Thirteen years later Imperial Suite(s) (Robert Laffont, 2010), the American Bret Easton Ellis makes a fascinating and unexpected return to the novel with Splintersa dark and paranoid novel that portrays a certain golden youth of 1980s Los Angeles.
A big ball of threads where reality and fiction mingle in minor mode, in which the author ofAmerican Psycho revives in a less compact way the universe of his very first book, less than zero (Christian Bourgois, 1986). A novel published when he was only 21 years old and which pinned the golden youth of Los Angeles – from which he came – against a backdrop of sex, drugs and alcohol, numbness and moral decadence.
The book has always been about an obsession
The novel unfolds around a small group of friends who attend Buckley, a very select private high school in Los Angeles – one of “those falsified enclaves of the world” where Bret Easton Ellis himself was educated. The narrator is 57-year-old Bret Ellis, who remembers 17-year-old Bret and the tragic events that allegedly unfolded in the fall of 1981.
A novel first delivered in a podcast of 27 episodes broadcast to its subscribers from September 2020. And a story that Bret Easton Ellis has tried to write several times since 1982, bearing the same title for 40 years. An undisclosed case?
“Each novel comes from an impression of an unclassified case, says the writer on the phone, reached at his home in Los Angeles. Every novel comes from a feeling of confusion and pain. Why do I feel this way? Maybe it’s my dad? Unrequited love? Whatever the feeling, that’s what makes me want to write a novel. This time it was nostalgia. It was the fact of having aged and thinking back to my youth. I had a lot of regrets about my youth and wanted to write about many of the things that really happened to me and my friends. »
A scent of nostalgia
When the writer understood that the story had to be told through the eyes of an old man who thinks back to those events of yore, a door opened. “Everything settled down. Very quickly, I was overtaken by the novel. I always try never to over-prepare a novel; I have to feel it. The aging, the nostalgia, the regrets…all of those things came together and I started writing. Splinters. It poured out of me. It was very moving. »
Despite the California glitz and dazzling “preppie WASP” panoply—Wayfarer glasses, Easter egg-colored clothes—the flamboyant, boozy parties, the fancy cars, the smells of chlorine, suntan oil, and marijuana, it is true that the novel also releases, from one end to the other, a powerful perfume of nostalgia.
The novelist acknowledges that the last few years served as a trigger. “The last five years have been horrible! he exclaims. Who wouldn’t rather go back to 1981? Not you ? I loved going back to 1981 rather than being caught in 2020: COVID, lockdown, pandemic, vaccination campaigns… Why are we in this horrible mess right now? »
“Everything was so much simpler,” he continues. It was also the time of my youth… As you get older, you realize that you are no longer young. You no longer have the same body, your sexual desire is no longer as intense as it was at 17. We have to be realistic. “And it was during the confinement, in April 2020, that the writer began to think that it was much better at the time. Almost always better.
“No one was on antidepressants, the suicide rate hadn’t gone up 5000% like it is today, there were no mass shootings. Regardless of social class, everyone was rather cool, here in Los Angeles. It was not all a matter of ideologies and the politicization of all issues. It was a much simpler time, ”repeats Bret Easton Ellis without flinching.
A time without cell phones or social networks — but with Valium, Xanax, Quaalude and cocaine. “And even when it comes to homosexuality, up to a point. Being in the closet and not being able to experience it openly, conversely, also came with an illicit thrill. There was a “secret agency-nobody has to know” side that made the sex even more intense, the writer believes. Of course, to some extent my own happiness was at stake, but I was young and stupid. »
The art of exaggeration
A twisted and dark learning novel, a long autofictional drift that skilfully mixes the true and the false, as always with Bret Easton Ellis. Splinters — deliberately less stylish than the previous ones — is also full of musical references that take us back to the early 1980s. A powerful soundtrack that echoes the story, between torpor and excitement, where Blondie, Duran Duran, Stevie Nicks or The Psychedelic Furs.
During this fall, the 17-year-old Bret, “imprisoned in adolescent lust”, ends up alone at the family home on Mulholland Drive, while his parents, in a final attempt to mend their ways, leave for a long cruise in Europe. . At the same time, a serial killer, the “Trawler”, takes as victims teenagers, girls and boys, according to a strange protocol. This is the context in which a new pupil arrives at Buckley, in the middle of the school year, the mysterious Mallory, “a movie star, a friendly Greek god”.
The adolescent Bret Ellis dreams of leaving Los Angeles and being able to unfold his secrets far from his friends and the suffocating family atmosphere. Far from the climate of fear linked to the serial killer. Very far from the character he had built from scratch: the cool hetero teenager, in a relationship with the beautiful Debbie, hiding as much as possible a homosexuality that is nevertheless very active.
A precocious writer, assiduous reader of Stephen King and Joan Didion, passionate about cinema, little interested in reality — except for sex, especially homosexual — the young Bret typed in his spare time on his electric Olivetti the pages of what would become less than zero. For his friends, “Bret exaggerated”. Both fascinated and jealous of Robert Mallory, whom he considers “dangerously ill”, he begins to suspect him of being linked to the serial killer. An idea that quickly turns into an obsession and that will have dizzying consequences. We won’t tell you more.
“The book has always been about an obsession,” continues Bret Easton Ellis. About the dangers, in quotes, of being a writer with an unbridled imagination, a young writer who can’t control his superpowers, who rewrites lies to please himself. In the same way that a novel is the form that a writer gives to his obsessions. Or an attempt to pick up the fragments of a past that has long since been shattered.
“I always write about myself,” says Bret Easton Ellis. I follow all the characters in my books. Even those who seem to be furthest from me. For me, writing a book has always been a matter of introspection. A way of expressing myself, but also a journey that allows me to discover why I am here. »