The Twenty-First Century Category Error

In the latest edition of The Drift, the popular literary magazine founded in New York, is an intriguing essay about the novelist Bret Easton Ellis. The writer, Gabriel Jandali Appel, makes a study of Ellis’ career and his latest novel, The Shards, and also deconstructs his success as a podcaster. Appel argues, convincingly in my view, that not enough reviewers of The Shards noted its genesis on Ellis’ podcast and how the auditory medium informed what the written novel became. Appel also notes that Ellis, so disdainful of trauma narratives and the politics of sexual orientation, has very much written a painful bildungsroman of sorts about a young gay man in Los Angeles—Bret Easton Ellis. I found this same surprising vulnerability in The Shards, and I argued that it was his best novel since American Psycho.