Credit Cassandras

JANICE P. NIMURA trashes Bret Easton Ellis’ reputation in the book review titled “A Mocking Mea Culpa, [Book Review, Aug. 14], disliking his new novel, “Lunar Park,” and remembering that his 1991 novel, “American Psycho,” was “virtually unreadable.” Five will get you 10 she saw the video and skipped the book. Perhaps Ellis’ “American Psycho” is readable now. It’s a fantasy of one trader’s over-the-top Wall Street greed attended by a stupefying level of self-gratification and self-propelled violence culminating in multiple homicides. When the broker’s psycho behavior is discovered, he is protected by insider society.

To all but Martha Stewart it’s no longer politically incorrect to suggest that self-examination by Wall Streeters 15 years ago may have averted tragic domestic corporate practices that followed. If we valued, and could interpret, literary messages brought to us by authors the likes of which include Mark Twain and Joseph Heller, “American Psycho” had the potential to stir our conscience about inane excesses of money movers.

Nimura is numb to the finesse of this tour de force novel, “American Psycho.” It is hard to imagine any novel screaming louder about American culture as practiced on Wall Street. What might American and world history of the last 15 years look like if movers and shakers had noticed that this literature was prescient and that its muted aspiration was to be the dead canary in the coal mine, to signal that there is serious, serious trouble brewing?

Nimura begins her review citing a National Organization for Women boycott and a New York Times critic who didn’t “enjoy” Ellis’ novels. She mentions “anxious parents,” who supposedly believe their children will be ruined by a novel and not the onslaught of American pornographic culture that is available daily -- soft-core sex and violence in print, radio and television media; hard-core on the Internet and elsewhere. Although she notices signs of literary density in Ellis’ work, she ends her review declaring that we should ignore Ellis until he grows up. To become what? A proper Calvinist? An inept and greedy CEO for a telecom or a utilities trading company? A middlebrow politician serving a wealthy religious base? Surely there’s room for an author in our country.

GERALD WALSH

Redondo Beach