The Shards

 I've just finished reading The Shards, a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm mighty glad to be done with it. 

Upon starting this novel, I hardly knew what to think, because although it had been widely touted as a rare literary accomplishment, what I was finding was a rather embarrassingly clumsy offering of breathlessly tedious prose generously salted with poor grammar. Literary, you say? 

I guess I could see the thing as a sort of teen soap opera, a Netflix series, and a damn long one at that, for the novel drivels on for some 600 torturous pages. And it's got all the right stuff for that genre, I suppose--drinking, drugs, sexual episodes of every nature, longer and more detailed than anyone (I would hope) would find interesting. I mean look, I don't mind sexual material in a novel, homosexual or heterosexual or bisexual or any other sort of sexual there may be, if it somehow moves than narrative forward. But the sex here is wholly gratuitous, as if the writer had taken time out from an actual plot every two pages or so to perform a sort of personal keyboard masturbation for his own amusement. Boring. And ultimately creepy. 

After dragging us along through hundreds of pages of vague suggestion that something (anything) is about to happen, Ellis kind of tosses the whole thing on page 500 or so and gives us a different book altogether--a teen thriller this time with plenty of chases and fights and broken glass and blood. Boom. The end. 

But that's okay, because we are skimming the text by that time anyway. 

In a way, Ellis reminds me of my old friend Todd Grimson, also a novelist and the author of Brand New Cherry Flavor, Stainless and other titles. They have in common a fascination with drugs, with violence, with sex, with perversion, with nihilism. But what Grimson has and Ellis doesn't is talent, man! Although Todd's subject matter has never been my cup of tea, I am nonetheless astounded by the expertise of his craftsmanship, not only in prose and style but in narrative control. 

So yeah, give Ellis a pass, is my suggestion. Read Grimson instead.