Bret Easton Ellis Covers His Own Death

A review of "The Shards" by Le Wayback

Apr 04, 2025

Alex Muka

introduced me to
wayback machine
a little while back, and he quickly became one of my favorite writers on Substack. Today he’s taking the LC70 out for a spin with a review of The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’s most recent novel. Enjoy.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it, you cannot complain.
— William S. Burroughs

The Shards, a weighty comeback novel from the former Prince of Numbness, Bret Easton Ellis, is soaked through with the type of immovable, all-encompassing sadness Old Man Burroughs was on about. It streams off your hands as you turn the pages, liable to fry any E-Reader, a sadness just as permanent, just as ancient, as Burrough’s mountains: the restless, roving pain of a middle-aged man looking back on his sexual awakenings.

The Shards was guaranteed to be a “comeback novel,” even if it was absolute shite, by sheer math alone. Ellis’s last novel—the taut, noir-esque Imperial Bedrooms—was published thirteen years ago. And the “former” Prince of Numbness is appropriate since—after nearly four decades penning spartan, numbed-down, Xanax-flat prose—Ellis is now shooting down the floodgates and allowing his bummer-trip persona to spread its wings and run rampant through the Westwood Mall. In The Shards, Ellis is all feeling, emotionally raw to an extent that can be uncomfortable at times. This is a “squirming in your reading chair” experience but not due to human dissection (American Psycho) or sociopathic teenagers (Less Than Zero); it’s more like finding someone’s journal on a long train ride with shoddy Wi-Fi so you have no choice but to read it. In this case the journal’s author, some dude named Bret, is absolutely bloodletting his most acute paranoias and bottomless insecurities and psyche-crushing romantic embarrassments for 600 straight pages. You don’t want to intrude. What you’re reading is deeply unsettling and abysmally embarrassing. But why not read a few more pages…

For a legacy author—who could have easily coasted on sweet Hollywood checks and redpill Patreon dollars until his inevitable heart attack, in a Beamer, driving west on Sunset—to so radically alter his well-worn aesthetics this late in his career is not only noble but nearly unprecedented. Equally brave is the lacerating disdain, or at least bemused disregard, Ellis trains on The Shard’s young protagonist, a character that is, of course, the younger version of himself. He attempted to appear disaffected and aloof in Less Than Zero and its sequel Imperial Bedrooms, then comically dark in the vastly-underrated Lunar Park. In The Shards, however, Ellis openly smirks at the ridiculously clichéd image of an early ‘80s teen in a prep school uniform pushing a convertible Mercedes through empty Valley streets while bumping Fleetwood Mac. But it isn’t just his own self that Ellis skewers and mourns in The Shards; it’s the slow, grinding death of the empire that birthed him, nurtured him, allowed him to flourish.

The scene that perfectly demonstrates this combined self-loathing and lamenting is the moment when a hippie from a local cult manages to infiltrate the teen club young Bret and his friends are partying in. After Bret encounters said hippie in the bathroom, he promptly runs to the bouncers announcing that a “freak” who “doesn’t belong” has managed to penetrate their privileged bubble. In previous works BEE would have left it at that, but here it comes off as a confession. The author’s sense of embarrassment is palpable. Ellis clearly sees he’s writing about a world so far removed from the reality of the mid-20s it may as well be science fiction.

This newfound vulnerability and humble-old-dude aesthetic works to avoid what was long becoming a tired trope for Ellis. Any young writer who has ever been called “Ellisian” by a critic or professor or Substack reader would immediately concur. If Ellis had used a pen name for this thing there would have been long debates if it was even him. For proof, look no further than the sex scenes. Ellis has been infamous for his all-out orgiastic and often violent depictions of sex: one that went on for 17 pages; another that involved penetrating the neck of a decapitated head. But if all the pre-Shards sexual escapades had something in common it was that they were confident, assured, penned by a man with a long, successful career of hookups under his belt. Anyone who follows the life of Bret Easton Ellis knows, however, that this isn’t quite the truth. Ellis has stated many times that his sexual life in his 20s was stunted by AIDS; that his relationships over the years have been put on ice after one of his partners overdosed; that mental health issues with his latest long-term partner necessitated his institutionalization. And now we know, since Ellis has stated The Shards is mostly autobiographical, that his high school years, that crucial time where sexual identity is formed, where marred by unrequited fascinations with straight boys; clandestine hookups laced with paranoia and betrayal; at least one Weinstein-style sexual assault; and awkward straight sex with his lustful, eternally unsatisfied girlfriend.

