By Miriam R. Kramer

As a member of Generation X who is pondering where I am in life, I am not sure how I made it out of my twenties and thirties without cruising through one of Bret Easton Ellis’s stylishly nihilistic novels. As a member of the literary New York Brat Pack, which included Jay McInerney, Jill Eisenstadt, Donna Tartt, and Tama Janowitz, Ellis made it big early, publishing his first bestseller, Less than Zero, while still in college at Bennington. I finally caught up with his recent, drawn-out work of autofiction: The Shards. Many years later he revisits his adolescence during his senior year at the Buckley School, one of the toniest, if not then competitive, prep schools in Los Angeles. His novel offers alternatively chilly, wistful, paranoid, dreadful moments and elliptical, slip-sliding conversations between teens who role-play. With a few exceptions, his self-titled character’s crowd is a handful of beautiful, noxious, and surface-level egos, teens who never tell each other the truth that goes on beneath their surfaces.

Why did this six-hundred-page book catch my attention now? Could it use a landscape gardener to chop off branches with a dripping hatchet? It sure could if you were looking to propel plot. Instead, though, Ellis is working some issues out. Building suspense, setting a mood, and creating uncertainty in his own impressions was more his goal.

Nor was following a plot quickly my purpose in reading it. At this age I have space to look back over my own life in high school, viewing my own graduation year that occurred some years later in the Eighties. I too felt like an outsider while attending high school in what was then known as one of the handful of high-quality “country club” public schools outside of Washington, DC. I attended an upper-middle-class school—nowhere near as affluent as his—and used humor, art, music, and literature to offset the darkness I felt. I also did have friends I loved and the support that helped me keep going.

The autofictive character Ellis writes as himself—Bret Easton Ellis—is very disconnected despite his popular group of friends. He is a purposefully unreliable narrator: an outsider, a sensitive, anhedonic observer trying to control his life through pinning it to the page. He pops Valium and eats the breakfast his housekeeper prepares for him before taking a dip in the pool before school. His parents are on a two-month cruise in Europe while trying to work on their marriage—they might as well not exist.

He sees himself and those he suspects of secrets in a skewed fun house mirror that is anything but amusing. That being said, what teenagers who felt like they were on the outside looking in are accurate narrators when it comes to high school’s flailing, alternatively bored and angst-ridden, and sometimes paranoid journey to self-discovery? Perhaps the characters of John Hughes movies such as The Breakfast Club come closer than others. They know they do not have all the answers, but they are willing to be raw. That conclusion helped this movie strike such a chord with me and others in high school.

So I am also interested to know if I too can see growing up more clearly after all this time: can I find myself in his portrayals of teenage fears, lack of strong self-identity, going along to get along until high school ended? In his autofiction, Ellis just happens to amp up the poor little rich kid persona of the early Reagan Eighties, with his friends all driving new luxury cars to each other’s house for coke-sniffing, Valium-popping, weed-smoking pool parties in which they nonchalantly drift towards the adulthood modeled in their joyless parents’ lives. They are playing with shiny images—playing the roles of Homecoming King and Queen, the popular kids, and a few other subsets. At least nominally bisexual, Ellis plays the part of a popular girl’s boyfriend, despite showing more interest in having sex with attractive men in his small senior class. Then he adds the gruesome touch of his character’s obsession with a new member of the senior class of 1982: a handsome boy he suspects of being a serial killer potentially in league with a dangerous cult.

The book moves on with horrific, violently cinematic moments of suspense interspersed with mundane descriptions of his latch-key life. His repetitions of his routines and thoughts are almost monotonous, but they serve the distinct purpose of putting you into a particular state of mind. You can see Joan Didion’s stamp on Ellis’s psychology: he has internalized her collections of California-cool essays such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, updating her crystalline observation of hippies and the Manson family and other aberrations of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike Didion, he personalizes the societal dysfunction, discussing the cult he and his classmates may have encountered with a far more personal sense of horror. The menacing lyrics of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” while not specifically mentioned, are most certainly an example of the shifting pop cultural plate tectonics that underpin the type of nihilism and dread Ellis conveys.

One of Ellis’s automatic techniques is to punctuate and anchor moments of his senior year with typically powerful Eighties mixtape moments: describing the music playing as he cruises from Mulholland Drive to Sherman Oaks and other areas in Los Angeles. In the background he plays the infamous KROQ station that launched so many New Wave groups in Southern California as he drives and drives and drives. You can almost hear Ric Ocasek: “Let’s go….I like the nightlife baby…She says….I like the nightlife baby….She says…Let’s go.” He punctuates horror and suspense and pool parties alike by obsessively listing the songs of his adolescence, someone dutifully and artificially resurrecting them from a journal forty years old to enhance verisimilitude.

As someone who remembers my own moments tattooed with indelible songs by bands like the Psychedelic Furs, Peter Gabriel, the Go-Go’s, or Tears for Fears, I read this book and played the songs he mentions on Spotify, ones that came a bit earlier in my own musical awareness. I wanted to catch the edge of pain and sweetness that comes with losing yourself in music at that age.

Instead, I felt a sense of sorrow for this character, whether he truly does represent Bret Easton Ellis at that age or is just a cleverly re-tuned version of a lost boy being rediscovered by a middle-aged man. I see little sweetness here. My connection to mixtape memories is much more like those in Almost Famous, the Cameron Crowe biopic about growing up to a soundtrack that becomes a part of you. I was never a teenaged rock journalist like Crowe, sadly, but my musical memories come with forceful emotional connection. I see Ellis’s pop and rock songs merely anchoring him to a place in time and space, helping to remind his readers that he was a teen. He wants to feel them more than he actually can. His autofictive character is infinitely to be pitied and possibly even, as a reader sees at the finish line, feared.

Whether or not Bret Easton Ellis is any version of the autofictive character he writes, this book is no immature work lacking in situational knowledge written by an unappealing adolescent. It took a fifty-plus-year-old to write about so many unattractive teenage poseurs this accurately, cleverly, and honestly, with sorrow but little warmth. Nothing he pens is accidental; he has mastered this style. This character has the perspective to know that he is on the sidelines watching the actors through the wrong end of the telescope.

Read The Shards if you are interested in revisiting this mood, this metafiction, this telegraphed and dissected “We Got the Beat” moment in SoCal culture from the Go-Go’s Eighties.