Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

“Pastiche is… blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.”

– Fredric Jameson

 “We’re the kids in America.”

– Kim Wilde

He drives a Mercedes 450 SL on the freeways, around Beverly Hills, and to Palm Springs (American Gigolo). Rich teens in Los Angeles get into unsupervised adult stuff (Less Than Zero). A psychopath stages an elaborate series of non-random murders (Theater of Blood, American Psycho). A killer kills pets as a prelude to feeding the pets to their owner then killing their owner (Theater of Blood). The bloody horror of sharp metal things (The Other by Thomas Tyron, American Psycho, Theater of Blood). Hiding the real self, posing, acting the tangible participant, I’m not crazy, you’re crazy (American Psycho). Graphically detailed sex fantasies (The White Hotel). That numbness-as-a-feeling aesthetic (“Kids in America” video, Less Than Zero). Climax on a high-rise apartment balcony (American Gigolo).

On June 29, 1986, The Los Angeles Times published a long feature about Bret Easton Ellis. The piece ran over 5,000 words and introduced Ellis in a sense to the paper’s readers. He was twenty-two-years-old, a year into the growing fame and notoriety that came with publishing Less Than Zero as a Bennington undergraduate. The piece ranges over a number of topics including how Ellis got his manuscript to publishers, how much marketing capital Penguin was putting behind the new paperback edition they’d secured the rights to, and what Ellis thought of the idea of a Less Than Zero film. It had to be a coup for such a young writer who was shaping his public persona. Just a week earlier, on June 22nd, The New York Times published an essay by the critic Denis Donoghue entitled “The Promiscuous Cool of Postmodernism.” Donoghue does not mention Ellis, but he indirectly implicates his work by describing the works of the age.

The art of postmodernism is chiefly characterized by the elegance of its pastiche. Instead of being assaulted and browbeaten by millions of historical images, each demanding some degree of attention, postmodern artists unruefully accept that proliferation  is here to stay and are promiscuously cool in their sense of it.

Ellis’ new novel, The Shards (published on January 17 by Knopf) is a pastiche of some of his own work (Less Than Zero and American Psycho most prominently) and the books, pop songs and movies that formed his sensibility growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. I listed the most notable in my opening paragraph. In his review in The Guardian, Rob Doyle called The Shards “the imaginatively expressed biography of a style,” and that remains the best summing up I’ve read. It captures the retrospective aspect of this return to familiar ground and some of the why.

The novel runs near 600 pages and takes the reader back to Los Angeles in 1981. We’re not returned to the lives of Clay, Blair and Julian of Less Than Zero, but rather shown the life of the narrator Bret Ellis who shares not only a name but some biographical details with the writer Bret Easton Ellis. The book opens with Bret looking back from the present day. He’s a writer who published a novel called Less Than Zero at a young age. A chance sighting of a close friend from high school, a woman he has not seen in decades, compels him to write of events that happened to him and his friends at the Buckley School in 1981. Bret is a part of the popular crowd at Buckley. The circle is rarely shown interacting with the rest of the school, but there is a hierarchy of tables at the lunch Pavilion, and they have the best table. Bret has dated his way in via his girlfriend Debbie. His closest friend Susan is a reluctant Homecoming Queen, and his friend Tom is the quarterback of the football team. They all have rich, distant parents. Debbie’s father is a powerful movie producer. Bret’s father is a wealthy real estate broker who sells skyscrapers. Ellis does a good job painting the isolation Bret feels at the outset. His parents are away on a two-month European trip, and he’s alone at home. The phrase “the empty house on Mulholland” appears more than 20 times in the novel.

This sounds familiar to readers of Less Than Zero, but with The Shards, Ellis takes the elements and gives them the jolt of a pulp thriller plot that involves a handsome, troubled new student who arrives at Buckley and a serial killer dubbed The Trawler who is stalking young women in Los Angeles. At the level of plot, the thriller is enthralling. I found myself rapidly turning pages, as Ellis slowly unspooled the story. It is at the level of style and sensibility that I found myself baffled and intrigued. It’s an uneven book with some strong passages and allusive digressions. Perhaps more often, though, the book offers dull, repetitive scenes and flat descriptions that don’t hit the numb, affectless tone Ellis stives to master. There is good writing in this book, but there are nowhere near 600 pages of it.

In White, his 2019 book of non-fiction, Bret Easton Ellis has an essay about growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s. His parents let him watch violent films and read violent fiction like Stephen King’s Carrie and Night Shift. In an admission that is almost hard to believe, he writes, “I was a child of the ‘70s who read Thomas Tryon’s popular horror novel The Other when I was seven years old, balancing the hardcover my mother had checked out of the Sherman Oaks public library on my lap while I waited for another swimming lesson on Ventura Boulevard. The pitchfork death of one of the boys at the end of the first part of that novel stunned me—became infamous for me—because it was the only detailed murder I had come across in print, and it has haunted me ever since. I wanted to know on a technical level how the author had pulled this scene off, so I read it over and over again, gazing at the paragraphs, enrapt, figuring out how the author linked up the words to give this scene its charge.”

