The Shards: A Novel

By creating a fictionalized version of himself, Ellis builds on the contentious literary persona he’s cultivated since the debut of his first novel Less Than Zero. In The Shards, characters accuse Bret of causing drama and behaving like a “drama queen.” While Ellis’s novels prompt debate due to their unsentimental depictions of young people, sex, drugs, and violence, Ellis himself frequently creates conflict by directly criticizing what he believes to be a culture of excessive political correctness. On social media, with the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, and in his nonfiction critique of contemporary society, White (2019), Ellis makes fun of what he feels is a humorless, victimized atmosphere. In The Shards, Bret refuses to consider himself a victim after his sexual assault by Terry. Bret says, “[N]o one had hurt me, I hadn’t been assaulted, I let it happen” (686). Despite this denial, Bret’s status as a minor at the time means that their sexual encounter was definitionally an assault.

Early in his career, Ellis belonged to a coterie of writers dubbed the “literary brat pack,”—a reference to the original 1980s “brat pack” comprised of young actors Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and others. The literary brat pack included Ellis and the novelists Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Jill Eisenstadt, and Donna Tartt, some of whom attended Bennington College together as undergraduates. Ellis includes McInerney in The Shards, creating a concrete link between the novel and the publicized literary faction. The “brat” label also applies to Bret’s social group, with the less-affluent Ryan referring to Bret and his friends as “all spoiled fucking rotten[…] they do whatever they want and there are no consequences for any of them” (415-16). Put another way, The Shards depicts characters who qualify as “spoiled” and “brats.” Ellis’s interest in “bratty” young people is on display in most of his other fiction—the teens in Less Than Zero, the college students in Rules of Attraction (1987), and the Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Nevertheless, the characters in Ellis’s fiction invariably experience tangible pain and anguish. Their gilded socioeconomic status doesn’t preclude suffering.

Metafiction is a genre or style that explicitly acknowledges the constructed nature of fiction. A work of metafiction constantly reminds the reader that they’re engaging with an invented narrative. The Shards isn’t a factual account of Ellis’s senior year, yet Bret and Ellis share many facts, which creates theatrical tension since the realism collides with the sensational murders. Building on the pressure is the inclusion of actual places, songs, and Ellis’s Buckley yearbook photo on the backflap of the Knopf 2023 hardback edition. Part of the self-referential playfulness involves the theme of The Malleability of Truth in Storytelling. Bret calls his story a “dream” and a “novel”; at the same time, he says, “I couldn’t dream it away or pretend it wasn’t true” (37). Bret points out the make believe while retaining the possibility that the story contains true events. Through metafiction, Bret advances the belief that, in modern society, what’s “true” is subjective and depends on the individual’s perspective.