Ray's Reviews > The Shards

Bret Easton Ellis was, of course, one of the great young American authors of the 80s and every early 90s. However, his 21st century output has been very sparse and honestly he is not the writer he once was.

From the beginning, there have been certain themes that have arisen in Ellis's works: the overlap of privilege and violence. Along with metafictional writing, in which 2005's Lunar Park the protagonist was the author himself (and his breakout Less Than Zero was always considered semi-autobiographical), and we have the formula for his new novel: The Shards.

It's an overwritten tome about his life as an upper-crust teenager in Los Angeles in 1981, full of queer experiences as well as high school drama that unfolded for the aspiring writer navigating as he navigated the adult world for the first time. It was a time at the private school Buckley, when apparently everyone constantly took copious amounts of drugs and had almost no consequences. Parents were basically nonexistant. And the parts about the process writing of writing his first novel are genuinely interesting. Then, after hundreds of pages about him cheating on his girlfriend with men--including with his girlfriend's film producer father, which was rather proto-Me Too--a subplot about a serial killer and a mysterious troubled new student eventually takes over the narrative. By the climax, with much unreliable narration herein, there's so much death and it's a complete bloody and intense horrorshow.

Ellis writes with excellent precision, he's an experienced author in total control of his voice and has always been a master of prose in this sense. He also drags on too much, a common problem with older established writers who don't get edited anymore, and the book did not need to be at that length.

It doesn't have the power of American Psycho, it won't be remembered as an iconic novel. It is a pretty good read for fans of Bret Easton Ellis who have waited a long time to read something new. He writes about what he knows, himself, and his descriptions of Southern California go on for quite a while. When he gets into driving from this road to that road, comparisons to the SNL skit 'The Californians' are inevitable.

No literary masterpiece. Like it or not, that era is over for Ellis. But I am glad to read his new works and for me as a fan it was worth getting into his world again. And one for such a personal, memoir-eque book, one does wonder which parts are true and which are embellished... and we can only hope that the violent murdering sections are but imagination...