Zeroing In on Bret Easton Ellis : Embraced by N.Y. Literati for His First Novel, the Young L.A. Author Ponders an Encore

It’s a little before 2 p.m. at Woods Gramercy, a peach-walled expense-account restaurant where the tables of Manhattan’s publishing power lunchers are spaced discreetly apart. At the round table that anchors the room sits the best-seller task force of Penguin Books, encircling an uneasy college student who is picking at his goat cheese and smoked salmon omelet. Gerald Howard, senior editor, debates the veracity of Thomas Pynchon’s vision of Los Angeles. Marcia Burch, director of publicity and special promotions, talks radio spots and store windows. Two other executives sip Courvoisier and stare mutely.

The target of their attention is Bennington College senior Bret Easton Ellis, who smokes steadily, gulps three mimosas to dull his discomfort and has the hunched look of someone about to bolt out of his ladder-backed chair. An hour later, he will confess that he remembers the name of only one of the team that is laboring to make him the most famous young writer since Truman Capote. “I have no idea why all these people are interested in me,” he says with apparently sincere bewilderment. “I haven’t saved a bunch of people from a fire or become a war hero or something. I’ve only written a sort of a book.”

Bret Ellis’ sort of a book, a first novel called “Less Than Zero,” delivered the dark side of MTV in stripped, deadened prose. It was an obviously precocious but strangely barren work about emotionally depraved L.A. rich kids whose ranks include a mainlining anorexic girl, a pretty boy who sells his body first to settle a coke debt and then to feed a habit, and a group of teen-age guys who occasionally break from video games to partake of a drugged 12-year-old girl bound to the bedposts of a Wilshire apartment. Though the hard-cover book jacket describes “Zero” as “this decade’s ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ ” it’s more like a pubescent version of Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays”--less artful, more shallow, but similar in style and with an equally anesthetized protagonist. In Ellis’ case, the latter happens to be a sexually confused 18-year-old boy named Clay who attends a New England college and has come home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation.

The book was a surprise hard-cover best seller for Simon & Schuster and a steal for Penguin Books, which paid $99,000 for the paperback rights and is in the midst of a six-figure promotional campaign. The novel also made its author, a shy kid who grew up in Sherman Oaks and earned a 2.5 grade-point average at the Buckley School, a national celebrity and cult figure just about the time he reached legal drinking age. Last summer, just after “Zero” was published, Ellis stopped in at a now-defunct downtown L.A. rock ‘n’ roll haunt called Club Soho, and a group of adoring teen-age boys swarmed around him; they had composed a poem, “Ode to Bret,” that they proceeded to recite en masse to their guru’s considerable embarrassment. In New York, adults with publishing muscle laud him as an important new talent, the voice of his generation. And though there are those who find his novel frightening and offensive and--most cruelly--devoid of literary merit, such controversy has fueled sales and kept the author focused in the public eye.

Now Simon & Schuster patiently awaits his second book. “It’s pretty nerve-racking, writing a novel,” says Ellis, “especially now that there’s a bunch of editors in some huge publishing house in New York waiting to see what this thing is that they bought.”

After all the hype, it’s disconcerting to meet the author. For instead of a flagrantly degenerate Johnny Rotten or a chest-beating Philip Michael Thomas, he is a self-conscious, laconic young man who, despite being tall and substantially framed, seems lost and vulnerable in his Salvation Army sports jacket and faded black tuxedo pants. He is, after all, only 22, and it may be that his writing emerged full-blown before he did. He was still struggling to grow into himself, trying to get comfortable, when he found himself in the glare of center stage. He’s had to grapple with being an icon to some and a cash cow to others, and his manner of adaptation has been simply to submit until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He’s grateful to his publishers and feels that he owed it to them to go along with their promotional plans for “Less Than Zero,” but he recently told the Simon & Schuster publicity department that he doesn’t want to promote his second, as yet unfinished, novel. It is not, he will have you understand, that he is too important or too confident or, God forbid, too arrogant. “It’s probably presumptuous to tell them I don’t want to promote it, because probably no one will want to talk about it anyway. It’s just an innocuous little second novel that probably no one will read.”

