The case for American Psycho: why this controversial book (sold here in shrink wrap) still matters
This Ellis says he “had even given it a title without having written a single usable sentence: Where I Went I Would Not Go Back”.Įllis’s interest in the creative treatment of actuality emerges in these extracts, as does his willingness to mine his youth for inspiration.īret Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less Than Zero, was a 1987 film. In an autofictional move that prefigures the central conceit of The Shards, Lunar Park’s narrator – a fictional version of Ellis in middle age – is discussing a memoir he didn’t write. But even when I simply thought about the memoir it never went anywhere (I could never be honest about myself in a piece of non-fiction as I could in any of my novels) and so I gave up. It was to deal primarily with the transforming events of my childhood and adolescence, ending with my junior year at Camden, a month before Less Than Zero was published. What, though, of form? To answer that question, we should turn to what once seemed a relative outlier in Ellis’ fictional oeuvre, 2005’s Lunar Park. In terms of length, however, The Shards, which is 600 pages long, is closer to Ellis’s New York fictions: 1991’s American Psycho (which I believe is the most important novel of the 1990s), and 1998’s Glamorama (easily, for me, the best novel of the 1990s). novels: Less Than Zero, 1987’s The Rules of Attraction, and the sequel to his debut, 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms. When it comes to content, The Shards, with its cast of hedonistic and disaffected adolescents, aligns with three of Ellis’s earlier L.A. Some cultural commentary, too, on the purported perils of political correctness. Things quickly spiral out of control.Īs Ellis’s fans will anticipate, his latest is full of pop culture references (the Buckley clique are big New Wave fans), sex and drugs, and acts of grotesque violence rendered in tonally neutral prose. He suspects Robert is responsible, and that he is The Trawler. The fictional Bret’s writerly imagination goes into overdrive. The Bret who is writing this novel then introduces two more characters – a student named Robert Mallory and a serial killer called The Trawler – into the mix. The ‘real’ Bret Easton Ellis as a high schooler, in his yearbook photo from The Buckley School, Sherman Oaks California.
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