Flying Houses is no longer a book review blog; it is a blog devoted to reviewing the books of Bret Easton Ellis. I kid, but this is just our third [book review] post of 2023, and the first post was for Glamorama. In that review, I suggested that Glamorama was, in fact, BEE's greatest novel, and upon re-reading, I had second thoughts. I revised that opinion to Less Than Zero. And right when I posted that review, The Shards was released, and I saw that it was longer than Glamorama, and I knew it had something to do with his earlier life, around the time he was putting the pieces of Less Than Zero together, while still in high school.
I had also listened to this podcast and recalled certain nefarious details of violent crimes being committed in Los Angeles around that time that reached closer towards Ellis's social circle. I do believe there was a serial killer on the loose, but will need to relisten to reference this with any kind of specificity. I will say that this podcast is interesting to listen to both before and after reading The Shards, because the host tends to conflate the characters in Less Than Zero with friends and acquaintances from Ellis's life. While that may have been true, The Shards takes that as a cue to present a more extreme example.
It is not unlike Lunar Park, in this respect, which is Ellis casting himself as the protagonist. Unlike Lunar Park, it takes place in the past, and at first blush, it is far more believable.
I might as well just come out and say it: for the first 200 pages or so, I felt completely convinced that this was Ellis's greatest novel. It basically is Less Than Zero, writ-large, and four hundred pages longer. But by page 400, that feeling started to wane. At its conclusion, I had to place it in slot #2 behind Less Than Zero. I feel confident in stating it is his 2nd best, and LTZ is only #1 because of its rapid-fire style and cultural/industry impact. By contrast, The Shards is the epitome of a slow burn.
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Over the first 200 pages, Ellis does the best work in his career. This is saying something. Because it felt like he "lost it," really, since Glamorama, and that is now *twenty-five-years* in the past. But Glamorama is still a really fucked up book, and arguably he had "lost it" since Rules of Attraction, which was a follow-up that walked along similar lines as Less Than Zero, and now here, The Shards has as well. Ellis was a baby when he wrote those first two books. Now he is approaching senior citizenship, and while still one of the most famous American authors, this is the "comeback" that he hasn't ever particularly cared about making. He still has it, he never lost it, even though White made it seem like he had become a cranky old man and mostly interested in "yelling at clouds."
He didn't "lose it," but his r'aison d'etre shifted. Things changed after Glamorama. Lunar Park is a truly bizarre novel, far from an abject failure, but an attempt at a genre exercise, or rather a nudge in the direction of genre fiction. It was his ode to Stephen King, and so too The Shards owes a certain debt to King. While Lunar Park mined quiet domestic bliss with a hazy undercurrent of nameless dread, it felt more suggestive than visceral. It would fall into the horror genre, but it was not an aggressive example of such. (Note: I haven't read Lunar Park more than once, I used to have a copy in 2006 or so, but I think I lent it and never got it back; so my memory of it is "hazy," too.)
After that, there was Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to Less Than Zero, but similarly, a genre exercise--this time "detective fiction" or "crime noir." It was enjoyable and fun, amusing, but felt like something of a truc, somewhat slight, almost like he was writing it to cash in on previous success. Then he apparently did work in film, most notably The Canyons, which I barely recall seeing. Then there was White, which was his first book in 10 years, a collection of essays, a good portion of them previously published. And now finally in the opening pages of The Shards, he pulls back the curtain to explain this career trajectory:
"After that night [which involved a panic attack and ambulance ride in 2006] I abandoned the project and instead wrote two others book during the following thirteen years, and it wasn't until 2020 that I felt I could begin The Shards, or The Shards had decided that Bret was ready because the book was announcing itself to me--and not the other way around. I hadn't reached out to the book because I spent so many years pushing myself away from the dream, from Robert Mallory, from that senior year at Buckley; so many decades spent pushing away from the Trawler, and Susan and Thom and Deborah and Ryan, and what happened to Matt Kellner; I had relegated this story to the dark corner of the closet and for many years this avoidance worked--I didn't pay as much attention to the book and it stopped calling out to me. But sometime during 2019 it began climbing its way back, pulsing with a life of its own, wanting to merge with me, expanding into my consciousness in such a persuasive way that I couldn't ignore it any longer--trying to ignore it had become a distraction. This particular timing had coincided with the fact that I wasn't writing screenplays anymore, that I had decided at a certain point to stop chasing that game--a decade of being well compensated for TV pilots and scripts for movies that would mostly never be made--and I briefly wondered if there was a connection between the book beckoning to me and the new lack of interest in writing for Hollywood. It didn't matter: I had to write the book because I needed to resolve what happened--it was finally time." (6-7)
The book thus introduces itself in grand fashion, and its propulsive energy does not abate until roughly the halfway point. It gets a lot of mileage out of autofiction. Autofiction can be a cheap, lazy device, not unlike voice-over narrative in film--but I have a soft-spot for voice-over narrative in film, and so too for autofiction, because it can sometimes best explore the artist's intent and motivation, and offer the most profound insights they've uncovered over the course of their career. It can feel lazy if you are trying to write a 5 paragraph essay on symbol and metaphor in this book, when you need to do literary detective work and interpret the "text" through a pre-determined lens (Feminist, Queer, Marxist, etc.). You can't do that with this book. It's like a big piece of candy. Less Than Zero is basically a pixie stick, and The Shards is basically a giant pixie stick. While the characters and motifs here are all "arch" and have a certain intellectual underpinning (primarily Ellis's admiration for Joan Didion), it is lurid, graphic, gory, prurient, and yes, cliched.
