The Shards is obsessive. Everything about it revolves around obsession. The narrative frame created in order to tell the story (the one Ellis landed on after decades of experiments, attempts at writing this particular text, he tells us, in the book’s long and detailed introduction) simply serves to create additional narrative layers of obsession.
The Shards is about Bret. It is about his world, the drug/sex/money/booze/drama world of seventeen year old Bret. It isn’t about the world in which he inhabits, no, it is about his world. Bret lives a life of riches; monetary, sensitive, emotional riches. At the center of it all is his seemingly successful attempt at hiding his own homosexuality, in a world, 1981, where coming out would’ve been devastating. He just wants to run away. He wants to get to the other side of the country, find some hot dude and write and fuck all day, getting drunk and high in-between fucks and writing sessions. But he can’t; not yet. He’s seventeen (still underage) and he’s finishing his last year of high school at what is described to us as the most relaxed and luxurious high school in the world. He has friends, Thom and Susan, a girlfriend, Debbie, and two fuck buddies, Ryan and Matt.
Bret is lost. He seemingly got himself into a relationship he isn’t invested into at all, only using Debbie as a form of social stabilizer, giving him the social cred necessary to sustain himself and to keep any suspicions of homosexuality out of the collective mind.
Thom and Susan are the power couple of the school. Both of them are the hottest and most popular people in said school: her, an emotionally detached blinding beauty; him, the football team leader. Thom serves as a recurring fantasy for Bret, one that he knows will never fulfill itself, while Susan is his best friend, someone he can confide in (until he can’t).
Ryan and Matt serve as his true escape. Matt, a stoner that likes to “experiment”, with all the detachment that comes with that word, and Ryan, a football team member that has had some erotic encounters with Bret, before the book starts.
There’s also a serial killer: someone called The Trawler is at the center of a number of break-ins, pet murders and disappearing girls. This is Bret’s first obsession.
The second obsession starts during a showing of The Shining, where he sees the most beautiful boy he’s ever seen, right before disappearing; up until the first day of school, where that boy introduces himself to the quartet as Robert Mallory. Mallory is weird, lying, suspicious and somehow, even though Bret can’t quite put his finger on it, despite being 100% sure, related to The Trawler.
This is our basis. It gets established in the first quarter of the lengthy six-hundred page book. What follows is a continuous enumeration of brands, cars, clothes, drugs, albums, artists, songs, movies and books; placing you entirely in the ambience of that specific community (rich, white teenagers in Los Angeles, with little to no parental supervision) in 1981. Ellis (current Ellis) is caught up with a nostalgic fascination for his own life at seventeen, which creates another, this time textual/formal obsession (from the writer of the book as the writer of the book). The same device is used in Ellis’ most famous book American Psycho, but where in that text, it was used to satirize yuppie culture, this time around, it is used for nostalgic purposes. It doesn’t work as well, if you haven’t lived through that time period in those same circumstances (there’s no reference point; the repetitive enumerations turn into mindless text at a certain point: just another name, just another brand, just another song).
The book has a center point to its narrative, which is Bret. Everything is seen through Bret’s eyes (either his seventeen year old self or Ellis’ narration), which, as the book progresses, becomes more and more manic, paranoid, drugged out, and borderline incoherent. There’s a complete sense of lack of narrative control on the part of Bret, something which is accompanied by the readers, if they choose to believe in Bret’s words. Bret’s obsessions start to get the better of him: after the death of Matt, his obsession turns to both Ryan and Matt’s dead body, which he uses as a jumping point to further develop his obsession with Robert and what he’s doing with Susan, which makes him feel like he’s being backstabbed by the people he uses as emotional and social anchors, which forces him into a deeper state of obsession with the Trawler and what his relationship with Robert might be. There’s this continuous and developing layer of obsessions, but on a higher level, the formal and stylistic obsessions of Ellis keep up the pace, developing a repetitiveness which, somehow, while tedious, functions, because that’s the life he lived. It was a repetition of brands, cars, clothes, drugs, albums, artists, songs, movies and books, so the book is clearly following up on that. It is tedious, because Bret’s life was tedious. It stops being tedious when Bret stops living his life on autopilot (despite his repeated attempts at doing so) and delves deeper and deeper into his obsessions. The reader follows Bret along that journey, guided by Ellis’ older, sober voice.
The book is violent and sexual, but not to the point of becoming disturbing. There are some very tense moments, in which Ellis uses his mastery in order to pull every bit of dread out of the situation, which functions perfectly.
Tense and ultimately satisfying as a reading experience, the book simply works at what it seeks out to be, an obsessive portrait of obsession, located in the rich L.A. community of 1981.