If Patrick Bateman, the serial killer at the heart of American Psycho, were to venture on to Twitter, would all hell break loose? No. He would just be looking for celebity retweets like everyone else.

I saw Bret Easton Ellis talking on stage of his creation, who still stalks him, the other day. He was louche and likable, an ageing enfant terrible, a literary man. Well, that is the version I saw, but he is as unreliable a narrator of his own life as Bateman is. Authors’ talks are always a performance and Easton Ellis has been starring in his own horror movie for a long time.

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No wonder he is obsessed with actors, movies and social media, which he ruminates on in his new book, White – the title is both accurate and a provocation. Is Easton Ellis a self-loathing troll? Tellingly, he writes that he doesn’t find self-loathing “unattractive”. The Easton Ellis I saw said he didn’t mind being older, greyer and fatter, because when he was young and looked good in a suit he was suicidal. Yet the Easton Ellis who wrote White says he has never been happier than in 1991 when he finished American Psycho.

I went to see Easton Ellis with a member of “generation wuss” – his name for millennials. His boyfriend is one – and any outrage on his partner’s part he dismissed, disarmingly, by saying: “I pay the bills.”

Some of his insights are hackneyed: he targets safe spaces, the need for Facebook likability and how upset everyone is over the election of Trump. Easton Ellis just happens to be white and privileged, but everyone else should grow up and get over themselves, etc, etc. When he riffs on this, he is not original or even outrageous, just conservative and dull. The mantra that he doesn’t care is patently untrue. He cares deeply. He cares about aesthetics, not ideology, which is bound up with his privilege. Generation wuss doesn’t give that a free pass any more. Feminists of my generation never did.

Yet I remain intrigued by a man who chronicled the shallowness of his own peers. Then, he wrote Patrick Bateman, who either tortured and murdered women or fantasised about it. Easton Ellis wrote the thought crimes down. Why would he not be obsessed with the performativity of social media, of buffing up appearances?

He is pleased when someone sees the “gleaming nihilism” of his work. When American Psycho was understood as a critique of capitalism as pure alienation, some stopped wanting to ban it. So when Easton Ellis says now that the reaction to Trump is worse than Trump himself, is that funny? For Trump is mentioned more than 40 times as a role model in that novel. He is the father Bateman wants.

This clairvoyance exists alongside the clickbaity feuding and his refusal to toe the liberal line on race and gender. Is this merely “alt-right”? Where do we position such a writer? Or is he to be “cancelled”? Not at all.

He does not like identity politics, nor does he want some kind of inclusivity. He sees the difference between being virtuous and feeling virtuous: a white audience at a screening of Moonlight, for instance.

He did not vote for Trump, but, he points out, “some of us … decades ago had identified precisely what he might be capable of”. Easton Ellis, make of him what you will, is still posing key questions: why is liberal America so shocked about Trump? For many, that question is a thought crime that continues to spark anger.

He sensed Trump in the culture early on and then, later, in his own reaction as a white man. He cares, he says, not for politics but only for aesthetics. His boyfriend says that is fascist. He thinks everyone else should stop being oversensitive babies.

Part dinosaur, part sage, the man who chronicled the murderous void at the heart of late capitalism is full of contradictions.The numbness is unreal. He needs a reaction. What else is generation wuss for?