Ellis’ editor at Simon & Schuster, Bob Asahina, 35, says that his young star is “very sincere” about disliking the hoopla of publishing. “Bret has never been a prima donna,” he says. “I think he understands that this is a business, and he’s been a very good soldier. He’s accommodated us, even though it’s made him unhappy.”

Ellis says, “I believe in, more or less, humbleness.”

At lunch, Ellis is asked what’s happening with the movie of “Less Than Zero,” a deal made by Ellis’ West Coast agent, ICM’s Jeremy Zimmer, with Marvin Worth Productions in Los Angeles. Ellis is vague, as he is about most business details. “I know they re-bought the option or something, but I have no idea what they’re doing with it.”

He says he has faith in producer Worth and in screenwriter / playwright Michael Cristofer, but can’t shake the “horrible idea that (the film) would end real upbeat. I’d hate to see it cleaned up and romanticized. Like ending it by having all of these characters pile onto some plane and fly east, cheering.”

Penguin editor Howard, who is quick to respond to the moods of his author, is sympathetic: “Oh, God,” he groans, “they’ll try to turn it into 12 videos.”

“Yeah,” says Ellis, “exactly what the book argues against.” It’s one of the few times that he allows an edge of literary self-importance to poke through the wall of self-deprecation.

Marcia Burch, the publicist, asks Ellis if he’d be up for signing books in stores. Ellis thinks for a minute, then says resignedly, “Yeah, OK. I guess I wouldn’t mind.”

“What about doing a reading in a few stores?” Burch asks.

“No, I couldn’t, I’m sorry.” Ellis sounds genuinely regretful, but his face is blank. “Not in a bookstore or gallery or anything like that. It’s OK to do it in a hall when people come just to hear you, but in a bookstore it might get in the way of people shopping and annoy them.”

Though Ellis is unfailingly polite and seemingly earnest, he is also adroit at making himself impenetrable when he feels that someone’s moving in too close. Burch senses the barrier dropping into place and makes no more promotional requests. “I don’t like to push him,” she says. “He gets uncomfortable.”

After a diet soda to chase the mimosas and some friendly chitchat with Howard, another publishing ordeal is over for Ellis. At the moment, he’s a month away from graduation.

The metamorphosis of Bret Ellis from a withdrawn Los Angeles boy who doesn’t tan easily into a best-selling novelist adopted by the young New York literati as one of their own wasn’t as simple as being in the right place at the right time. He was also in the right company.

Ellis was a freshman at Bennington--America’s most expensive college and one of its most self-consciously progressive--when he met Joe McGinniss, to whom “Zero” is dedicated. McGinniss, an ex- Wunderkind himself (he was only 26 when his “The Selling of the President 1968” topped the best-seller lists), was teaching an upper-level writing workshop. Ellis campaigned for admission by giving McGinniss some essays about teen-age life in Los Angeles. McGinniss later told the business magazine Manhattan Inc. that reading Ellis’ essays was like “being a gym teacher and giving a bunch of kids a baseball to try and throw. And one of the kids is Dwight Gooden.”

McGinniss sent Ellis’ L.A. life-style sketches off to a few key players in New York publishing, among them Morgan Entrekin, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, and to the Sterling Lord Agency, where McGinniss was then a client. Entrekin passed Ellis’ work on to Asahina, then an editor at Harper’s, who found it impressive. When Asahina left Harper’s for Simon & Schuster, he and Entrekin lobbied successfully for the house to buy the novel that grew out of the sketches; when Entrekin left Simon & Schuster, Asahina became Ellis’ editor.

Though Ellis says that “without Joe McGinniss there probably wouldn’t have been a ‘Less Than Zero,’ ” McGinniss resists the halo. “It still comes down to the quality of the work,” he says. “For almost 20 years I’ve been recommending a lot of different people to agents and publishers, but this is the first time anything has come of it.”

The Lord agency, by now Ellis’ representative, relayed his pieces to a select group of major magazines. Tom Jenks, then a fiction editor at Esquire and recently the editor of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel, “The Garden of Eden,” remembers receiving examples of Ellis’ work in January, 1983, more than two years before “Less Than Zero” was published. “The pieces were rough; they had none of the polish, none of the chill poise of the finished work--though they certainly had the chill subject matter,” says Jenks, now at Charles Scribner’s Sons. “When I later saw the galleys of the novel, I admired the writing but thought it was a dangerous and frightening book, one that I wouldn’t want to publish. Its primary audience was teen-age kids in shopping malls who picked it up because it was topical and because of some pathetic identification with it. Other than the title, there wasn’t any indication of a distance between the author and his material, and these kids might see it as an affirmation of generally destructive things: despair, drugs, depravity.”

