The Shards is about a group of disaffected LA teenagers in the 1980s – among whom is the 17-year-old Bret Easton Ellis, noting down the activities of his solipsistic schoolfellows and recycling them in the first draft of Less Than Zero. You can’t really do that with Ellis’s new book, however – his first novel in almost 13 years, it weighs in at 600 pages, which doesn’t suggest he’s kidding about. Imperial Bedrooms was unconvincing, but, like the original, it was short, so it could at least be written off as a misjudged jeu d’esprit. Instead, his last novel, Imperial Bedrooms (2010), was a belated sequel to Less Than Zero that answered the question of what became of the original’s teenage protagonists in middle age – but had anybody really been asking it? If Ellis wanted to trade on past glories for commercial reasons, he would be writing endless sequels to the book that turned him from literary star into cultural icon: American Psycho (1991). Bret Easton Ellis’s compulsion to revisit the milieu of his debut novel Less Than Zero (1985) – a study of disaffected LA teenagers that made him famous before he was 21 – is increasingly puzzling.
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