NPC's Reviews > The Shards

Yet another fragment of coolly ironic metafiction from Bret Easton Ellis. The setting is new, the characters are somewhat younger, but everything else about this novel will be very familiar to readers of Ellis's work. At more than 600 pages, I couldn't help wondering what the point was. He has performed all these tricks before -- the gratuitous clinical depravity, the quirky blending of autobiography and fiction, the ultra-dry satire. What was fresh and provocative in the 90s now seems formulaic. It also doesn't help that in "The Shards" Ellis occasionally lapses into saccharine nostalgia for 1980s Los Angeles and his own adolescence. Overall, this is not a bad novel, but it reeks of self-indulgence.