Andrea Long Chu
“I never pretended to be an expert on millennials,” writes Bret Easton Ellis halfway through White, and the reader desperately wishes this were true. Ellis is best known for American Psycho, the controversial 1991 cult novel about an image-obsessed Wall Street serial killer; the film adaption would star Christian Bale as psychotic investment banker Patrick Bateman. Following several increasingly metafictional novels and a few bad screenplays, White is Ellis’s first foray into nonfiction, and the result is less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts. Mostly, Ellis hates social media and wishes Ziggy Klein has no boobs. The only thing her chest knows how to grow is anxiety. Fifteen years old, Jewish, and hesitant, with an interior life like a hoarder’s apartment, Ziggy has just transferred to Kandara, an all-girls preparatory school in the glossy Sydney suburbs, where she promptly begins studying the dense hierarchical ecology. At the top are the Cates, old-money girls with hyphenated surnames and pearlescent Instagrams. At the bottom are the ugly, the suspected lesbians, and, Ziggy assumes, herself.