
McInerney, Jay. Story of My Life. Vintage, 1989.
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