{"id":1917668,"date":"2023-04-21T10:41:20","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T14:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/despite-drugs-sex-and-serial-killers-bret-easton-ellis-leaves-readers-cold\/"},"modified":"2023-04-21T10:45:58","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T14:45:58","slug":"despite-drugs-sex-and-serial-killers-bret-easton-ellis-leaves-readers-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/despite-drugs-sex-and-serial-killers-bret-easton-ellis-leaves-readers-cold\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite Drugs, Sex, And Serial Killers, Bret Easton Ellis Leaves Readers Cold"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fdespite-drugs-sex-and-serial-killers-bret-easton-ellis-leaves-readers-cold%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1917668&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>\u201cMany years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone.\u201d That\u2019s the opening of\u00a0\u201cThe Shards,\u201d Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s first novel in over a decade. And just as in dreams, one is never sure what is real and what\u2019s imagined.<\/p>\n<p>A generation ago,\u00a0Ellis was the most controversial of the era\u2019s \u201cliterary brat pack,\u201d a wunderkind who published his first novel in 1985 at age 21 and whose gory\u00a0\u201cAmerican Psycho\u201d\u00a0ended up being canceled by its original publisher. When the book did come out, it was greeted with moral offense.\u00a0\u201cThe Shards\u201d\u00a0is also filled with gore and a lot of teenage sex as well \u2014 and is being universally hailed by both left- and right-wing outlets. It\u2019s as if Ellis\u2019s fiction has acquired immunity from criticism. Has society become benumbed, or do novels just not register on our collective consciousness in a time of smartphones, Netflix, and a billion other demands on our attention?<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1404951050\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-6fb3ac30d300d87245036d606ebf0779 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-6fb3ac30d300d87245036d606ebf0779\"><\/div>\n<p>Either way, the near-universal acclaim presents a puzzle to a reader who loves L.A. noir but is continually left cold by Ellis\u2019s fiction.\u00a0\u201cThe Shards\u201d\u00a0returns to the hedonistic early \u201980s Los Angeles milieu of his debut\u00a0\u201cLess Than Zero,\u201d\u00a0drugs, bisexuality, and anomie intact \u2014 plus a serial-killer mystery and many, many more pages.<\/p>\n<p>Our protagonist \u201cBret\u201d\u00a0recognizes a girl on the street he hasn\u2019t seen in 40 years, and from there, the story tumbles out,\u00a0nearly 600 pages of it, encapsulating a fraught few weeks in 1981, the beginning of Bret\u2019s senior year at the Buckley School, a time in which\u00a0\u201cThe Trawler\u201d is stalking Los Angeles\u00a0and circling closer to Bret and his circle.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a new kid in town, Robert Mallory, whom Bret swears he\u2019s seen around town before one afternoon in a nearly empty movie theater in Los Angeles. Bret quickly comes to suspect something is very wrong with Robert. The link, if any, between the new student and the graphic, horrifyingly stylized murders drives the plot, such as it is.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Shards\u201d\u00a0is told in fictional autobiographical mode, narrated by an Ellis alter-ego, \u201cBret.\u201d (Ellis has long played with the idea of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB113339471793210726\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">two Brets<\/a>.\u201d) Bret is also a writer, working on the book that would become\u00a0\u201cLess Than Zero,\u201d written by Ellis while attending high school at the exclusive Buckley School in Los Angeles. Bret also attends Buckley and is\u00a0writing a movie script for his girlfriend\u2019s producer father, who seems to be mostly interested in Bret\u2019s body.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-c7a1a1dd6df2d3557bb48d28701b5c59 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-c7a1a1dd6df2d3557bb48d28701b5c59\"><\/div>\n<p>Everyone has a beautiful body here: The only fat on display is in the text itself, padded with evasive exchanges of free-floating paranoia: I didn\u2019t say that. I didn\u2019t mean that. What do you mean by that?\u00a0<em>Ad nauseam.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Ellis\u2019s trademark druggy, anesthetic aesthetic remains unchanged.\u00a0Ellis is a fan of the famed California writer Joan Didion, and many see her influence in his cool, languid style.\u00a0An admiring\u00a0reviewer from The New York Times\u00a0reviewer referred to \u201cThe Shards\u201d as\u00a0\u201clush,\u201d but it\u2019s more the opposite, with run-on sentences that are Faulknerian \u2014 or do I mean annoying? \u2014 in their determined stream-of-consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>While Bret projects himself as calm thanks to his lovingly documented intake of drugs, his friends are constantly asking if he\u2019s \u201cokay.\u201d So is Bret an unreliable narrator?\u00a0One possible clue is\u00a0\u201cThe Shards\u2019\u201d\u00a0epigraph, a quote from\u00a0\u201c1984\u201d: \u201cIf you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bret refers to himself as \u201cthe tangible participant,\u201d a part he watches himself perform day to day. Bret attends class or doesn\u2019t, has minutely described sexual experiences with various male classmates, returns to \u201cthe empty house on Mulholland,\u201d and goes to parties where many, many clove cigarettes are smoked.