For his sixth novel, Bret Easton Ellis immerses us in a world of luxury and opiates, reinventing for the occasion the ” campus novel under narcotics “. Shall we meet at the back of the amphitheater?
Bret Easton Ellis is old fashioned. And this is perhaps precisely what makes the author of less than zero an authentic classic, the beacon of a certain era, the founding father of a literary current with a vast lineage not always at the level, who too often caricatured the dogmas of the maestro (name dropping, decadence of disillusioned offspring in Prada, etc.) – and that’s good, since it forces others to move on, to invent new forms. Bret Easton Ellis is old-fashioned, too, when you think about the content of his pamphlet Whitenot really in harmony with a woke America somewhere between Savanarole and H&M ads – which, fortunately for our man, hasn’t had to set eyes on the pages ofAmerican Psycho… The writer, almost in his sixties, is no longer the golden boy of Generation X of the 80s, and it is perhaps to find him that he embarked on Splinters. A funny project that he first read on his podcast, before finding the traditional form of the novel – but, after all, wouldn’t it be the same thing as Alexandre Dumas with his soap operas? Wouldn’t writing be an endless return to the future?
CAMPUS NOVEL
Be that as it may, we find Ellis, in a mise en abyme way, trying to recount, decades after the fact, his memories of 1981, when he was seventeen and hanging out on the benches of Buckley, a very chic school in Los Angeles. He has an official girlfriend, Debbie, but also has sexual fun with Matt and Ryan. But young Bret has a fascination with Susan and Thom, the establishment’s most glamorous “stunningly beautiful” couple. “We were teenagers, vaguely refined children, who knew nothing of the workings of the world – if we had any experience of them, their meaning escaped us. At least until something happened that propelled us – expelled – into a state of exalted consciousness”. Because, beyond the excesses of all kinds (no need for details), the reality of this small world will be upset by the misdeeds of a serial killer, the Trawler (understand “the Trawler”), who attacks domestic animals, before attacking people (and he has his reasons…). Could this monster have a link with the new kid on the block, Robert Mallory?
This devil of Bret Eaton Ellis then plunges us into this world of luxury and nightmare, with a memory oversaturated with pop-rock songs, marketed images and, above all, films – New York 1997, The Raiders of the Lost Ark and of course, Shining . As such, Splinters might look like a campus novel under narcotics, crossbred with James Ellroy, Stephen King and…Marcel Proust. Playing to the point of vertigo (and very freely) with autofiction, the author of Lunar Park indeed mixes with brio and a staggering narrative fluidity dread, paranoia and melancholy. The past, here, is horror. And the memory of it is even worse, because we are inevitably forced to be attached to it, and to love it.
Splinters
Bret Easton Ellis
Robert Laffont/Pavilions, 616 pages 26€
By Baptiste Liger