Ellis, of course, was not the first young literary lion to focus on such subjects. Just a year earlier, a 29-year-old hipster named Jay McInerney made his debut with the first upscale cocaine novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” a journey through the netherworld of New York club life. As part of the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series, the cover of “Bright Lights” had a rakish video look, and the subject and packaging initially drew a Columbus Avenue audience--Manhattan grad-school alumni turned high-salaried professionals in their late 20s and 30s. From there, the novel radiated out from New York to Los Angeles, and then to Houston and Dallas and Chicago.

The success of “Bright Lights” broke ground for “Less Than Zero.” The marketers and the media now had a recognizable promotional handle (“the new Jay McInerney,” the “next ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ ”) and the chain bookstores--whence best sellers emerge--had a proven buying audience.

Ironically, “Bright Lights” has little in common with “Zero” other than cocaine and sunglasses. The prose style of “Bright Lights” is flashy and energetic; that of “Zero” is arid and affectless. “Bright Lights” has a camp, comic edge along which its protagonist caroms, while in “Zero” Clay rides a hypnotically straight-laned freeway without interchanges or exits--other than the final escape to the East Coast. And McInerney’s narrator is a decade older and a generation apart from Ellis’, as is true of the authors themselves.

“On a scale of cool to hot, we’re at opposite ends, and there’s more light at the end of my tunnel,” McInerney says. “But we both made fairly big splashes, we’re both perceived as endorsing things we are in fact criticizing, we’re both young--and we both got processed by the hype machine.”

Simon & Schuster paid a typically modest first-novel advance for “Zero”--$5,000--and had no plans to treat it much differently than any other first novel (which means to do little for it other than to pay postage on review copies). Then the media rumblings started. Reviewers were either intrigued, impressed, hypnotized or horrified by it, but no one failed to react strongly. Articles appeared everywhere, from the New Yorker to USA Today, and Ellis had a different look for each forum. He was preppy in a cable-knit cardigan for People, disheveled on an unmade bed for W, swathed in Armani for Interview, and just plain hung over for “The Today Show.”

Ellis’ emergence as a hot young novelist was no surprise to Bruce Taylor, a former UCLA student who has been friends with Ellis for 10 years. Taylor was editor of the Buckley School’s newspaper when Ellis was assistant editor and the writer of the entertainment column. And Taylor was in Ellis’ writing class at Buckley when Ellis’ short-story assignment, titled “Less Than Zero” after a line in an Elvis Costello song, earned raves from the teacher. “About the 12th grade,” Taylor says, “he started putting on artsy airs and reading a lot of Didion. The role of depressed, austere young novelist is perfect for him.”

But to 24-year-old musician John Shanks, another hometown friend, Ellis was just another guy who lived for rock ‘n’ roll. They’d met a few years ago through a mutual acquaintance, L.A. deejay Lee Selwyn. According to Shanks, Selwyn called him up one day and said: “I know this kid who wants some help on his music. Maybe you could go over to his house and help him arrange some songs.” The kid was Bret Ellis. When Shanks confided to Ellis that he kept a journal, Ellis allowed that he fooled around with a pen, too. “Bret said, ‘I just kinda write down stuff people say,’ ” Shanks remembers.

One night last year, Shanks was making dinner for a girlfriend who worked at MGM. “She started reading excerpts from some book that had come into her office, stuff about what went down at certain parties in Los Angeles, and I thought, ‘What’s the big deal, I’ve been at worse than that.’ I asked her who wrote it, and she said, ‘Some guy named Bret,’ and I said, ‘Bret who?’ and it was Bret Ellis. I was blown away.”

The New York publishing industry knows that slice-of-life novels set in the twin glamour towers of Beverly Hills and Hollywood have instant recognition value to book buyers everywhere--which, of course, enhanced the commercial potential of “Less Than Zero.” “I’m sure you could find decadent rich kids behaving similarly in Chicago or Phoenix,” says Asahina, editor of “Zero,” “but the L.A. life-style image is so much more familiar to the rest of the country.”