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-106b4f680c297134167928abdb734ce4 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-106b4f680c297134167928abdb734ce4\"><\/div>\n<p>It\u2019s a dreamy half-life measured out in cocaine and Quaaludes with the phantasmagoria of The Trawler as a sinister backdrop. He listens to cassettes in his car, a Mercedes 450SL, which is not even the snazziest car in the school parking lot, though he borrows his mother\u2019s Jaguar when stalking Robert.<\/p>\n<p>Bret is obsessed with protecting his friends against \u201cthe psychopath\u201d that had entered their lives senior year, though no one else is all that worried about Robert, or when pets go missing, or even when one of their own circle disappears. Ellis\u00a0keeps the cast manageable: Debbie is Bret\u2019s deluded girlfriend, Susan is the beautiful cool homecoming queen, Matt is the stoner, Thom is team quarterback, Ryan is the most handsome.\u00a0Adults are thin on the ground \u2014 a school principal here, a sinister assistant there, a few drunken mothers and aunts scattered across patios. Kids live in pool houses separate from the main house.<\/p>\n<p>Someone put together a <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/playlist\/2pEYm35mYlL6WKAEYh7jcH?si=a615f293a7b44233\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u201cmixtape\u201d on Spotify of the 144 songs mentioned in\u00a0\u201cThe Shards.\u201d<\/a> The relatively well-known New Wave choices suggest Ellis is using recognizable signifiers to do the heavy lifting of setting mood and place. From music to cars to sunglasses, the references here are determinedly generic, willfully shallow, and purposefully distancing.<\/p>\n<p>In the midst of the Grand Guignol horrors, scenes about constructing the homecoming float are perversely interesting and grounded in a more convincing reality. There\u2019s a colorful description of serial killer \u201cburnout,\u201d an image of that peculiar cohort \u201ccrisscrossing each other on the freeways and through the canyons and boulevards\u201d in \u201ca time before video surveillance and cellphones and DNA profiling, where serial killers were allowed to be cavalier and bountiful.\u201d But soon, we\u2019re back inside Bret\u2019s bubble, his closed, frantic life playing on a loop.<\/p>\n<p>More such asides would have made the book more engaging because Ellis is an iconoclastic thinker. No one\u2019s idea of a conservative, Ellis\u2019s 2019 politically incorrect non-fiction essay collection\u00a0\u201cWhite\u201d\u00a0claimed\u00a0the left had become \u201ca rage machine\u201d and details\u00a0his run-ins with the censorious GLAAD, the Gay &#038; Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Ellis calls them the \u201cGay Police\u201d) whose demand for political conformity was betrayed by their histrionic response to some of Ellis\u2019s dark-humored tweets.<\/p>\n<p>Yet\u00a0\u201cThe Shards\u201d\u00a0remains defiantly idea-free, and even its nods toward the serial killer and murder mystery genres prove half-hearted as the story comes full circle, ending with yet another pop-cultural reference in the form of Blondie\u2019s classic song \u201cDreaming.\u201d That dream-like detachment underlines the unreality of\u00a0\u201cThe Shard\u2019s\u201d previous 592 pages, a nightmare space in which awful things happen and nothing matters.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-9e0c269ab87fa816cc4a49cec8e3ed26 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-9e0c269ab87fa816cc4a49cec8e3ed26\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"article-tags bdr-top-black mt-30 mt-sm-60 pt-15 pt-md-45\">\n<ul class=\"list-unstyled d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center mb-0 mx-n10 p-0\">\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/book-review\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">book review<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/books\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Books<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/brett-easton-ellis\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Brett Easton Ellis<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/culture\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Culture<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/literature\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">literature<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/review\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">review<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cMany years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone.\u201d That\u2019s the opening of\u00a0\u201cThe Shards,\u201d Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s first novel in over a decade. And just as in dreams, one is never sure what is real<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":778,"featured_media":1917669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[20598,8044,7137,20599,9438,12597,7028,9939,5979,7937],"class_list":["post-1917668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-bret","tag-cold","tag-drugs","tag-easton","tag-ellis","tag-killers","tag-leaves","tag-readers","tag-serial","tag-sex"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/778"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1917668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1917669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1917668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1917668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1917668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}