Why I Still Love Bret Easton Ellis

Reviewing The Shards.

Today I want to take a quick break from politics to talk about nostalgia, sex, and serial killers.

In other words, I am reviewing a novel by Bret Easton Ellis.

Hardcore fans of this site may know that novels used to be my primary obsession, until somewhere along the way comedy took over, then politics. This means I have missed some of the more recent books from the only remaining living writers worth bothering with, notably Michel Houellebecq, J. M. Coetzee, my podcast guest Lionel Shriver, and of course Bret Easton Ellis, who last year produced what is probably his greatest work, a 600-page opus called The Shards.

I hesitate slightly recommending this book to a conservative audience due to the aforementioned murder and sex stuff. This is a concern I haven’t really felt before, but I suspect it is something that will increasingly become an issue as a divide emerges on the right between those who are inherently conservative and those who are simply rebelling against the prevailing culture.

It is by no means clear-cut, but I probably align more with the latter group. Hence when it comes to a writer like Bret Easton Ellis, whilst endless gay sex scenes are hardly my thing (let’s be very clear), and nor for that matter are horror and gore—I see these tropes as the obsessions and structural necessities one puts up with in an Ellis novel to get to the good stuff—I am no doubt more open to depictions of Gen X transgression than the more strictly conservative Zoomers, whose only relation to Bret Easton Ellis is probably some quasi-fascist ‘sigma male’ meme they posted featuring an image of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman.

Of course, I have no problem with people rejecting work due to its perceived degeneracy. I do it myself with most of the cultural sludge that has been pumped out post roughly 2010. But one also doesn’t want to slip into the philistinism sometimes associated with the right. An association that is perhaps unfair given the number of serious artists who have been conservative or even reactionary, but nonetheless, it persists.

Caveats out of the way, let us get onto the actual book.