But what separates it from the rest of his oeuvre, like Less Than Zero, is the era, and his ability to create atmosphere out of it. Ellis was the same age, or even younger than the characters in Less Than Zero when he wrote it. He writes this about 40 years later, and he inhabits that same perspective brilliantly.
There are two novels here: one is a coming-of-age novel about a senior year in high school and getting ready to get away from everyone and starting a more authentic life; the other is an 80's slasher flick about teenagers doing drugs and having sex and getting slaughtered by a killer on the loose. The magic of the novel is that Ellis ties them together seamlessly. He does this so well that the reader will constantly question whether it is really autobiographical. At least this was the case for me.
I will do my best to avoid spoilers here but the novel is at its best when it is working from this perspective: Ellis knows his own notoriety and presence as a faded literary icon, and he fashions an origin story befitting that perfectly. The narrative detail from the period is so precise and intricately observed that one cannot discount its veracity.
***
This does, however, lead to my sole criticism of the book, which is that it moves slow. This is probably intentional. I didn't mind all that much. But others have criticized this book for some of the dialogue, that it becomes inane and cliched and devolves into "basic" tropes. Yes perhaps, but so did all 80's movies, and while I do think this is a Great Novel, I have trouble putting it on the Best Books list.
This a book of two halves, similar to Glamorama being three "parts" of varying quality. The first half of this book is just stellar. It really does announce itself as being the book that everyone should be reading as their 2023 summertime beach read. Maybe it wouldn't get shortlisted (or even longlisted) for the Booker Prize, but it's a lot better than Gone Girl (which I liked too!). There is actually more in common with that book than appears at first glance. BEE hasn't had a "hit" since American Psycho, to put it mildly incorrectly--a Glamorama film could be a dazzling misunderstood classic if adapted, like some people sometimes say about Southland Tales (that odd Donnie Darko 2007 follow-up that is mostly forgotten but which may be sort of brilliant) . The Shards finally would make for the best adaptation for a multitude of reasons (including societal repression in the early 80's vis-a-vis mainstream depictions of gay/bi relations; the movie would have no audience in 1985 with an "openly closeted" narrator; in 2023, it is practically required that award-winning films must focus on some marginalized identity, though yes, these are rich white kids, so maybe it's a no-go) because it is a pure genre exercise that has a real human story underpinning it.
This review is getting bogged down in parentheticals and comparisons and box office musings and semi-colons; suffice to say, it's the most mainstream thing he's done so far, and while it may be less ground-breaking than Less Than Zero was at the time, it doesn't come off as "padded" or "parasitic" as some might have considered Imperial Bedrooms, which even though I liked it a lot, definitely mines Less Than Zero for all it is worth in an attempt to re-ignite interest in oeuvre and work. That didn't come off in a way that made a dent in the larger cultural conversation.
And this probably won't either, but it's a much better candidate. I will lament that more people will not read this novel, because they won't know what they are missing. It's got to be made into a movie (it already is "in development" as an HBO series, actually)--the only problem is that BEE is also the main character and I can't recall a big movie where the author writes about themselves (in this particular way) and also has a movie made about that. There are memoirs, for sure, but this isn't a memoir.
***
PLOT: 1980's Los Angeles, serial killer on loose, paranoia, "numbness," Quaaludes, stereotypical high school politics, secret gayness. CAST: Bret, Thom (jock, prom king), Susan (prom queen, class President), Debbie (girlfriend to Bret, daughter to Terry, major film producer/"open secret" married gay), Matt (harmless stoner/slacker, "close" with Bret); Ryan (sidekick to Thom, also on football team, "close" with Bret); and Robert (the new kid that drives the majority of the action of the novel).
[Would like to pause here for one moment to acknowledge a small detail about Robert: it is often remarked that he was in a "facility" just outside of Jacksonville, IL. I doubt that many people reading this post (or book) have been to Jacksonville but I have. It's such a weird detail. I wonder if BEE has been there. It's not a place I'm anxious to revisit, but there's more there than in some of the surrounding towns (Florence--pop. 9, where I stayed in a ABNB that Abe Lincoln allegedly stayed at in the late 1850s; Pittsfield, more charming and bigger than Florence, but empty)--though it's all chains and big box stores on a strip. It's the middle of nowhere basically. But Robert also went to school in Evanston, IL and moved to L.A. for confusing reasons that are ultimately explained (by his aunt, whom he stays with and mildly disturbs).]