Bret Ellis’ bleak take on life in Los Angeles has also set off a new round of the fierce bicoastal mud wrestle over What Is Literature. One such match took place at a typically New York publishing event, held in March by McInerney and Gary Fisketjon (McInerney’s former college classmate and then head of Vintage Contemporaries) in honor of Vintage author Richard Ford and his ballyhooed new novel, “The Sportswriter.” The party was held at the Palladium, Steve (Studio 54) Rubell’s latest temple for night lizards.

It was hot, dark, and everyone was pretty drunk, and a husband and wife who form one of New York’s many media marriages were railing at L.A. screenwriter Michael Tolkin for thinking that “Zero” was not just good but brilliant. The wife, magazine editor Sarah Crichton, had read the novel and upon finishing it had immediately “stuck it in a manila envelope and sent it out of my house, because it was spewing ugliness.” The husband, journalist Guy Martin, had not read it, but pretended that he had, reiterating over and over that it “was a miserable piece of camel dung.”

The argument that night at the Palladium did not hinge on Ellis’ talent as a writer or as a social observer; even Crichton and Martin grudgingly acknowledged that as a piece of atmospheric reportage, “Zero” had validity. Their outrage was caused by their belief that “Zero” was all form and no substance--no story, no characters, no morality--and therefore wasn’t sufficient to earn Ellis the mantle of master novelist. Tolkin disagreed vigorously; the novel was brilliant, he maintained, precisely because of its form.

Tom Jenks, who was dragged into the argument by Crichton and Martin, believes that it represented nothing less than the cultural gulch between the New York and L.A. literary worlds. “Accuracy of atmosphere may be enough for good journalism,” he says, “but that’s not enough for something that’s supposed to be an important work of fiction. At least not here.”

Ellis himself is careful not to parrot East Coast put-downs of Los Angeles as a place for philistines--after all, he is a native son. “People in New York don’t think L.A. has an art scene or a literary scene, just a TV or film scene, but that’s not true. And though I know people from New York who’ve gone out to L.A. and lost their minds, the same thing happens in reverse.”

Still, losing your mind in New York can be a lot more productive than losing it in Los Angeles if you’re ascending the literary ladder, because only in New York are writers gossiped about with the same breathlessness that in Los Angeles is reserved for Sean and Madonna sharing a pizza at Spago. Only in New York would any gossip columnist care to report, as one tabloid did last year, that McInerney snubbed Ellis by not showing up for his publishing party at a glitzy disco. (In fact, says McInerney, not only was he there for two hours, he even posed for photographs with Ellis. “But when the photographer asked who I was, Bret was kidding around and he said, ‘John McEnroe.”’)

So it seems predestined that Ellis intends to move to New York this fall, after spending the summer in Los Angeles completing his new novel and writing an original screenplay commissioned by actor Rob Lowe. (“I’m only doing it for the money,” Ellis explains, a touch disdainfully.) He mentions the move casually, eyes wide: “I haven’t had the New York experience yet. I just want to give it a shot.” But old chum Bruce Taylor says the move is hardly an offhand yen. “Bret’s been edging toward that practically all his life. Since the seventh grade he’s been complaining about how uncultured L.A. is and how much more intelligent the people in New York are, how much more valid the art is.”

Ellis’ initial plunge into the smart set of New York novelists was as a member of a PEN (the international writers’ association) panel, moderated by Bob Asahina. It was in April, 1985, a month before “Zero” was published. The panelists were Jay McInerney, then 30; Emily Prager, 34; Richard Price, 35, and Ellis, at 21 the baby of the pack. The topic under discussion was how the ‘60s had affected young writers, and Ellis, nervous at his first public appearance, also had to deal with some hostility from the mostly ‘60s-generation audience for having been born in 1964.

One woman in the audience goaded Ellis: “A lot of the writing and the art of the ‘60s was characterized by rebellion. . . . I wonder if there is some focus of rebellion that your generation is going to be writing about.”

“No,” Ellis said, kicking up laughter. “I’m going to this really small liberal arts college which likes to think of itself as the last bastion of bohemia, but the two most popular places on this campus now are the computer room and the weight room.”

