eA ach episode of Bret Easton Ellis Lengthy-running podcast It begins with a monologue—typically a overview, typically a considerably provocative essay—mocking the tradition’s supposed neo-puritans. Its September 2020 opening regarded totally different. For 20 years, Ellis mentioned, he had been haunted by a ebook he longed to put in writing however was afraid to begin: a memoir of kinds, detailing “what occurred to me, and some of my associates, one 12 months after the tip of highschool.” His latest false begin—a number of jagged pages written with trembling palms, half-numbed by tequila—spurred “an nervousness assault so extreme it despatched me to the emergency room.”
Ellis’ supply was so delicate that it took a number of moments to register the dearth of type. This was not a podcast monologue. It was the opening for his first new novel in 13 years, The Shards.
The start of braveness, which dramatized the novel’s creativity, set the tone for that uncommon cultural phenomenon: an actual literary occasion. Others earlier than Ellis have tried to retool serial narratives for the Web age. Nothing has sounded fairly as thrilling as Ellis’ year-and-hour-by-hour efficiency in The Shards.
Now, amended and tightened, The Shards arrive in print, and any lingering uncertainty whose brilliance lies extra in recitation than in writing may be distributed with. The Shards is not simply Ellis’ strongest novel for the reason that ’90s, it is a full-spectrum triumph, merging and subverting the whole lot he is finished earlier than and giving us, if we comply with the ebook’s creative and self-delightful conception, nothing in need of an Ellis origin story.
Ellis tells and stars. The setting is the Los Angeles of his youth, within the fall of 1981. Brett and his close-knit, unique group of associates are getting into their remaining 12 months at Buckley Excessive. College life has turn out to be stifling. Brett feels he’s “fulfilling a well-rehearsed function whereas my escape is found”. Earlier than rising up engaged on a novel that we all know will change his life, lower than zerohe’s already patronizing the glacial detachment for which he shall be well-known.
Round Ellis’ mature teenagers, the tradition can be altering. The eagles are out, the cool Viennese ultravox has entered. The hippies had been not a counter-cultural pressure, however relatively a tough, intimidating cult banished to the fringes of town. Even the violence modifications.
The Seventies was formed by the novel underground. The eighties would be the age of the butcher. On the fringes of Buckley’s bubble, new fears are starting to encroach: a pointy rise in dwelling invasions, the disappearance of a number of younger girls, and a collection of sadistic murders by the hands of somebody calling himself The Trawler.
The seniors at Buckley Excessive are an exquisite, outrageously privileged crowd. They cruise to high school in BMWs, measure one another up from behind Wayfarers, and maintain a perpetual buzz of cocaine and Quaaludes. They’re additionally clearly uncensored. Ellis’ dad and mom are away on trip for months, leaving him alone in a spot he by no means refers to as dwelling, solely “the empty home on Mulholland”.
With the arrival of a brand new pupil, the stability and exclusivity of the friendship group is damaged. Candy and charismatic Robert Mallory is immediately divisive. Brett’s associates discover him “electrifying”, however Brett has noticed a manipulator beneath the good-looking masks – a malevolent, sociopathic presence. Brett thinks Mallory stands out as the trawler himself.
Superficially, The Shards sticks to Ellis’ established aesthetic. The dialogue is deadpan, and the environment is paranoid and implicitly hostile. intercourse is graphic and unfamiliar; Violence is frightening and sexual. However within the shadow of coldness and carnage, a brand new, gentler high quality may be found. The place Ellis’ final work of fiction is, 2010 Imperial bedroomsOverly drippy and claustrophobic, The Shards is dreamlike and expansive, with longer sentences and a slower tempo.
Homosexuality, at all times an undercurrent in Ellis’ creativeness, involves the fore. Brett is homosexual however hasn’t come out but – a case of loneliness and promiscuous arousal. The cautious method during which he should hunt down different “secret brokers”, the simultaneous pleasure and inadequacy of his relationships with the passionate boys make up a few of the ebook’s most poignant passages.
With the Trawler ship closing in, and Brett’s paranoid, paranoid obsession with Mallory’s crescendo, layers of secrecy and want turn out to be the means by which Ellis explores his longtime central theme: the shadow self, the violent interior Different we maintain again. Brett’s characters—the “concrete participant” who hides his interior self, the aspiring author inclined to seek the advice of, the painful, lust-ridden teenager trying to find connection in a world “not constructed for me or my wants or needs”—cease being meaningfully cohesive.
Because the ebook and its characters transfer towards a shattered state of “transcendental understanding,” we’re conscious of the subtlety and subtlety of its construction past the textual content. The closing violence is its climax and genesis. From the splattering of blood and dismemberment, Ellis’ model of “numbness as ecstasy” was born, “the Prince of Darkness’s literary determine”. Or so Ellis would have us consider. For all its autobiographical misrepresentation, The Shards continues to be a novel, and Ellis continues to be the arch-cynic of narcissism that gave us American Psycho and glamorama. We suspect Ellis would scoff on the strained constancy of the trauma narrative, simply as Ellis at present routinely demeans a victim-preoccupied society. That is the brilliance of The Shards. Within the Corridor of Shattered Mirrors, you discover Ellis in all places. However the corpse at our toes is tradition, dismembered.