Ellis’s first novel in 13 years brilliantly fictionalises the secrets and desires of his high school years and the birth of his dark literary persona
Arch satirist of narcissism … Bret Easton Ellis.begins with a monologue – sometimes a review, sometimes a mildly provocative essay, pillorying the culture’s supposed new puritans. His opening in September 2020 felt different. For 20 years, Ellis said, he’d been haunted by a book he longed to write but was terrified to begin: a memoir of sorts, detailing “what happened to me, and a few of my friends, one year at the end of high school”.
The bravura beginning, dramatising the novel’s creation, set the tone for that rarest of cultural phenomena: a genuine literary event. Others before Ellis have attempted to retool the serial narrative for the internet age. Nothing has felt quite as thrilling as Ellis’s year-long, hour-by-hour performance of The Shards.
Ellis both narrates and stars. The setting is the LA of his youth, in the autumn of 1981. “Bret” and his close-knit, exclusive group of friends are entering their final year at Buckley High. School life has become stifling. Bret feels he is “performing a well-rehearsed part while I figured out my escape”. Precociously at work on the novel we know will change his life,Around Ellis’s maturing teenagers, the culture is changing too. The Eagles are out, the chilly synths of Ultravox’s Vienna are in.
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