Ellis’ playfulness (which he swears was unintentional) was a refreshing contrast to the intellectual stridence that often characterizes PEN seminar habitues and beguiled many of those present. Today, though Ellis sometimes pretends that he doesn’t “know anyone literary or even literate here,” Prager, Price and McInerney have “become sort of friends I hang out with sometimes when I’m in New York.”

His first night hanging out with McInerney began with the MTV Awards, an event that both thought was “sort of silly,” McInerney says. “We went tongue in cheek, but afterward we felt a little cheap and sleazy for going. I remember Bret being really annoyed that they kept playing that Dire Straits line (from the song ‘Money for Nothing’), ‘I want my MTV,’ over and over. ‘They don’t even know it’s a put-on; they don’t see the irony,’ Bret kept saying. I got the sense that Bret felt everyone was doing the same thing with him.”

Ellis trudges up Broadway in thick white socks crumpled into ancient black loafers with chewed-up heels. He doesn’t stand up exactly straight and seems awkward in his body, as if his confidence hasn’t caught up with his height.

He’s worried about his lack of time for schoolwork. This week he’s got to finish his Shakespeare paper, which is supposed to be about Bassanio’s reflections on the caskets in “The Merchant of Venice,” and it’s already 4 p.m. Thursday, and there are still more official duties to perform before he can slip back to student status. Right now, he’s on his way to NBC Radio for an interview for “The Source Report,” a half-hour weekly magazine show that airs on The Source, NBC Radio’s young-adult network. The interview will be taped and released to 160 rock stations to time with the release of Penguin’s edition of “Zero.”

He stops to buy a pair of sunglasses from a street vendor, for a girl at Bennington “who begged me for a cheap pair of Wayfarers,” the same kind that every tan blond teen-age druggie wore in his novel. He stops again for a $1 diet soda from another vendor, gives the guy a $10 bill, gets a five back, walks away, stops, looks at his change, goes back for four singles. “I guess I’m pretty distracted,” he says.

Riding up in the elevator to the taping studio, Ellis sighs. “I’m not in the mood for this.” Yet he’s poised and cordial when Andy Fisher, the interviewer, greets him deferentially. Fisher leads Ellis into a small glass-walled room equipped with microphones for the taping. Ellis folds his arms on the table, bites his lower lip, and listens to Fisher’s first question: “How much of Clay (the narrator of ‘Less Than Zero’) is Bret Easton Ellis?”

“Hopefully not a lot,” Ellis says quickly. Obviously he’s answered this one a million times. “The guy’s a bit of a wretch. Hopefully no one would mistake the author for that apathetic narrator.”

It’s 3 p.m. on Friday, and Ellis is back at last in his room at the Hotel Carlyle, musical home of Bobby Short and a frequent New York lodging of John F. Kennedy. Ellis is used to the low-key luxury of the place. He has stayed here on trips with his father, a wealthy Los Angeles real estate developer, since he was a little boy composing short stories as Christmas gifts.

Now he hangs up his jacket in the walk-in closet, where a small refrigerator sits and where a tangle of shirts and socks spills out of a canvas duffel bag. He cracks open a diet soda, lights a Camel filter and turns on the TV, volume down, to a game show. When he’s reading fiction, he has to be in a closed, silent room; when he’s writing, he has to be in a loud, rock ‘n’ roll-filled empty room. But when he’s talking, he has to have the TV on, though his eyes almost never veer in its direction. “I was raised on it,” he says. “I can’t help myself.”

He’s just returned from lunch with Asahina, and he’s gratified. It seems that Ellis is already on his way to becoming a mentor himself. He’d sent the novel-in-progress of a former Bennington student, Jill Eisenstadt, to Asahina, and Ellis learned at lunch that it looks as if Simon & Schuster may be interested in buying it.

Asahina says: “Bret wrote me a sweet little note saying, ‘I don’t know if this is an imposition or not, but lots of people have been sending me stuff since my novel was published, and it’s all been pretty terrible, but here’s something I think is pretty good.’ He was absolutely right.” (Three weeks later, Simon & Schuster indeed made an offer to Eisenstadt, now a 23-year-old student in Columbia’s graduate writing program.)

