It’s the early eighties and Bret – rich, privileged, highly emotionally erratic – lives pretty much alone in LA where he is a senior at a private school in Buckley. His largely one-dimensional friends are also rich, tan, toned, staggeringly beautiful, totally amoral and lightly – and sometimes less lightly – buzzed on coke or Quaaludes or their parents’ valium. They spend their time cruising around LA in their BMW convertibles, going to parties and having sex with each other. Bret is gay but has a beautiful and fabulous wealthy girlfriend, whose father is a movie producer who Bret has sex with in the hope that he might take on the screenplays he is writing.
Then a new student, Robert Mallory, appears on the scene and Bret starts thinking that he might be the Trawler, a serial killer preying on local teens in a horrifically gruesome fashion. A young man with whom Bret was having a secret relationship is found dead, sending Bret into spirals of psychosis and paranoia.
This is the new plot of Bret Easton Ellis’ new novel The Shards which purportedly, according to the unreliable narrator (Ellis himself), explores what ‘really’ happened to the real Easton Ellis and his friends, in his life pre Less Than Zero, as he once again re-tells his own origin story.
Before pitching to a movie executive, Bret, in his typically laconic fashion, outlines the plot he has in mind: ‘A boy, his friends, young people in LA, sexy, a little bi, drugs, someone is killed, there is a chase, violence and bloodshed, a mystery the boy solves or maybe not.’ That’s the perfect summary of the book’s action.
For those not familiar with Easton Ellis’ work it’s important to explain here how seminal it is considered in the English literature canon. His 1985 debut, Less Than Zero, about rich, disaffected drug-using teenagers in LA, made him a literary sensation when he was just 21. Overnight, he became the voice of his generation.
In the opening chapter of a later book, 2005’s similarly meta Lunar Park, Easton Ellis describes Less Than Zero:
“It detailed a wealthy, alienated, sexually ambiguous young man’s Christmas break from an eastern college in Los Angeles – more specifically Beverley Hills – and all the parties he wandered through and all the drugs he consumed and all the girls and boys he had sex with and all the friends he watched passively drift into addiction, prostitution and vast apathy; days were spent speeding towards the beach club with beautiful blondes in gleaming convertibles while high on Nembutal; nights were lost in VIP rooms at trendy clubs and snorting cocaine at the window tables of Spago. It was an indictment not only of a way of life I was familiar with, but also – I thought rather grandly – of the Reagan eighties and, more indirectly, of Western civilisation in the present moment.”
‘Ellis has for a long time now inhabited the disconcerting place in the public domain between revulsion and literary acclaim’
Ellis became part of the ‘bratpack’ literary movement which included Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt and gained infamy as an enfant terrible of the New York social scene. His third novel, American Psycho, about 26-year-old Wall Street financier Patrick Bateman, who has a nervous breakdown while committing gory acts of rape and murder, catapulted Easton Ellis into global celebrity. Leaked passages instigated a public outcry and Simon and Schuster cancelled the book two months before its release. It was published by Vintage in 1991.
Norman Mailer, in Vanity Fair wrote “What a deranging work!... written by only a half competent and narcissistic young pen’ another critic wrote ‘Not much could be more sickening than the barbarism of this novel.’”
American Psycho remains one of the most graphic novels ever written, and continues to shock and thrill readers (one of the best moments is when Patrick Bateman tells someone in a nightclub “I’m into, uh, well, murders and executions, mostly.” They hear it as ‘mergers and acquisitions’). The truth is we all recognised the Donald Trump-loving Patrick Bateman and the grotesque perversion of the American capitalist dream which created him (Trump is mentioned 40 times in the novel, thanks to Bateman’s obsession with him). It was a bitter, savage and frightening black-hearted satire of yuppie culture and it turned him into a cult figure.
Since then, Easton Ellis has been mainly known as an agent provocateur and anti-woke cultural commentor gaining attention for his opinions rather than his work. He discusses everything from identity politics to cancel culture in America today in his 2020 book White, a collection of essays about America and continues the conversation on his podcast on Patreon.
Now as famous for his politically incorrect public persona as he is for his nihilistic fiction, Ellis has for a long time now inhabited the disconcerting place in the public domain between revulsion and literary acclaim – but he has something which is surprisingly rare for an author – his work is considered cool.
I will always remember interviewing Bret Easton Ellis in his suite at the Savoy sometime around 2010 as the highlight of my entire journalistic career when he said “fame is humiliating” (I also remember feeling thrown that someone I considered to be a literary genius was reading Robbie Williams’ biography, and there has always been this question mark over his literary credibility – is he a clever guy, who somehow captured the voice of his generation, or is he one of the greats?)
‘As a literary stylist you can’t fault him. His sparse freewheeling sentences are hypnotic’
Since American psycho, his true fans have all been waiting for the masterpiece, the next great American novel. Everything since has been minor, and disappointing. And it is heartbreaking to say The Shards continues the trend. Worryingly, if anything, it shows Ellis, now 57, has just been atrophying for forty years as he keeps on reproducing bland fascimiles, mere approximations of his former self and languishing in autofiction where he constantly refers to that period when Less Than Zero shot him into another realm.
This book too, is highly repetitive. This is a typical sentence: “We were at another party at Anthony Matthews’ house and she just started making out with me on a chaise by the lit pool. I was stoned on a Quaalude, she was on coke, it was midnight, Split Enz’s I Got You was playing from inside the house.” That worked in Less Than Zero, which was a short book. This is 600 pages long.
There are moments where you feel you get a glimpse of the real Easton Ellis, and they are thrilling. “Matt had never felt about me the way I’d felt about him,” he writes, “which would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life though, of course, I didn’t know that yet on that September afternoon in 1981, when I was seventeen and still navigated on hope.”
The Shards has echoes of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, but the book doesn’t say anything or move the needle on any of the characters or themes he has already covered many, many times. As in all his other books, cultural lodestars are luxury items and restaurants are the world’s only meaningful signifiers.
For those who want it, there is loads of sex and horrific violence. (The Trawler is named after his habit of stuffing fish into his victims – I’ll spare you any more than that.)
The frustrating thing is that White, and his podcast show that Ellis is acutely aware of modern social mores and fixations. So why can’t he use this knowledge to create an adult, grown-up book which addresses the issues of the day?
Maybe we’re expecting too much, Most great authors only write one standout novel – Thomas Hardy had Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Fitzgerald had The Great Gatsby. Arguably, in Less Than Zero and American Psycho, Ellis has produced two.
As a literary stylist you can’t fault him. His sparse freewheeling sentences are hypnotic and on a sentence level he captivates with tone and mood and insight.
But will this book cement Ellis’ status as a great American novelist, or contribute to any meaningful discussion about the state of the world today? I’m afraid not.
