In His New Book Bret Easton Ellis Defends Freedom and Generation X
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There is perhaps no other American novelist associated with Generation X as much as Bret Easton Ellis except for the writer of Generation X himself Douglas Coupland.
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Among Ellis’ oeuvre are such classics as Less Than Zero, American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction, and Luna Park.
Now we can add The Shards.
It had been almost 13 years since Ellis, the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, had published a novel when, in April 2020, he was sitting at his laptop in the condo and The Shards just “announced itself,” he told me.
He had been trying to write it since he was 17. But every time he tried he failed. It wasn’t until 2020 that he realized “the key to unlocking it after all these years was that it needed an older voice, that it was, in fact, a memory.”
Then, over the course of 16 months, it poured out of him. “Writing has always helped me understand the world—often it’s bliss, a heightened state of pleasure,” he told me.
Writing The Shards, he said, was “a kind of letting go of the past.”
The Shards is about a serial killer named The Trawler prowling the canyons and malls and parking lots of Los Angeles in the fall of 1981, and the kids whose lives are turned upside down by him.
Unlike Ellis’ previous novels, this one is a big, carefully woven yarn, with plot twists and cliffhangers, and there’s a new vulnerability, a self-awareness. It lacks that Ellis-y staccato cadence.
But it’s not exactly a surprise. It’s more a natural extension of his earlier books: He had first sketched these character types—the rich latchkey kids with their varying sexual preferences and drugs and music—in his 1985 breakout novel Less Than Zero and fleshed them out in his 1987 follow-up, The Rules of Attraction.
Then, in 1990, Ellis wrote American Psycho—about a yuppie who may or may not be a serial killer—and was promptly dubbed a misogynist and became a victim of cancel culture decades before that was a thing. (It was a profitable cancellation, but still.) So, in 2019, when Ellis published White, his first work of nonfiction, it was perhaps not surprising that he had a few things to say about the cancellers (part of a phenomenon he called “Generation Wuss”). But it wasn’t great, and he soon returned to fiction. The Shards parachutes us back into the world from which Ellis comes, the world before the youngs became so sensitive, so weak.
He thought there was something to the idea that we were pushing back against the Pacific Ocean of wussiness that had engulfed us. “I love this fantasy that they are reacting against Millennials,” Ellis told me, referring to Zoomers. “Just like Millennials find Gen X disgusting, I do think Zoomers will find Millennials absurd, like we all do.”
We were on our second or third round of drinks, and the steak tartare had just arrived, and Ellis, in a black hoodie—he always wears black James Perse hoodies, black Calvin Klein t-shirts, and black Lacoste shirts—seemed bored. There, but not exactly. He was exceedingly polite.
I wanted to talk about the story behind the story.
Yes, there’s The Trawler, but really, The Shards is about Ellis confronting Ellis. Navigating the complicated shoals—or shards?—of adolescence. It is not a coincidence that the book’s antihero is “Bret Ellis” and that he attends the private school, Buckley, attended by the author, and that the author himself was a senior in the fall of 1981.
But really really, it’s about that miraculous moment in America when young people—those of us who came after the turn-on-tune-in-drop-out Boomer herd, and preceded the similarly nauseating, helicoptered Millennial monolith—did what they were put on this Earth to do: seek out their freedom.
“We were very, very free to explore things that might hurt us, potentially might damage us,” Ellis told me.
The teenagers in The Shards are not really teenagers but proto-adults, young people sifting through the liminal space between youth and adulthood trying to become full-fledged humans while not doing too many catastrophically stupid things. What makes The Shards, like all of Ellis’ novels, entertaining is that, armed with a great deal of money and unhindered by parental oversight, the teenagers do, in fact, do many stupid things (some catastrophic). They have sex with grown-ups. They prostitute themselves. They glide through school in a semi-stupor helped by their mothers’ Valium.
There’s a scene in the novel in which Bret pitches a movie idea to a producer named Terry Schaeffer in a bungalow at The Beverly Hills Hotel and winds up in bed with him.
“‘That was thirty minutes of my time,’” the producer tells Bret. “‘And now I want thirty minutes of yours.’
“There was a silence. ‘What does that mean?’ I mumbled. I knew exactly what he meant but I just wanted to postpone the reality of the situation.
“‘Quid pro quo.’ He shrugged.”
“Whatever my take is on the Terry Schaeffer thing, it’s something that happened to me,” Ellis told me. “Not quite in that way, but yeah, I thought I was going to get something, you know. And I was young. I thought, ‘Okay, this older producer is going to help me make a movie,’ foolishly, and it didn’t happen, and it was a big life lesson.”
He added: “I know that some younger readers might think that that is a trauma narrative.” (He had never heard of this term, “trauma narrative,” and then he’d discovered it online, and he found it awful and humorous.) “I just didn’t see it that way. We didn’t feel that we were being victimized.”