The taste of the past spares no one. Bret Easton Ellis was once the enfant terrible of American letters, the alter ego of Jay McInerney within the Brat Pack, launched by less than zero (1985) and consecrated by American Psycho (1991). The pop provocateur was then only 27 years old. Her figure is rounded, her hair has turned white. Since the very bad Imperial Suite(s) (2010), Ellis had no longer published a novel. What became of him? He had revealed another facet of his talent with the test White (2019): as a mocking moralist, heir to the Tom Wolfe of Park Avenue Leftism, he ridiculed, among other things, the Hollywood caviar left and today’s young people (the “chochotte generation”). Our world no longer seemed to be his. It is therefore quite natural that Splinterswhich marks his resounding return to the novel, is a 600-page cobblestone set exclusively in 1981, the cherished year of his 17 springs.
The narrator of Shardsa certain Bret, is a rich kid who between two classes works on the manuscript of less than zero. A game with autofiction, as in the fabulous Lunar Park (2005)? Ellis answered this question in the Guardian “I didn’t really say to myself: come on, I’m going to write an autofiction book. I just wanted to remember old classmates, in a sentimental and nostalgic way – even if this period of my life was very painful At 59, I am reunited with the boy I was in 1981, a year that changed everything for me.”
Schooled at Buckley, an elitist college in Los Angeles, young Bret spends his days sipping Corona while his friends are zombified by marijuana, cocaine and tranquilizers. We go to school in a convertible, we bathe in the beautiful swimming pools of friends, we are in couple and we sleep on the right and on the left. If Bret has a girlfriend, he’s more attracted to boys. Ellis no longer spares ambiguity, as he explained to himself again in the Guardian “It seems to me that my homosexuality is obvious when you look at my work, but when I started out I didn’t want to be labeled a gay writer. At my advanced age, I don’t care about hiding this part of me, and I felt very free to write about a period that I had wanted to discuss for a long time, and in particular some adventures I had in high school. … »
All these liaisons are not consensual: in one of the most striking scenes of Shards, Bret is raped by his girlfriend’s father, an influential film producer. A serial killer, the Trawler, is lurking around. Already paranoid, Bret can’t help associating her with a new student, Robert, who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital for a few months. Could this Robert have a link with the Trawler? When one of Bret’s lovers is found butchered, the tension rises a notch. Ellis masterfully alternates long atmospheric passages nourished by musical references from 1981 and moments of anguish worthy of Stephen King. Abandoned in villas, these disoriented children enjoy and suffer at the same time from the absence of their parents.
A final point to which Ellis returned to the British daily: “Would I have liked my parents to be more there for me? Of course. Would I have preferred to be pampered? There must be an in-between… We often talk about it with Quentin Tarantino: it was great to grow up in our time! Unfortunately, there was a counterpart to this freedom, but it was preferable to an escalation of security. That’s why Generation X is by far the most conservative of all generations: we had the most free world – and we saw that freedom slowly being snuffed out. I think our conservatism is a reaction to that. In Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, we met Charles Manson. As in Ellis’s novel, this melancholy evocation of a lost Los Angeles ended in a bloodbath. Charming country that California, where one associates softness of living and psychopaths.
Splinters, by Bret Easton Ellis, trans. from English (United States) by Pierre Guglielmina. Robert Laffont, 603 pages, €26. (in bookstores March 16)