Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Keywords
Brett Easton Ellis, The Shards, nostalgia, 1980s, postmodernism
Abstract
Bret Easton Ellis, in novels such as Less Than Zero (1985) and American Psycho (1991), has vividly chronicled some of the darkest aspects of American society in the 1980s. It is thus no surprise that his return to writing about the 1980s in The Shards (2023), published amid a wave of nostalgia for the 1980s in American culture, goes strongly against that wave. The novel is set in the fall of 1981, when its narrator/protagonist—one “Bret Ellis”—is a high school senior in Los Angeles. This character (presumably a younger version of the author) goes out of his way to present the lives of his friends and himself as the virtual opposite of the kind of sweet, innocent fare that has been remembered in the nostalgic recollections of the 1980s that have appeared in recent American culture. These lives are driven by meaningless sex, hard drugs, and a popular culture that seems to consist mostly of things such as sex comedies and slasher films. Meanwhile, the debauchery of these teenage characters occurs against the background of a wave of gruesome serial killings that have targeted high schoolers and that is presented as typical of the texture of American life in the early 1980s. This vision of the 1980s, combined with the highly metafictional nature of Ellis’s postmodern narrative, not only provides a vicious rejoinder to the recent wave of 1980s nostalgia in American culture but also illuminates the role of nostalgia in contemporary American culture and politics.
Citation
Booker, M. K., (2025) “Fast Times at Buckley High: The Assault on 1980s Nostalgia in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards”, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 12(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10524
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