Book Review: "The Shards" by Bret Easton Ellis

“Many years ago I realised that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.”

I spent the better part of the final few years of my schooling (we're talking a while ago now) completely obsessed with the works of Bret Easton Ellis. Basing some of my coursework on the novel Less Than Zero seemed like the best decision I had ever made. It is the one book that as I have aged, my opinion of it has not really changed. However, my opinion of Imperial Bedrooms has and not for the better, Less Than Zero has pretty much remained as the key text of the transgressive era of literature.

When I first read Less Than Zero I was fifteen and had just finished American Psycho. Honestly, American Psycho did not impress me anywhere near as much as Less Than Zero because of the latter's subtlety. Bret Easton Ellis has always been a master at mind games and Less Than Zero has many of them. I was waiting a while to read The Shards and had seen many people slating Bret Easton Ellis's character online. Not that I could care to find out why, it just made me all the more interested in this book. I really want to read Less Than Zero again now.

So here it goes, reviewing a book by one of my favourite authors...

The book starts off as one of those classic Bret Easton Ellis openings that we all remember from his previous books. There's a narrator and he's going through some stuff. The people around him are changing and the atmosphere is off, everything is a bit transgressive and a bit weird. Things don't feel normal anymore and he's on the tipping point of madness, though he cannot describe it to anyone. He has a panic attack and ends up in the hospital, not wanting to stick around he refuses the night stay and leaves. Bret Easton Ellis is known for his openings where a character is stuck in a whirlwind of change and anxiety - it reminded me a lot of the beginning of Less Than Zero where Clay knows that people, especially Julian, have changed and can't do anything about it.

The fictionalised interweaving of the 'Trawler', a serial killer who (as I have researched) actually targeted old women and not young adults, makes for an interesting side-story of obsession whilst Easton Ellis tells us about Mallory. It's the 1980s, everyone is interested in everyone else and there's a certain degeneracy in the air. The story about the Trawler gets going right from the outset and I don't care if it wasn't exactly targetting them, it still made for a great part of the story, an extra piece of the tension.

Bret Easton Ellis has a very particular writing style which makes you gain access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of the main character and narrator. In this character he had forged of himself, I found a lot of his other characters: in the obsession and compulsion I found Patrick Bateman, in the promiscuity I found Sean of The Rules of Attraction and in the introspection I found the legendary Clayton of Less Than Zero. This makes for an excellent read if you have previously read a lot of Bret Easton Ellis novels.

As one of the 20th and 21st century's greatest writers, Bret Easton Ellis has produced a great body of work which he adds to with The Shards. I think that we cannot call it an autobiography though. It is an autobiography in the same way that The Bell Jar is an autobiography. It is a semi-autobiography, embellished for effect and twisted for impact. But, in the end it is still one of the author's greatest and most well-known works. A brilliant achievement of letting us know that the transgressive era of 1980s literature is still alive and kicking I would like to be one of those to welcome back Bret Easton Ellis to reclaim his crown as one of the greatest writers of the past 50 years.