Sex, Drugs, Murder, and the Return of Bret Easton Ellis

“Someone once asked me why I haven’t written a memoir, a proper memoir,” Bret Easton Ellis has recently spoken UnHerd. “But I have written my memoir, over nine volumes of them—my novels. All have a narrator of the same sort of age as I was, and they are all a reflection of whatever pain, confusion, distress I was going through at the time.”

Ellis’s first novels were most notable. We have less than zero (1985) American Psycho (1991) – A young man is unsure about himself and struggling to figure his place in an amoral and vapid world. You can read the rest of this article. The Shards—his first novel in more than a decade—that young man has reached his midlife crisis. Ellis’s fictionalized autobiography shows him obsessed with his lost teenage years. This is a strange, hallucinatory journey through 1980s Los Angeles. It reads like a bizarre fusion of Donnie Darko And The Secret HistoryIt is tinged enough with nostalgia to please the Stranger Things generation.

Shards This is Ellis as he finishes his senior year at Buckley School. Ellis, then 17, has decided to quit his studies and write the book he will be writing. We have less than zero. His life appears simple at first glance, much like a John Hughes movie. His time is spent at movie theatres and in coke-fuelled house parties, while he struggles with his homosexuality. Ellis’s calm life suddenly becomes chaotic when Robert Mallory arrives, an intriguing and attractive new student. A serial killer, dubbed “The Trawler” His neighborhood is being watched by the media, while a Manson Family-like cult lurks around the edges of the city. His suspicions about Mallory are growing and his relationships with him begin to spiral into madness.

Ellis doesn’t seem to be breaking any new ground. Before Ellis dabbled with autofiction, he was familiar with the subject. Lunar Park He starred in the 2005 ghost story, playing himself as the main character. This makes his horror stories feel much more natural, while his detached and voyeuristic writing style gives off a captivating aura of suspense, when terror strikes. Let’s take the following example as an illustration:

Although the screams were not joyful or celebratory, they were anguished and shocked enough to break through Debbie’s walls and the music that we were hearing. Billie started barking furiously and dashed to the door and pawed at it, whimpering, desperately looking over at Debbie, who was kneeling by her record collection and then stood up, frozen, confused, looking at the door behind which the screams were coming from …

However Shards Ellis creates a dark mood throughout the novel, which is almost 600 pages long. This tension holds until Ellis’ cinematic finale. The novel is quite long, but it does not justify its length. Ellis writes in a detailed style that is unnecessary. Pages are devoted to meticulous descriptions of minor details, locations and rote actions. This is an In American PsychoThis technique was effective in satirizing a culture that seeks fulfillment in materialism. Ellis obsessively described outfits and menus. Shards They lack the same grand commentary as its more detailed passages and feel rather mundane. Ellis travels across Los Angeles at many times in the novel. Ellis describes every step of his journey and catalogs each turn. “I took Avenue of the Stars and would make a left onto Santa Monica and then drive South Beverly Glen until it hit Bel Air Road where I’d swing right onto Bellagio.” These sections may initially be evocative but quickly turn tedious. It’s much the same as his obsession with male anatomy or endless references to pop songs.

But despite its excesses, Shards It’s a riveting story that is rooted in deeply human themes, which has made Ellis’s best works so memorable. This is the intelligenc We have less than zeroIts characters fear not only the possibility of being murdered, but also the idea that they might be exposed to other people and become adults. They have a certain air about their interactions. “numbness and disaffection, a general rejection of seventies kitsch,” And in their superficial environment “everything [is] clean with sharp angles.”

The novel is filled with Ellis’s trademarks: intense scenes of sex, which blur the lines between reality and pornography; equally violent blasts of violence and banal dialogue. Beneath his usual extremity, however, is a newfound maturity—a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of youthful alienation and the importance of cultivating meaningful connections. Ellis’s emotional turmoil is relevant today in a social climate where loneliness has become a major problem and community have been eroded. He shares his fears and insecure experiences to help us understand the current challenges.

Although it may seem bloated Shards It is also very entertaining. Ellis voices a distinct dark side, which doesn’t detract from the intrigue or mystery. He subverts high school clichés—the pompous jock, the blissfully unaware stoner, the impossibly beautiful couple destined to be crowned king and queen at senior prom—with a playful wink, contorting them into deranged, drugged-out shapes. Ellis obviously enjoyed creating such an intimate book. That enthusiasm is infectious. No matter how absurd the tale may seem, you will be entranced by Ellis’ total self-assurance. Shards Although it may seem brutal, it is also extremely entertaining.

The Shards: A Novel
Bret Easton Ellis
Knopf, 608 pp., $30

Guy Denton is an American Enterprise Institute research assistant.