Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards (Swift Press, 2023) ***½

Bret Eaton Ellis does not write much. This is only his only his eighth novel in thirty-seven years, and thirteen years after his previous "Imperial Bedrooms", but it's been worth the wait. Like with his successful "American Psycho", he takes us back to the West Coast in the eighties, telling the story of privileged and wealthy white young people, who lack nothing, who are apparently interested in nothing except sex, drugs and partying. 

The narrator is called 'Bret' who is also trying to become a writer, giving the novel a tinge of reality. And I can assume that many of the partying and relationship issues described as the background of the story are part of Easton Ellis's real experience, which gives the novel a strong realistic value. The story is moved forward by a mysterious killer, the Trawler, who has killed several young women over the past years. 

Bret becomes convinced that the new kid on the block, Robert Mallory, has something to hide, and finds some troubling coincidences between Mallory's presence in LA and the crimes. On the other hand, we also see that Bret is jealous of the new guy, because his handsomeness and easy-going nature appeals to his own closest friends. 

These are seventeen-year-olds with all the means and the hormones and the world opening up for them, with basically nothing else to do than to explore what they can do. This leads to lots of superficial relationships, hard-to-manage emotions, lack of clarity on each other's intentions, betrayals, disappointments and rejections, as well as gay and hetero trials. As a social criticism it is strong. 

This lack of emotional and relational clarity is further exacerbated by the crimes who happen in the background really, and Bret tries to see something coherent in it which he cannot convey to his friends, who do not really see things the same way or believe him. 

The drinks and the drugs make things even more hazy, and seemingly insurmountable. Bret's (and everyone's?) loneliness and sense of despair is high. 

""You don't look like you're having fun," she said. And then, "But you never really do."  

"That's not ... true," I started. "Debbie, I ... "

I don't know what I was going to confess--certainly nothing about her dad, because whatever happened with Terry had nothing to do with her or anything else, and this was true of Ryan Vaughn and Matt Kellner as well. I just wanted to explain myself in some vague way that Debbie Schaffer could grasp and finally understand that I never wanted to hurt her - just like Ryan Vaughn didn't want to hurt me­ - and that I was as lost as anyone she knew and this was fucking me up and that she deserved so much better than this seventeen-year-old zombie who was pretending to be someone he wasn't. But I couldn't form the words because I saw a future that seemed even more deso­late than the present I was trapped in if I admitted any of this."

I know the novel has received mixed reviews, but I'm more on the positive side. Easton Ellis manages to keep up the pace of the story, to re-create a social context that comes to life with vivid dialogues and good descriptions of the psychology of young people. It can also be seen as a quest for and questioning of the truth, and how narratives can distort the truth or create a false truth just by being coherent. 

The novel's ambiguity is also one of its greatest strengths.