Those critics who find Bret Easton Ellis’s world overly craven aren’t going to be too pleased by his acrid fifth novel, Lunar Park. About Glamorama, Ellis’s prescient 1998 satire of terrorism and dot-com-era Manhattan, it’s “hard to understand,” the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani wrote, why he “wants to spend so much time (in this novel and every other book he’s written) chronicling a world he seems to recognize as shallow, mercenary, cynical, and meaningless.” Ellisland is a place of designer labels, pornography, ephemeral celebrity, nightlife ennui, and a disregard for the safety of others. It’s a place where everyone wants to be sedated. Ostensibly in Lunar Park our author repents. But only the tone deaf could fail to hear his distinctively laconic sarcasm, equal parts Joan Didion and Jane Austen.

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—Benjamin Strong