In his own work, Ellis is running a bit behind. His second novel was due at Simon & Schuster this month, but no one seems particularly concerned that he didn’t make that date. Officially, Ellis’ agent, Amanda Urban, has arranged with Asahina for a new September deadline. Unofficially, it’s pretty loose. “We figure we’ll get it by the end of the summer,” says Asahina, “but if he needs more time, one month, six months, it won’t matter.”

Ellis says he’s more than half done but he doesn’t want to talk about it much. “Some of it I think is OK. I think it’s a little different. I don’t know how people are going to handle it. I think it’s really weird. Then again, I can’t tell you why it’s weird, because it’s not finished yet.” He does say that it will “have the same concerns as the first one: keeping tabs on my generation.” And he hopes it will seem more grown-up. “ ‘Zero,’ ” he says, “was very much a first novel, a very young person’s book, written during a time when I was very”--he snickers self-consciously--”young.”

There are those in New York publishing who believe that Ellis won’t be able to build a body of work, or even a critically successful second novel, on his limited experience as a sheltered product of the white American upper-middle class. And he’s likely to stay sheltered. Ellis hates to fly and hates to travel, recently cutting a European book tour short because he felt “lonely and alienated” on the road. By all accounts, he seems more comfortable on the sidelines of life than barreling onto the field.

“Can a Bret Ellis really represent his time being closed in a room with a TV set?” asks Tom Jenks. “I hope not.”

But Ellis defends the fact that he’s “never had the desire for a heterogeneous experience.” He says, with a rare flash of anger, “I don’t feel that in order to write better I have to move to Venezuela and soak up the local color or something.”

And there are people who expect Ellis’ booster rockets to come apart at the literary seams, no matter how rich the material he has to draw on. “He’s in a good position to be chewed up by the time he’s 23,” says one New York editor. “It’s hard to live up to this kind of early splash in a town that’s always restless for the next hip novel.”

When asked to contemplate crashing and burning with his second book, Ellis agrees that “it would be, yeah, to use California slang, a bummer. But I don’t think it would drive me to suicide.” Once again, as if wary of appearing too smug or of tempting fate or both, he adds a qualifier: “Who knows, though. I suppose I could read in the paper, ‘Young Writer Throws Himself Off a 24-Story Building.’ ”

Ellis tries to keep in mind what mentor McGinniss told him before “Zero” was published: Writing the book is the most important thing, and don’t get carried too far up or down the roller coaster. Ellis insists that “the success thing” makes up “like 5% of my life’s concerns. I honestly don’t hunger after that.” What does he hunger after? “The same as anyone else. Writing well, falling in love, going to a good movie.” For now, he wants to focus on finishing school in Vermont, finishing the new novel, finishing the screenplay for Rob Lowe in Los Angeles and finding an apartment in New York.

As he discusses his plans, Ellis slouches in the chair, elbows bent over the desk.

“I’ve been lucky lately, OK. But all it means is I don’t have to worry about certain things right now, like what to do after graduation. I don’t feel safer or better or anything like that. I mean, I’m still wandering around all day worrying about vulnerability. About random death. I’m sure I’m going to get some deadly disease any second, like AIDS or cancer. Or I could be walking down a street and notice a crane that I’m sure is going to fall on me. Or something will happen to my friends or family.”

He’s sitting up straight now, leaning forward. “I’m this sort of person who, if I get really hypochondriacal, forget it. I can just sit in a room for three hours and not move and think, ‘What’s going on here, I know I have cancer.’ I know it’s ridiculous, and I try to control it, because it completely ruins your life. You don’t go to classes, you put off your work, you just pace and smoke.” Something about this subject, the fragility of life, gets him talking fast, makes him unusually hyper.

Ellis jiggles his foot, shod in that forlorn black loafer. “Lately, I’ve been having these attacks pretty often,” he says, suddenly lapsing into his slouch. No matter how much Ellis tries to minimize it, to pretend that none of it really matters, the stakes are higher now. There’s simply more to lose.

Now he gets up, changes the TV channel for the third time, slumps back down into his chair.

“Well, yeah, OK. OK. Things have been pretty good this year or so, and I’m one of those people who thinks that no good thing goes unpunished.”

He rolls his eyes and drums his fingers against the desk, knocking on wood. “So I’m just waiting for that, you know--that ‘ha ha, wasn’t it fun, and now something bad is going to happen. . . .’ ”