Most of the characters are students at Buckley, a famous fancy private high school, which seems like the L.A. equivalent to the Dalton School in NYC. It's not a boarding school, crucially, and it is often observed how much freedom they all had when they were 16 or 17 and had a car to drive around L.A. They live at home with parents, but parents are never there, or if they are, they seem to let their kids do whatever they want. Bret's parents are separated, and details about his father are glossed over. His mother, too, for she spends the entirety of the novel on a seemingly endless trip to Europe, and Bret lives alone in a house in Sherman Oaks with their dog (Shingy) and a maid that comes by on weekdays (Rosa).
Of course, it's not an endless trip to Europe, as the novel seems to concern two months in particular--September and October--though it may be November by the end of the novel.
This is the only scene with Bret's mother:
"I grabbed my mother and fell into her arms weeping when she appeared at Laurie Wright's house early Tuesday morning to take me back to Mulholland in a black limousine that was waiting curbside in front of the residence on North Hillcrest." (572)
BEE has always been a writer very concerned with specific time and place, and again, anyone that has lived in L.A. for any limited amount of time will be able to envision the events more clearly. This may annoy some readers, however, as certain stretches of the novel read more like Google Map directions than a literary thriller.
This is forgivable, as are many other aspects. Yes, BEE's high school experience is rather basic and feels lifted out of a John Hughes film except set in L.A. But, after re-listening the podcast, it is quite clear that this novel is very true to life in a certain sense. Just to hear him talk about his girlfriend at the time, and her father, and the two classmates that he got "close" with--the experience feels directly transposed onto the novel. Robert Mallory is essentially a plot device and really the entire novel is just Bret being suspicious of him.
From a certain angle, there can be a lot to take apart, and it doesn't feel like the work of a literary master, but if we consider Stephen King that, this is every bit as good as anything King has ever done.
Ellis writes about his love for King in this book, and his attendance at an opening day screening of The Shining figures as a crucial detail throughout the novel. King's villains are not often serial killers but demonic spirits and "triggered" humans. While here, there definitely is a serial killer, and graphic descriptions of their "offerings," his experience of that is mostly through Los Angeles Times reporting, not his own detective work. He suspects Robert is the killer (I don't think that's a spoiler) and he undertakes his own detective work on him, but not as directly on the murders themselves (apart from one of the victims).
I'm wary of spoiling anything here, but the spoilers are mostly about who dies when, and shifts in relationships between characters. Ellis takes the opportunity to depict a "me too" experience and essentially minimizes the hurt and pain that many victims express in the wake of such "casting couch" incidents. He does this by writing about himself in that position, and it may be disingenuous, or maybe not.
Many times, authors write thinly-veiled autobiographical novels, and readers and critics subtly acknowledge the elements that appear taken from their own lives. But when one writes an "openly autobiographical" novel, it gives one license to write about more questionable behavior and avoid moral opprobrium. No, one cannot call Ellis a "me too" apologist, because as a victim (whether or not he actually was--and I don't think anyone wants to presume that he was not, for it certainly lends credence to the idea that his early literary stardom was a byproduct of said incident, though this seemingly only relates to a screenplay deal, not a book deal), we must believe, or at least give the benefit of the doubt (even rich white male ones).
Writing a novel like this also takes a "quiver" out of the critics' arrows: we don't analyze that Debbie is real-life Ellis's girlfriend, because we know she was, after what he said in the podcast (this must be intentional--all of Ellis's work, including what he says about himself on podcasts, is all of the same part). Instead, we analyze how much of this book really is autobiographical, and after reading, we should know.
The ending, while somewhat anticlimactic, despite having a real climax that probably would be good on film, also leaves some unanswered questions, including a rather chilling one. There are things I like and don't like about the ending, but on balance I see it as "adequate." It's not an Ernest Hemingway ending (i.e. significantly better than the rest of the novel). It's not as puzzling as the ending to Glamorama, but feels vaguely unsatisfying, maybe because it feels a little unrealistic (i.e. how easily and simply it ends, with such little investigation).
I am not sure it belongs on the Best Books list, but it is very close and I think I probably would put it on there. On that note, I now need to read yet another Ellis book, so I can have an actual review of Less Than Zero on FH, and truly assess if it is still his best novel. Both might go on the list, and while this may not be better, it is a close second, and probably better than The Rules of Attraction, which I now hope will get similar treatment, and a book-length exploration of his time at Bennington College.
It's one of the limited few books (along with Why We Sleep) that I checked out from the public library, needed to return, and felt comfortable purchasing for the personal library (which is not very large--as the personal library is Flying Houses itself--and most books are rented and not bought, here). That is the last thing I can say as a testament to its quality.
Grade: A-
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