Commercially and conceptually, The Shards is a fascinating project. The bound codex (or the softly luminous and fully searchable PDF which I have had emailed to me) is not the first incarnation of the novel to hit the marketplace: it was read aloud by Ellis in a series of podcasts – online fireside chats which were initially free to air but now require a Patreon subscription. Ellis’s delivery in the podcasts was artless and intimate. The hollowed-out prose style he deployed in his 1985 debut, Less Than Zero, and has maintained, with occasional interesting divergences, ever since, was still in evidence, but the effect was natural and conversational rather than mannered.

The first couple of ‘episodes’ were largely made up of throat-clearing ruminations of a confidential nature. Throughout his life and career, it seemed, Ellis had been skating over certain traumatic events in his adolescence, and all his fiction to date, to say nothing of his ‘prince of darkness’ persona, his substance issues and his contortions over his sexuality, had been as much about evading these things as documenting or allegorising them. To adapt his fellow trinome David Foster Wallace’s famous observation about a late Updike protagonist: the reason he was an asshole was that he was unhappy. Only now, with a little help from the canonical LA medicinal triad of therapy, tequila and Xanax, was he ready to tell the truth – to play it as it lay, as his beloved Joan Didion might have put it.

It was not just possible but also tempting to imagine that the published novel would not feature these elements, would be leaner and cleaner, would cut to the chase. In fact, the metafictional asides and authorial confessions seem largely to have survived the transition into print. (There was a shrewd comment on the podcast about Ellis’s grumpy essay collection White documenting what he called the ‘trajectory’ of Generation X that seems not to have made the cut, along with a few other things.) So while the book revisits several elements of Less Than Zero – aimlessness, sex, aimless sex, driving around listening to touchingly mediocre Eighties pop music – and some of the sheer ghoulishness of Ellis’s masterpiece American Psycho, it does so in the tricksy, self-referential, mannerist mode of Lunar Park, which features ‘Bret Ellis’ holed up in a McMansion on the not at all portentously named Elsinore Lane, fielding flak after the succès de scandale of American Psycho and battling demons both imaginary and (perhaps) real.

In The Shards, a fifty-something Bret bumps into a former classmate on the street and suffers a kind of breakdown. He buys an old yearbook online, writes up a storm, then finally settles back into a burnished mid-century armchair, sparks up a Cohiba and begins to relate the real story of his last months at Buckley College. It is 1981. He’s dating the hottest girl in school while enjoying clandestine hook-ups with doomed stoner Matt; he’s going to parties with Carrie Fisher; he’s doing Quaaludes; he’s driving around listening to touchingly mediocre Eighties pop music. Meanwhile, the City of Angels is being haunted by a hippy death cult of some sort, as well as the inevitable serial killer, whose ‘alterations’ to his victims have earned him the distinctly unthreatening nickname ‘The Trawler’. A new student arrives, charismatic but strange. Bret is convinced that there is more to him than meets the eye and can’t quite see why all the cool kids are so taken in by him. Meanwhile his own behaviour is raising immaculately trimmed eyebrows all over campus.

The thrillerish material is handled reasonably well, I think, though thrillers don’t thrill me much as a rule. All the tropes and topoi are there: the Trawler even has better taste in music than everyone else, such that one potential candidate is marked out for ‘alteration’ with the gift of a Gang of Four poster. Themes of splintered
identity and unreliable subjectivity are extensively explored, for those who like that sort of thing: often the characters say or do things that mirror one another, a device Ellis exploits brilliantly in American Psycho. At one point young Bret chooses not to say what ‘the writer’ wants him to say, as if old Bret is himself a witness or a patsy rather than the mind that created and controls the book; there’s even an intertextual shout-out to our own Martin Amis, a documented Didion sceptic, it’s true, but no slouch when it comes to putting himself in his fiction. This doesn’t so much undermine as enhance the book’s pervasive mood of jangling paranoia (and surely we’ve all wished a serial killer would crop up in a Rachel Cusk or Geoff Dyer book from time to time).

Ellis is essentially offering us his own supervillain origin story. It’s from the attitudes of his beautiful young friends, their studied blankness when they’re confronted with emotional complexity or the possibility of loss, that he derives the idea of ‘numbness as ecstasy’ that he will monetise in Less Than Zero. Some of the writing, as always, is almost teachably bad at the level of the sentence, but the mastery of tone and pace is complete, and the sharpness of Ellis’s mind is often in evidence. Near the end of one generically terrible sex scene, Bret has a thought it’s hard to imagine occurring to many seventeen-year-olds (or many 58-year-olds, come to that) but that seemed to me both wise and sad: ‘The fantasy we were creating almost cracked for me because of how real it seemed to her.’