Troubling Immediacy in Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards

Bret Easton Ellis's novel The Shards (2023) continues his now familiar metafictional, postironic, quasi-autobiographical trawl through a parallel universe of his own past. But something has changed. Finally “coming out” in his own name, Ellis has also slackened his rigorous commitments to stylistic precision to the point of near unrecognizability and produced a bloated, overwritten, generically schizophrenic bad book. Why? This article argues that there are three overlapping reasons why this might be something more interesting than a simple failure. First, by teasing away at the moment in his past just before he became the brand name Bret Easton Ellis, and by seeking to preserve it in an amber bubble of indeterminacy, Ellis indemnifies himself against himself. Second, by teasing readers with shocking “revelations” of a psychosexual nature, he baits his audience into a recognition of their own complicity with Anna Kornbluh's culture of “immediacy.” Third, and most consequentially, this “novel” is the printed text of a multipart subscription-based podcast on Patreon, a fact with enormous formal consequences for this book and this literary moment in time.