The Shards: A dark and troubled dream about Los Angeles in the ’80s
Bret Easton Ellis's new book is about a novelist writing a novel supposedly based on true events
Los Angeles, 1981. A high school senior called Bret Ellis is working on his debut novel called Less Than Zero. Sound familiar? In The Shards Bret Easton Ellis returns to familiar territory with a cast of beautiful, cool, privileged prepsters who wear wayfarers, drive Porsches, Jaguars, BMWs and Mercedes, and party on champagne and a cocktail of cocaine, Valium, marijuana and Quaaludes. The novel is a paean to La La Land in the eighties: “Numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy,” Ellis writes.
Known for his controversial novels exploring themes of nihilism, amorality, and consumerism, Ellis published his first, Less Than Zero, in 1985 when he was just 21. Dark and disturbing, it explores the lives of wealthy young people in Los Angeles from the perspective of its protagonist, Clay, a college student who returns to LA for Christmas and is confronted with the emptiness and despair of his former friends...
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