The sex in The Shards is so different from the sex Ellis penned before that it is the main divider that separates this work from those before it. You find yourself really feeling for his girlfriend, poor horny Debbie, who wants it all the time but rarely gets it from her elusive, often limp, boyfriend. This becomes even more frustrating as the story progresses and you begin to realize that Debbie is by far the coolest, most genuine person in the tapestry of vapid nepos that make up their LA prep school. In her short-shorts and bikinis, she is also every teenage boy’s fantasy. Their sexual cat-and-mouse game, with Debbie playing aggressor to her demure, closeted boyfriend’s increasingly complex attempts to dodge her affections, plays as comic relief in an otherwise tense, joyless novel. And when she does catch him, what unfolds are the most awkward fumblings Ellis has ever committed to the page. Here we have Bret unable to get it up, desperately wracking his brain for images of boys/men in a failed attempt to stir the blood flow while his sex-starved girlfriend grinds on him, puts him in scissor-holds, doing anything she can to generate some heat. He tells her he came. She knows he didn’t. The Ellis of ‘80s and ‘90s would never have entertained this level of sexual failure no matter the circumstances. It would have all been pulled off with a blasé, numbed grace between a line of blow and a naked dip in the pool.

Somehow, even more awkward, is the sex young Ellis actually wants to have. When he manages to pull off a short relationship with a closeted jock it all ends in tears as Bret scares the boy away with his possessiveness and sheltered, rich-boy disposition. You see, this closeted jock, Ryan, is something of a class warrior, making him instantly one of the most interesting characters amongst an unspeakably privileged cast—a definite sign of Ellis’s late-career bloom in action. Ryan isn’t quite as rich as the rest of his classmates at the prep school, and his acute disgust at young Bret and his friends’ seemingly bottomless wells of privilege is what eventually causes him to pull back after just one lustful weekend, leaving Bret even emptier and more dissatisfied than he’d been before the affair began.

And then there’s Matt, the doomed stoner so catatonically spaced-out he ends up having sex with Bret in his pool house bedroom. You get the vibe, however, that Matt would have had sex with anybody, anything, anyone who took the chance to initiate. There’s something definitely wrong with this kid, something beyond mere substance abuse and teenage depression, and it’s admirable that Ellis doesn’t let himself off the hook for potentially taking advantage of someone deeply unwell. The stalker-like aggression Bret falls into with Matt borders on frightening: At one point he sneaks into his room and initiates sex without inquiring if Matt is in the mood. Later he snoops through his things, grills him when he’s speaking to another boy at school, and mocks his early-onset schizo tendencies. He longs for a reciprocation that Matt is in no way equipped to give him while simultaneously loathing him for his erratic, bumbling disposition. And when Matt finally explodes and moves to end his aggressor’s possessive vice grip, the tears Bret cries are only for himself. Does Bret gain any satisfaction from this “relationship” beyond just momentary sexual release?

Now, to address the real elephant in The Shards: When Bret is taken advantage of, Harvey Weinstein style, by his own girlfriend’s father. You see, the source of Debbie’s nepotism is her father’s fabulously successful Hollywood producer career. Mr. Terry Schaeffer is also not-so-secretly gay, a fact Mrs. Schaeffer masks with copious amounts of gin, leaving her hubby to ogle their daughter’s teenage friends out by the pool. One of these is Bret, and when naughty Terry finds out that Bret harbors writerly aspirations he senses blood in the water. Luring Bret to the Chateau Marmont to discuss the development of a non-existent film, he entangles him in a sex scene made all the more disturbing by the fact that the protagonist, and by extension the older author recounting the actions of his young self, seems completely unaware of just how horrifying and criminal this encounter is. If this is Ellis attempting to recapture some semblance of the blasé numbness of his earlier novels, this mission fails the moment he explains to the reader how unbothered he was, and is, by the whole thing. The Clay of Less Than Zero or the Sean Bateman of Rules of Attraction would not have needed to explain. Their indifference would have been palpable.

