{"id":12542,"date":"2023-01-27T11:05:12","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T18:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=12542"},"modified":"2023-01-29T11:33:57","modified_gmt":"2023-01-29T18:33:57","slug":"b-e-e-the-shards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2023\/01\/27\/b-e-e-the-shards\/","title":{"rendered":"B.E.E. ‘The Shards’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Free Press<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s Great Defense of Gen X<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The Shards\u2019 parachutes us back into the world before teenagers became so sensitive. \u2018We were very, very free to explore things that might hurt us, potentially might damage us.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Peter Savodnik<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Credit: Pat Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You can see the Century Towers\u2014the site of the harrowing climax of The Shards<\/em>, Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s new novel\u2014from Ellis\u2019s 11th-story condo in West Hollywood. It was designed by I.M. Pei in 1964, and for many years it epitomized mid-century-modern chic, and the juxtaposition Ellis paints in his novel\u2014blood splattered against sleek white walls, chaos enveloping order\u2014feels anticipatory. The crack-up on our horizon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I asked him, over dinner at Mat\u00fa in Beverly Hills, whether the crack-up had already happened, whether it was all over, or whether there was any cause for hope (in America, the West, the human species), he laughed and said, \u201cI never feel optimistic about the future. I don\u2019t even think about it any more. I just read novels. I answer my emails. I keep The Food Network<\/em> on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It had been almost 13 years since Ellis, the author of Less Than Zero<\/em> and American Psycho<\/em>, had published a novel when, in April 2020, he was sitting at his laptop in the condo and The Shards<\/em> just \u201cannounced itself,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had been trying to write it since he was 17. But every time he tried he failed. It wasn\u2019t until 2020 that he realized \u201cthe key to unlocking it after all these years was that it needed an older voice, that it was, in fact, a memory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The Free Press ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Free Press Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s Great Defense of Gen X \u2018The Shards\u2019 parachutes us back into the world before teenagers became so sensitive. \u2018We were very, very free to explore things that might hurt us, potentially might damage us.\u2019 By\u00a0Peter Savodnik You can see the Century Towers\u2014the site of the harrowing climax of The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}