Book Review : Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards (2023)
What separates good artists from the timeless ones is their capacity to reinvent themselves within the boundaries of what got them popular in the first place. If you can’t figure it out, nothing will ever top that first ever thing you were known for. One of my favorite examples is Cormac McCarthy who updated his writing by incorporating elements from crime and post-apocalyptic fiction in his later novels. Bret Easton Ellis is primarily known for Less than Zero and American Psycho, but he's quietly made this shift.
Ellis' novels have gradually become more self-aware over the years to a point where he's bent both reality and fiction to create something unique. After a thirteen years silence, he's release what I consider to be his crowing achievement. A 600 pages hallucinatory monolith of revisionist fiction titled The Shards.
The Shards features Bret Easton Ellis himself as the narrator of an introspective true crime investigation where he revisits a tumultuous era of his youth where a serial killer named "the trawler" laid waste to Southern California. In his senior year of high school then, young Bret is perturbed by the transfer of a gorgeous-looking new kid named Robert Mallory. The new kid definitely isn't your run-of-the-mill boring rich California brat. He's strange, erratic and he's not being honest about his background.
The Self and the Endless Pursuit of Meaning
This is a similar novel to American Psycho in terms of structure as it mostly exists to invalidate the inner experience. It's the story of a young guy who tells himself a story about what's going on in his life and who becomes so convinced of his own observation, he starts bending the facts in order to support the narrative he constructed in his mind. The exercice is both relatable and completely insane and it takes about half of the book before you realize young Bret is completely off base with his theories.
That’s the thing with twenty-first century Bret Easton Ellis : he's done trying to earnestly entertain you with depictions of soul-rotting Californian opulence. He's using this setting in order to conceal other, more ambitious themes he wants to explore. Namely here memory, sexual identity and the endless pursuit of meaning. The young Bret of The Shards is still closeted, in a relationship with a girl named Debbie and desperately clinging to the idea that he's not the bad guy in the movie of his own life.
With that said, The Shards is somewhat of a 201 class in Bret Easton Ellis as it uncoils over the entire length of its 600 pages. In that sense, it reminded me of Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean's song Summer Comes to Multiply as it is deliberately difficult and repetitive at the start, but it gradually reveals itself to become intoxicating and addictive by the time it's over. Not going to lie: this novel has one of the most entertaining, over-the-top and straightforwardly insane ending I’ve ever read.
But it does make you earn it.
Robert Mallory vs the Eternal Present
One of the aspects of The Shards that I really like is that no one cares that Bret believes Robert Mallory is "the trawler". Once he begins exposing his theories, no one around him fucking cares. His girlfriend dismisses his theories, his best friend Susan is in love with the freakin’ guy, his school headmaster is only thinking of the absolving the school if any legal responsibility, the fabric of Bret's reality is rebelling against the idea that Robert might be a serial killer and why wouldn’t it?
The goal of any system is to perpetuate itself. It will go to great lengths for reality to remain static.
Bret's inner narrative is invalidated so thoroughly, he starts coming off as a really unreliable narrator himself. They’re a staple of Bret Easton Ellis’ writing, but now that the narrator it so clearly and unashamedly him (and it’s him at the present tense reminiscing about the past), that it cast a whole shadow over his motives. Is he really afraid of Robert Mallory or does Robert embodies the inherent dangers of accepting his new lifestyle? Therefore if he rejects him, business will go on as usual in sunny SoCal.
*
I loved The Shards and like any Bret Easton Ellis novel is bound to do, I might modulate my enjoyment of it over time. Ellis’ writing has this pleasant incongruity that requires to settle in your memory in order for you to gain proper appreciation. But it’s by far the most ambitious, exciting… and oddly personal thing Bret Easton Ellis has ever written? I mean, Lunar Park was arguably more intimate but it was less him than the character in The Shards. I loved this book, it was wild, difficult and heartfelt and as jagged as it gets.
