Et if Bret Easton Ellis, the most emblematic writer of his generation, inseparable from the famous American Psycho (Salvy, 1992), was hiding an unspeakable secret in his past? And if this insolent talent, the one that shines in less than zero (Christian Bourgois, 1986) – published while the author was still a student – or Lunar Park (Robert Laffont, 2005), the cult books of a generation, had its origin in a bloody and until then carefully concealed episode of his youth?
This is the starting point of The Shardsthe highly anticipated new novel by Bret Easton Ellis who had not published fiction since Imperial Suite(s) (Robert Laffont, 2010) almost thirteen years ago…
The result – a false autofiction – plays with everything: our expectations as readers, the unhealthy curiosities implied by star status, self-writing as the era practices it. With real audacity, the novelist reinvents his own life in the form of a lustrous James Ellroy whodunnit… but in a style that belongs only to him.
Deliciously decadent universe
Consider a 17-year-old kid named Bret Easton Ellis. He frequents Buckley, an ultra-chic private establishment in the Westwood district of Los Angeles. He’s been dating fellow student Debbie since she kissed him languidly in a cloud of Quaalude and cocaine…but harbors a romantic attraction to the hottest couple in high school, Susan and Thom, while secretly reserving his sexual favors to Matt and Ryan, two athletic but foggy-minded comrades. We are in 1981, the year when shining comes out on the screens, and Bret, whose mother has the good taste to be very often absent, criss-crosses Mulholland Drive in his convertible Mercedes.
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This deliciously decadent universe, where the torments of a gilded youth are appeased in an eroticism mixed with illicit substances, where Stanley Kubrick’s latest film and the songs of Elvis Costello matter more than any societal or political event, we know it good: it’s the one in most Bret Easton Ellis novels.
The terrain is familiar, especially since the narrator of the novel, this Bret who is difficult to distinguish from his namesake, is working on his first text entitled… less than zero. But very quickly, a shadow hovers over this enchanting picture, a shadow that is nicknamed “the Trawler” and which leaves massacred young girls in its wake.
Poisonous and powerful
With the appearance of this serial-killer, Bret’s life looks more and more like a movie. A film noir of course, populated by femme fatales and pretty lying boys, a hypnotic film, anchored in a world as seductive as it is dangerous where film producers turn into predators once the hotel room door is closed.
A handsome and enigmatic boy, Robert Mallory, arrives in Buckley just as the killer begins to strike. So when “the trawler” hits his inner circle, Bret – a writer at heart – convinces himself that this kid who fascinates him is the culprit. The atmosphere of paranoia becomes suffocating, and despite the complex network of carnal ties that unites Bret and his entourage, his loneliness, his feeling of alienation too.
Poisonous and powerful, The Shards is a thriller that keeps its promises – the last act reserves surprises until the end – at the same time as a novel of learning and a sophisticated metafiction.
The reader attends the elaboration of a style and a work which is realized in the very text that he holds between his hands. The title – The Shardsthat is to say shards, fragments of glass or metal – is never really explained, and the novel retains, at the end of its 600 pages, a part of unfathomable mystery, the mark of a work destined to stay.
The Shards will appear in French under the title SplintersMarch 16, published by Robert Laffont.