Aside from demonstrating a newfound humanity in what once was a hopelessly inscrutable literary figure, these sex scenes are just as sadness-drenched as everything else in The Shards. In these moments, however, the despair is far more specific. This is the eviscerating awareness experienced by a late-middle-aged man revisiting past exploits, knowing for a fact that they will never be had again. At one point Ellis admits that he still seeks youthfulness in lovers up until this very day; instead of coming off as a flex it rings out as a shameful admission. He’s still chasing Ryan and Matt all these years later. But like all addicts, the feeling of that first high gets further and further away the more he chases it.

Ellis has long been defined as a “plotless” author and has said himself many times that linear plotlines come as a distant second to feeling and setting. It’s all the more surprising, then, that The Shards is unmistakably plot-driven. To be sure it meanders, goes on long side quests and is rooted in feel and setting, but the novel undeniably moves with clear purpose along a series of events toward a definitive conclusion. In other words, a tried-and-true goddamn plot. But as always Ellis is far too elusive, too slippery, to fall into Tom Clancy mode. To start with, young Bret is very obviously an unreliable narrator from the outset. The extreme reactions he tends to provoke in others—Matt’s outburst, Debbie’s hurt, his best friend Blair’s obvious concern for him–don’t quite match up with the picture Bret paints of himself as a well-composed, going—places young man just trying to keep his head down to get through high school. If this were really the case, then why is everyone always shouting at him and crying because of him? At best he’s a magnet for chaos; at worst he’s an agent of it.

Then there’s the new kid in school, Robert Mallory, who is instantly suspicious of our narrator. Even though Bret goes to great lengths to paint Robert as a malicious new force in their world with obvious ill-intentions, it’s plain to see that Robert is simply more in tune with reality than these prep school airheads, and much more perceptive of their shortcomings. He immediately spots that Bret is gay and easily sniffs out both his relationship with Matt and his obsession with Blair’s ultra-straight boyfriend, Tom. Although suffused with homophobia, his reaction to Bret is at its base a correct one: Bret is the malevolent force in this friend group. He’s secretive and cagey, cursed with destructive impulses; he’s a natural born liar who both thinks the world of himself and looks down on those around him in equal measure. He’s even potentially dangerous.

The jostling match that takes place between these two after their initial meeting sets off a paranoid and bloody final 300 pages that doesn’t let up until many main characters, and their pets, meet particularly Ellisian deaths. Ellis’s skill with linear narrative makes one wonder what his career would have been like if he had blessed, say, Less Than Zero with a storyline, or provided a cliffhanger ending to Rules of Attraction. It turns out BEE can be a page-turner after all, intertwining a series of connected escalations at a gripping pace that never gets bogged down in the type of ennui that would have easily kneecapped an attempt at this novel from the Bret Easton Ellis that existed before the year 2020.

The fact that the ending is technically “left open” (even though we all know who is guilty) doesn’t really matter since the plot of The Shards never was about Reagan-era rich kids doing key bumps at Spago anyway. The real plot here is the sadness. It's a sadness caused by many deaths—not that of rich kids or the other scattered victims throughout LA County—it’s the death of the era Ellis comes from, the America he once thrived in. Just take a look at all the things that play major roles in The Shards that have since died or are currently in their death throes: Once opulent Los Angeles on fire, losing its population rapidly; Hollywood destabilizing and fractioning as new forms of content stab it further towards death with each passing day; prep schools, like the one in this novel, now only available to Kardashian children; liberal arts colleges, like his beloved Bennington, with their enrollments dwindling to a trickle; opportunities of the kind open to the children of this tale being shut down further with each subsequent generation passed; novels like this one reduced to fringe curiosities. Even the author’s prized decadence is a thing of the past.

The real plot of The Shards is the death of Bret Easton Ellis.