—"Wheat Fields” by Jacob van Ruisdael, ca. 1670
Every Bret Easton Ellis novel begins with a party.
Both Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms start with Christmas parties. American Psycho opens with Patrick Bateman riding in a cab through 80s Manhattan on his way to a dinner party with friends, while Glamorama's first act follows Victor Ward as he Vespas around 90s Manhattan prepping the massive dinner party he's throwing to open his new club. The first pages of The Rules of Attraction are a monologue about a sloppy college party; the first chapters of Lunar Park, Ellis’s Stephen King novel, lead up to a Halloween party in the suburbs. The lead character in Lunar Park (a novelist named Bret Easton Ellis) even has a short speech about the cosmic significance of "the Party" while describing an argument with his wife Jayne:
In one last ditch effort Jayne suggested it should be a school night for me as well, that maybe my time would be better spent working instead of throwing a party. But Jayne never understood that the Party had been my workplace. It was my open market, my battleground, it was where friends were made, lovers were met, deals were struck. Parties seemed frivolous and random and formless but in fact were intricately patterned, highly choreographed events. In the world in which I came of age the Party was the surface on which daily life took place.
Ellis's new novel, The Shards, published by Knopf on January 17th this year, is about this very world in which the author came of age, and it follows the same tradition. After a surprisingly heartfelt few pages spent introducing the narrator, an older man who's also a novelist named Bret Easton Ellis, and who's looking back on his senior year of high school in LA, the story moves quickly toward its first big moment: a Labor Day party in 1981 at the stylish Bel Air home of Debbie Schaefer, Bret's girlfriend, whose boyfriend's secretly gay, whose mother's a verbally abusive alcoholic, and whose father's also secretly gay, and a major Hollywood movie producer (who, later in the novel, will trade sex with Bret for the promise of a job writing screenplays (which doesn't pan out)).
Also at the party are Susan Reynolds, the incoming senior class President of Buckley High (the preppy LA private school at the center of The Shards) and Bret’s close friend since seventh grade. There's also Susan’s boyfriend, Thom Reynolds (a classic, all-American football guy, whom Bret adores), as well as Ryan Vaughn (another all-American football guy, like Thom, but who himself is secretly gay, and who’s been inching closer to hooking up with Bret for months). Not at the party are two characters who round out the main cast: Matt Kellner, a solitary California surfer dude who's been carrying on a secret sexual relationship with Bret the entire summer, and Robert Mallory, the new kid in town with a mysterious past, who’s so staggeringly handsome he stands out in this crowd of generally-quite-handsome young men, and who's beginning his senior year at Buckley with the rest of them.
There's an innocence about these kids; they're all into sex and drugs and drinking, of course, but there's a tenderness toward the characters, an awareness for how young they truly were, and a palpable ache for the Eden they're all about to lose. Ellis writes, "There was a distraction, a flaw in the paradisiacal canvas of the summer of 1981.” Early in The Shards, this flaw takes the form of the Trawler, a serial killer who's plaguing LA, murdering teenagers, and whom Bret will come to suspect is the new kid, Robert Mallory.
This feeling of doom, and the horror-novel elements of the serial-killer plot, are set off by the sheer beauty of The Shards, a novel that's pleasurable in the way only long, immersive novels full of rich detail can be. One senses Ellis's recreation of LA in 1981 was done for the most nakedly self-interested and artistically pure reason possible: because the writer wanted to go back. Ellis plainly relished this journey into his own past: he revels in the clothes, the quality of light, the restaurants and shops and malls and especially the music, late 70s punk and classic rock playing at the same parties as early New Wave and pop (I put together a Spotify playlist of every song mentioned in The Shards (83 of them), and you can find it below the review). The kids go to a club in the first half of the novel and hear Blondie's "Rapture," Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk," and "Kids in America" by Kim Wilde; this same bunch has recently discovered the Doors’ Greatest Hits, and Bret writes, "the soundtrack that summer and fall was dotted with "Light My Fire" and "Break On Through" and "L.A. Woman."" There's a sense the 80s haven't quite started yet, the 70s not quite ended, and Ellis is powerfully effective at conjuring the specificity of this moment with simple reportage, telling you what song was playing, what brands the characters were wearing, and he weaves LA’s avenues and boulevards into the prose until it becomes a kind of poetry: characters are always turning left onto Beverly Glen, or stopping at the red light where Van Nuys meets Ventura. There's a hypnotic quality about all this, a sense of color and spaciousness, and you start to feel the textures of LA in 1981 as if they were your own memories, with their own dreamy sense of time lost and regained.
