Bret Easton Ellis walked out of the elevator of the Loews Regency at 61st and Park Avenue on a Friday afternoon in late January carrying sneakers and a sweater. He smiled and apologized for switching the placement of the interview from his suite, which he mentioned was sort of a large number, to the foyer. He wheeled round, on the lookout for a spot that may be appropriate for a dialogue about not solely his new novel, The Shards, but in addition the truth that he was again in New York, the town he lived in and documented for many years earlier than retreating, absolutely and with just a few days-long lapses, to Los Angeles, the place he grew up.
The Shards, printed final month by Alfred A. Knopf, is a surprisingly affecting e-book by which a 56-year-old world-famous novelist named Bret Ellis remembers his senior yr at LA’s unique Buckley Faculty within the early Eighties. Attractive, Wayfarer-wearing teenagers are haunted by gangs of hippies mutilating animals, and a assassin, dubbed the Trawler by the native rags, is disappearing prepsters, invading houses, and making “alterations” to younger our bodies. A lot of the drama surrounds the homecoming king and queen and their crew of cool children because the narrator takes numerous dreamy nighttime drives on Mulholland Drive stoned on quaaludes, all soundtracked by the always talked about punk and new-wave songs woven into the textual content. But it surely’s additionally a legitimately charming coming-out coming-of-age, with a important character exploring his homosexuality in a deeply closeted Hollywood. It’s the creator of American Psycho’s first novel in 13 years, a e-book practically as violent as that one. Like all his books, it’s polarizing and really exhausting to disregard.
Ellis, legs crossed in a foyer sales space, was fondly recalling the speak he had given the night time earlier than with New Yorker employees author Naomi Fry at a packed occasion house in a downtown Brooklyn high-rise. Within the entrance row, influencers and downtown figures sat subsequent to podcasters, considered one of whom supplied, by means of a assessment, that The Shards was “1,0000 pages of vibes.” Thirty minutes late, Ellis sat earlier than the packed viewers.
“We simply had a nip of gin backstage,” Fry mentioned into the mic.
“Not a lot—like, two sips,” Ellis mentioned, grinning.
Ellis had the viewers within the palm of his hand as he mentioned the origins of the e-book, the method of edging autofiction away from the reality, the Manson household, Quentin Tarantino, whether or not writing a novel is like Methodology appearing, and whether or not he’d been in Brooklyn for the reason that ’90s. Within the days main as much as the occasion, followers, most of them born after American Psycho was printed, left Instagram feedback questioning if they may sneak into the inevitable after-party. Possibly Ellis needed to throw down at The Odeon for previous time’s sake? Or go someplace new?
Ellis went straight again to the Loews.
“I simply needed to return again to my resort room, order some room service, have a glass of wine, get into mattress with the meals channel on, examine my emails,” Ellis advised me.
Ellis has spent only a handful of days in New York within the final 20 years, after he accomplished his 2005 novel, Lunar Park. He’s owned an residence within the American Felt Constructing since 1987, however has not slept there since 2004.
“I had not been to New York in not less than 10 years,” Ellis advised me, recalling one mid-teens journey. “I needed to get some stuff out of storage, and I needed to satisfy the brand new tenant as a result of I’ve been renting it out for years and years and years…. Round Fourth Avenue, thirteenth Road, I seemed up from my cellphone and I immediately panicked. I advised the driving force, ‘You’re within the mistaken space…We’re going to thirteenth Road between Third and Fourth.’ He mentioned, ‘That is it.’ I couldn’t consider the change.”
That was 2016. Final week Ellis once more drove by the neighborhood on his manner dwelling from the occasion and didn’t acknowledge everything of Astor Place. He doesn’t miss New York Metropolis.
“I arrived Wednesday night time throughout this horrible storm, after which the same old issues of getting your baggage, an hour ready at Delta carousel, after which the trip into New York,” Ellis mentioned. “I believed, How does anybody reside right here? How within the fuck does anybody reside right here?”
He favored residing right here within the ’90s, throwing events (Tom Cruise was a neighbor) and leisurely taking a lot of the decade to jot down 1998’s Glamorama, having fun with the final second of what he’d later dub “Empire”—a time earlier than, in his thoughts, September 11 kicked off a interval of American collapse, when the millennials took over.
“It was a wonderful time to be in New York,” Ellis mentioned. “I speak to lots of people who simply merely agree—to be youngish and residing in New York throughout that interval, and to be concerned within the journal world, the fantastic journal world.”
I’ve through the years heard about being within the ’90s with Bret Easton Ellis. A author who labored as Ellis’s assistant within the early 2000s as soon as advised me a narrative that I used to be hesitant to ask the author about—absolutely it was apocryphal. Then once more, there we had been, so I believed I would run it by him. A number of years after Ellis had left for LA, the ex-assistant, as he advised me, was requested to go to the residence to maneuver a synthesizer.
“They usually dropped it,” I advised Bret, “and out of the keyboard got here a lot of cocaine.”
“That would have been completely true, completely true,” Ellis mentioned. “I had a Juno-60. I used to be in a few bands in highschool and school, and I carried that with me. Cocaine use was ubiquitous within the ’90s, completely ubiquitous. And there have been many events in my residence, many get-togethers. And if that Juno-60 dropped…”
