Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs - Lina Wolff

If you’ve read Imperial Bedrooms or watched The Canyons, you might find it difficult to believe that Bret Easton Ellis could sink any lower. 2016, though, sees him taking up residence in a run-down Spanish brothel, where the workers take out their frustrations by feeding him rotten meat. Ellis is joined here by other stellar literary names, including Dante and Chaucer. Disappointingly, these are non-speaking roles - the names have been given to stray dogs who have gravitated to the brothel, by an academic who was disappointed by the workers' apparent lack of political consciousness - but the metafictional mix of surrealism and anger sets the tone for the novel as a whole.

Typically, while the reader’s attention is drawn to the male author’s name in the title, the focus of the novel is on a female writer, Alba Cambo; the brothel section in which Bret Easton Ellis features is a minor sub-plot. It does, however, illustrate a wider point. Cambo is scathing of male authors who write ‘like lazily masturbating monkeys in overheated cages’, or cooks who have ‘lost the taste for the real flavours of a dish and had to keep adding salt and pork fat to make it taste of anything. Raped and murdered women here, raped and murdered women there'.

In her metafictional novel I Love Dick, Chris Kraus says that what women do together is the most interesting subject in art, as it is the least explored. More often, women are portrayed as victims: in the work of authors like Bret Easton Ellis, says Cambo, 'the entertainment value of a violated female body [is] infinite and inexhaustible’. In her own writing, she wishes to explore the kind of entertainment value which the violated male body can offer.

The bulk of this elliptical novel is narrated by a teenage girl named Aracelli Villalobos, who lives upstairs from Cambo in Barcelona. She rarely interacts with Cambo herself, but she hears second hand accounts of her from lovers, domestic employees and friends. The stories told by these characters shed light on Cambo’s life while also allowing Wolff to weave in stories about poverty, ageing, adolescence and migration.

In each of the story-arcs which Villalobos brings together, male aggression is shown from the point of view of females. Men appear as destructive bit-part players in more fully developed narratives, appearing brutish, stripped of motivation and glamour. It is the women who we follow. The men are like mayflies, Villalobos observes, ‘here one day and gone after three days at most’. This redrawing of familiar literary gender roles creates a jarring sensation, in which everything feels slightly off centre. A section in which two women talk calmly as a male acquaintance lies unconscious at their feet feels genuinely shocking; we are not so desensitized to this as we are to the portrayal of male violence against women. When men are not being physically violated, their trust and dignity is being abused, as in the story of a timber merchant being blackmailed into giving a petty crook a break into the industry.

By the novel’s end, we are really no closer to understanding Cambo’s character, but each story Villalobos is told serves to reinforce the author’s worldview. There is a sense that Cambo is pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the information which the younger woman will hear. This relationship reflects the dynamic between author and reader which exists in all literature. We are subtly reminded that we should not trust novelists implicitly, and that we cannot know an author through their writing.

Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs is a beautifully written, intricately plotted novel. Eminently quotable, it draws the reader in thanks to Wolff’s ability to create warm and distinctive voices for her characters. The book never follows the paths you would expect as a reader, and while the text is rich and detailed, there is nothing extraneous. Whilst the title, and the description of Cambo’s philosophy, may suggest a polemic, this is a far more considered piece of writing; the moments of violence and conflict emerge in brief flashes, preserving their impact. The narrative style has drawn comparisons with Roberto Bolano, but the novel deserves to be judged on its own merits, as a uniquely crafted piece of literature which contributes positively to debates around gender portrayal in fiction, combining imagination and wit with a biting insight.