The Shards, or, a story of a lost time and place

reaquainting myself with eighties literary bad boy Bret Easton Ellis

This means nothing to me....

I think that when you truly fall in love with a book or a film, it's like falling in love with a person, in that you can enumerate the reasons that you've fallen in love but they still only ultimately tell part of the story, and they don't tell the truth of it at all. In the end, you fall in love with someone because you fall in love with them, a recursive Möbius strip of pheromones and memory and recognition and longing and attachment.

I wonder what you will think when I say that I fell head-over-heels in love with Bret Easton Ellis's memoir/coming-of-age tale/serial killer doorstopper of a novel The Shards. It is a book as sweetly nostalgic as it is savage. Depending on your point of view, it is either sprawling or flabby. (The former, I say.) It isn't a nice book, a warm book, a comforting book. It is absolutely not a safe book. Ellis, thank goodness, hails from the same era of literature that I did, one in which the last thing in the world we looked for in our art was to have our safety ensured¹. If anything, we looked to art for danger—as Ellis himself has pointed out, we wanted to be offended; it's certainly what I loved about Ellis's first book, Less Than Zero, which he wrote while he was still a teenager and which I read when I was a teenager.

The feeling has gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me...

It's no accident that within the massive musical soundscape that is one of the backdrops for The Shards, Ultravox's paean to adolescent longing and ambivalence and the terror of vulnerability, “Vienna,” recurs. The end of that road, the one that insists it means nothing to me, is numbness, a numbness that Bret Ellis the character and Bret Easton Ellis the writer are both obsessed with evoking, a la his writing hero Joan Didion (“I could introduce you to Joan and John sometime,” a predatory producer suggests in one of the book's many upsetting episodes, shortly before demanding a quid pro quo for listening to young Bret Ellis's rambling film pitch, one that we know is coming but are nevertheless appalled by as it unfolds).

The world of Ellis's teenage years among the privileged sons and daughters of movie moguls and other entertainment industry professionals in 1980s Los Angeles could not have been more different from my own, growing up in a small, rural, deeply conservative Southern town, and I was fascinated by the nihilistic decadence chronicled in Less Than Zero. I was somewhat less enamoured of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction, and after his third, nearly career-ending satire of Wall Street psychopathy, American Psycho², came out, I began to lose track of his work. At some point, I concluded that his books were as empty and shallow and surface-level as the people he wrote about appeared to be. But when I heard about the premise of The Shards, I found myself eager to return to Ellis-land.

Ellis has had a bumpy ride through the social media era, prone to shooting off tweets while drunk or high (among the more inoffensive but most infamous, his 2012 3:00 am tweet “come over at do bring coke now”). The Shards is his first novel in more than a decade. He is, by current publishing standards, a dinosaur, not so much because of his age—sixty—than his attitudes. Unconcerned with contemporary decorum, a thorn in the side of present-day mores, in the parlance of his own day, he is entirely politically incorrect, as he has always been.

If it's a certainty that American Psycho would not be published today, as Ellis has asserted, I am not sure that The Shards would have been either had it not begun its life serialized on Ellis's paywalled podcast³, and probably not if it had been the work of a new novelist, at least not by a major mainstream publisher. We are indeed back in Less Than Zero territory here—in fact, Bret Ellis, the narrator of The Shards, is a middle-aged writer looking back on his last year of high school, which includes working on Less Than Zero throughout, and this book feels like it illuminates that book in important ways that have made me want to return to it⁴. Although it didn't really occur to me at the time, Less Than Zero was also arguably a horror novel, even if it didn't wear it on its sleeve. It's no accident that throughout the course of The Shards, Bret is reading Stephen King books and watching film adaptations of his work.

We are also firmly in Dennis Etchison California Gothic territory in The Shards. The sun-bleached landscapes of LA and Palm Springs, the malls, the freeways, the extravagant homes, the swimming pools, all become sites of terror and unease. The book contains some of the scariest and most upsetting sequences I've read (or listened to—Ellis reads his own audiobook) in a very long time. The Trawler, the serial killer stalking young women and—maybe—Bret and his friends performs a series of lovingly detailed, gruesome “alterations” on his victims that you may be somewhat prepared for if you remember American Psycho and otherwise may not be (be forewarned as well that several animals come in for horrific ends, offscreen but you get a thorough accounting of their grisly remains). For good measure, there is an evil cult at work as well, the Riders of the Afterlife (I can testify that cults, and the Manson family in particular, were among the scariest boogeymen for a certain type of Gen X child). The Shards is also a master class in the art of the unreliable narrator, and by the end of it, just as it is difficult to determine precisely where Bret Easton Ellis the writer's life and Bret Ellis the character's life begin and end, it is unclear where fantasy and reality converge in the narrator's account. As soon as I finished the audiobook, I wanted to sit down and reread the book again in print to try to tease at least some of this out.