I tracked this passage down, and it is amazing. It is powered by run-on sentences, one of the calling cards of Bret Easton Ellis’ own fiction.

And up in the barn, moving from the open door, out of the sunshine, stepping back into the shadow of the loft and once more laying his glasses down, Russell Perry blinked into the dim void and took four long steps to the edge of the loft. Arms flung wide, he leaped. “I’m the King of the Mountains!” Down and down and down. Hardly soaring, but dropping merely, the smell of fresh-cut hay in his nose, holding his breath and dropping into the cool dark nothingness, rushing as though late for an appointment, hurrying to where, only a blur at first, then more clearly, clearer than anything he had ever seen, reaching for him with cruel, beckoning fingers, waiting to catch him as he fell, he saw in the blackness the glinting silver prongs, sharp, sharp and fire-cold… “Eeeyaiee!” As the steel tore through his chest, shattering flesh and bone, his scream sent the mice scurrying with fright, and hot blood, all red and frothy, with little ruffles like ghastly lace, spurted into the yellow hay…

You can see how this passage could inspire a future horror writer at a young age. Ellis says all the horror movies and novels he consumed helped him see that “there was another world—a secret one beneath the fantasy and fake safety of everyday life.” (White, 2019)

There is an extended knife fight late in The Shards that mimics the Tryon style (less than successfully) and is representative of Ellis’ horror. I’ll leave out the character names to avoid spoilers.

Suddenly there was silence. I pulled the [bloody] towel from my forehead and scanned the space but couldn’t locate ______. He wasn’t by the front door and he wasn’t in the kitchen. I walked carefully by the dining room and the granite fireplace and the Hockney print. The bleeding had slowed down—blood wasn’t dripping into my eyes anymore—but I could taste it on my lips and my face was wet with it. I was about to call his name again when he suddenly emerged from the darkness at an angle I hadn’t expected and pushed me back against a wall and then lifted his arm and stabbed me in the chest, but the knife hit the breast bone, which only caused the blade to drag down, slicing across the pectoral, and I could feel blood draping across my abdomen. I automatically pushed ______ away and then slashed wildly at him with the knife: a large red line was suddenly swiped across his chest and his rib cage and down to his torso—the white t-shirt flowered red. It wasn’t deep but blood started spattering across the marble floor…

Let’s return to Dodge’s idea of the biography of a style. Ellis is explicit about this in the novel. He takes advantage of the book’s time setting to bring in contemporary songs and movies as color and detail. Scenes are often introduced along with a song playing in the background. They are usually a little too on the nose thematically. The novel often has the feel of having been written as the basis for a multi-season television show. As he loves to do, Ellis will pause to digress on some of the pieces of pop culture he’s raked into his pastiche. Here is one of the more important examples in the book.

I passed into another empty room, where Kim Wilde was about to sing one of the pop glories from that year “Kids in America” and I sat on the floor looking up at the video projected on the bare wall. It was so simple: a synthesizer, a smoke machine, Kim’s Wilde’s blank blue-tinged face staring straight at us, and like so many songs of that era it was an anthem, something about being the kids in America, where everybody lives for the music-go-round, but Kim sang it with a quiet determination, a girl who could handle anything with her cool indifference: she didn’t get excited by the excitement of the song. This is what gave the song an added tension: Kim remained unsmiling through the soaring chorus—she was withdrawn, dead-eyed, even drugged. Maybe she knew where she was, or maybe she didn’t know, maybe she could have been anywhere—this was what became so suggestive in the video. She was offering an invitation but she didn’t care if you came or not, because she could always find somebody else. She was radiating that numbness-as-a-feeling aesthetic I was so drawn to and trying to perfect in Less Than Zero, and I was thrilled seeing it embodied in the poppiest of artifacts.

That sounds to me like a manifesto of intent, one of the key epiphanic moments in the life of a stylist. It comes with the rearview mirror perspective of a 40-year fiction writing career. You don’t get the same biography of Ellis’ sensibility in The Shards. For that, you have to turn to the essays in White, and I cannot recommend any reader do that. Donoghue’s final word in “The Promiscuous Cool of Postmodernism” diagnoses a lack, a lack I see in Ellis’ work (his fiction, his non-fiction, and his podcast). Donoghue writes, “But what I should like to find in postmodernism is an urge to dissent from the very conditions that made it possible. Dissent from own’s own felicity; an entirely reputable procedure, as in the mind that suspects itself.” When your own felicity is the certainty you’ve never been wrong about anything (you were only transgressively trolling or you were right, actually) you might never start to suspect.