Here's a passage:
I drove onto Valley Vista from Haskell Avenue and glided along the deserted boulevard-- there seemed to be no one out on that Monday, the unofficial last day of summer, but through the open windows and sunroof of the Mercedes I could smell the charcoal from various grills and hear the delighted cries of children cannonballing into pools, and every so often I'd catch top-forty songs playing from radios in backyards, and I was reminded that even though we lived in supposedly glamorous Los Angeles this was also suburbia, filled with quiet tree-lined neighborhoods, kids riding bikes in the empty streets, swimming parties and barbecues. I was listening to Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" over and over (. . . Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside . . .) as I moved from Encino into Sherman Oaks, and I found myself mindlessly heading toward Stansbury Avenue and the school located there. I was originally going to drive past Stansbury and make a right onto Ventura and let it take me through Studio City, where the boulevard became Cahuenga, and then head into Hollywood, cruising along Sunset until I hit Beverly Glen--a circuitous route back to the house on Mulholland--because I didn't feel like going home just yet.
Ellis wasn’t going for these effects in the early minimalism of Less Than Zero or The Rules of Attraction (or Imperial Bedrooms, his later-period throwback). And he couldn’t have achieved them with the maximalism of his middle career: the same dense layers of irony and satire which held American Psycho and Glamorama together would’ve smothered the material in The Shards. Ellis has never been an earnest writer in the way many of his contemporaries were; he's the anti-David Foster Wallace, more interested in pain and numbness than love and empathy.
Which makes The Shards even more of a surprise. It's Ellis writing from a place of true affection. It's generous and even sweet in a way no Bret Easton Ellis novel has ever been before. Still, The Shards balances this sentimental narrative against a classically suspenseful plot, somehow both soapy and macabre at the same time, and Ellis does it all while engaging in a character study of a complex young man in his last year of high school. Ellis presents Bret as a real teenager, equal parts tortured and exhilarated by what it’s like to be 18, and he does it so well there are times you could almost reimagine The Shards as a contemporary YA novel about students at an expensive prep school: Bret's got a girlfriend, a secret lover. A secret crush! He's complicated. He wants to be a writer, but he's beginning to understand being a writer is a dangerous profession. You're always seeing things that weren't there, hearing things that weren't said. You're always searching for the secret narrative, and if you're not careful, writing one yourself.
For Bret, this begins on the first day of school, when he finally meets Robert Mallory. Robert's so strikingly good-looking he reminds Bret he's seen the guy before: at an opening weekend showing of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining at the Village Theater in Westwood. Bret couldn't help remembering Robert (that's how beautiful Robert is), and when they first meet at lunch at Buckley's preppy, private-school courtyard, Bret lets Robert know this.
Nothing out of the ordinary, just simple, getting-to-know-you chitchat.
'I think I saw you at a movie last year.'
But Robert, to Bret’s surprise, vehemently denies it.
Says he wasn't at the movie.
Says he hasn't even seen The Shining.
He lies, point-blank, to Bret. And Bret knows it.
But why?
From this moment on, from this strange, inexplicable falsehood, Bret comes to believe something's terribly wrong with Robert Mallory, and it's not long before he connects this with the Trawler’s killings. Bret starts following Robert. He spots a mysterious beige van appearing all over the city. Is it now following him? He hears about a new cult popping up in LA, the Riders of the Afterlife. They're breaking into houses, they're killing pets. Someone close to Bret dies. A mysterious cassette tape appears. 'What's happening' Bret wonders, and the writer kicks in, starts telling the story of how it's all connected, how it all relates to Robert Mallory, until this obsession takes over, driving Bret and his friends toward a harrowing final confrontation.
The Shards is a thriller, a high school hang-out novel, a horror story, and a snapshot of American youth in a particular time and place. And, like many of our best stories and novels, it’s a delivery vehicle for one of the most haunting lines in all of human literature:
"I never saw him again."
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I'd like to thank Knopf for providing me with an advance reader's copy of The Shards.
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As I mentioned above, I've put together a playlist of the songs mentioned in The Shards. Now, I've seen quite a few people posting their Shards playlists on Spotify, and I'm not sure what methodology they used, but I only used songs where the title itself had been named in the text, and I placed them in the order in which they appear. I also included the song from the epigraph ("Beach Baby" by First Class).