If you ever read Less Than Zero, you'll also find it interesting to encounter the same environment as written by a man in his fifties rather than one in his late teens. There's a strange innocence to The Shards that was lacking in Less Than Zero, a middle-aged man's perspective on the fact that however sophisticated these kids may seem, they're still very much kids, shielded as they are by their parents' wealth and their private school educations and their cozy social worlds where they've all known each other since puberty. Sex in The Shards—and there is a lot of it, both erotic fantasies and actual encounters, so much that it may be jarring to contemporary readers—conveys its primacy in the life of a seventeen-year-old boy along with the pain of first love and his struggles as a closeted gay kid.

The Shards is brutal, but it's also wistful, a book of poignant yearning for the past, a past that it is tempting to escape into because we know how things turn out, even if they turn out badly⁵. You may want to immerse yourself in the era (as I did) via the nine-hour Spotify playlist that some person even more obsessed with the book than I am put together.

Should you read The Shards? I have no idea; you decide. I loved every page of this detached, delirious, paranoid, Grand Guignol-esque autofiction. It’s a fever dream of a lost time and place, by turns shocking and melancholy, a gorgeous, ruthless, beast of a book that will absolutely not be everyone's cup of tea handful of quaaludes. This means nothing to me.

P.S. A weird bit of synchronicity: the day after I finished writing this, I read this post by Blake Nelson, a book review of a debut novel called Pregaming Grief by Danielle Chelosky. As I was reading the review, I was thinking, wow, this makes me think of Bret Easton Ellis’s early books and then, sure enough, Nelson adds a section where he discusses its similarities and differences to Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction and (affluent) youth culture then and now. (I also appreciated Nelson’s dig at the viral New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” a work I think is bafflingly overrated.) Apparently, Affluent Decadent Young People is my new obsession (I am also currently thinking a lot about autofiction) because I now very much want to read this book by way of comparison if nothing else, although I can’t get it from the library and it appears to be only available from an imprint of the small press Hobart (and Hobart is a whole nother literary scandal story but that’s a tale for another day), so it will probably be a while before I get around to it, alas.

1. Counterpoint one: We’ve always loved being shocked and horrified by storytellers, and we still love it. And here are a collection of comments from readers in 2019 talking about the books that most shocked/disturbed them although if you are like me, you may find it difficult to take seriously a comment from someone who has assumed the online sobriquet unclestinky.

2. I can't exactly remember what I thought about the furor over American Psycho at the time. I've never been a gorehound, but I've always been a fervent supporter of free speech and of artistic expression, and I do remember being uncomfortable with the response to the book—Ellis lost his publisher and, almost, his entire career because of the novel's extreme violence, which satirically portrayed a greed-is-good investment banker type so lauded in the 1980s as a literal murderous psychopath. Many people would point out that being dropped by your publisher and even losing your career is hardly censorship, and also is consequences not cancellation but it was a pretty ugly, difficult time for Ellis (relinking the first article from footnote 1 as the first two paragraphs offer a few examples of what he experienced). He was nineties-style cancelled.

3. Counterpoint two: A new BEE novel after so long is something of an Event in publishing, the kind of Event that doesn’t happen much anymore, so perhaps it would have been.

4. That's one of the reasons that writing this was so long-delayed; I felt like I should go back and reread Less Than Zero before I wrote it, and maybe more Joan Didion and then maybe Ellis's entire oeuvre but then I realized that would mean not finishing this piece for, like, a year, unless an editor or a lot more people are paying me to write it. But in my own time, I am going to go back to the beginning and reread/read all of his books, which all take place in the Bret Easton Ellis Universe.

5. I think this is also responsible for the feeling some people get that things have never been worse than they are right now. That this is demonstrably untrue is not the point; of course right now feels bad compared to looking back because you know how the past resolved itself.