Bret Easton Ellis hadn’t published a novel since. Imperial Suite(s) 13 years ago, and I worried that one of my favorite American writers had lost his inspiration, or gotten lost in the labyrinths of film production. ‘Cause it’s not his trial Whitereleased in 2019, a kind of anti-chargewoke of an angry fifty-something who, although entertaining, had convinced me of his foray into the side of “non-fiction”.
All my fears were swept away when I immersed myself in the 600 pages of his new novel, Splinterswhich is now one of my favorite titles from the writer with less than zero, Lunar Park And American Psycho. It even looks like Splinters is a mixture of these three novels.
A real journey back in time (accompanied by a fabulous soundtrack) to Los Angeles in 1981, in an enjoyable tangle of autobiography and history of slasher for teenagers.
The story takes place when Bret Easton Ellis was writing what would become his first book, less than zero, which propelled him at the age of 21 to the rank of star writers. Why such a long absence? “You know, I was very busy in Hollywood for ten years, he says on the phone, from his residence in LA Then the pandemic arrived, and everything stopped. I don’t know why, maybe because the years 2020 and 2021 were terrible, compared to the years 1980-1981, but I was nostalgic for that time. Even though I had my issues, I realized that, my god, 1981 was heaven compared to the shit we’re living in now. I started thinking about my friends, some I haven’t spoken to in 40 years! All these people began to haunt me. »
Not just the people, but the places too, where he used to go out, all of which are gone today, which only made his nostalgia worse. ” Splintersit’s the book I wanted to write in 1982, but it’s less than zero which I wrote instead. And there, 40 years later, I felt all these things and while writing the first two pages, I understood. It was never a novel from an 18-year-old boy’s perspective. This is the perspective of a 57-year-old man who recalls these incidents and it opened up a whole world to me. Talking about it in the past tense gave me the backdrop, the historical recreation of 1981 Los Angeles, and that’s how I felt about the book. I hadn’t smelled something for a book in 10 years. »
Thus, in Splinters, the narrator goes by the name of Bret Easton Ellis, and remembers his golden (and drugged) youth on the chic Buckley campus with his friends, when he tried to be this “tangible participant” in everyday life, hiding his homosexuality by having a girlfriend. The writer points out that in all his novels, the narrators have always been the age he was when he wrote them. The young Bret Easton Ellis would have liked to have the detachment of Clay, his alter ego of less than zero, in this significant period of its existence. “I wanted to explain to myself what I was like at that age and it wasn’t Clay, the cool guy. This guy disappeared, it’s been a long time, he doesn’t exist anymore. I really wanted to write about my emotional life at 17, 18. »
The tension is multiple in this novel where the influences of Joan Didion and Stephen King are clearly displayed; there is this sexual tension, specific to youth, but hidden, which forces the character to maintain a role, while in Los Angeles rages a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler, whom Bret believes to be Robert Mallory, the newcomer to the school, which he becomes obsessed with.
But what was it like to be a gay teenager in 1981? “I knew I was gay at 8 years old,” says Bret Easton Ellis. It never bothered me, but I understood that to cross this world into adulthood, it was something that had to be hidden and I had no problem with that. Except during the year in which Splinters, where it was a problem. I had two classmates with whom I had secret sex. But there was something exciting and illicit about keeping the secret. »
Nevertheless, it was while writing this book that he realized that his first lover was probably his first love. “I was also nostalgic for our bodies and our desire, compared to my aging 59-year-old body…”
If there’s one thing you can be sure of with Bret Easton Ellis’s books, it’s that there will be no traumatic warning and no “sensitive reader” will re-read his manuscripts.
For a writer who has always said that art was the religion of his generation, these new questions make no sense, even if his novel American Psycho, which caused a scandal in the 1990s, was initially refused by about thirty publishers. “We WANT to be offended by the art! he says, convinced. This idea that you can’t show something because it might offend a child’s sensibilities is one of the reasons why Gen Xers, at least in America, have become so conservative, much more so than millennials or boomers. I think it’s because we’ve had so much more freedom that we feel this almost totalitarian aspect of free speech. »
In any case, he continues to enjoy it, because writing has always been an immense pleasure for him and that is perhaps also why we like to read it so much. “The book becomes your best friend, your lover, you think about it all day. The writing ofAmerican Psycho was one of the most fun times of my life. I’m not a “career” writer, because I don’t give a fuck what people think. I don’t think about a possible reader, which never existed for me. Never. When I write, I don’t think of my publisher, my agent, my parents, anyone. It is only for me that I write and that is why the dedication of the novel says: “for nobody”. »
Splinters
Bret Easton Ellis
Robert Laffont
603 pages