2023-04-28 14:05:32
Splinters
de Bret Easton Ellis
Translated from English (United States) by Pierre Guglielmina
Robert Laffont, 616 pages, €26
Thirteen years after his last novel, Imperial Suite(s)and a detour through non-fiction (Whiteessay published in 2019), the sulphurous Bret Easton Ellis signs a comeback with Splintersa dense and disturbing story that takes up motifs dear to the author of less than zero et American Psycho : emptiness of American youth, drugs, sex, ultraviolence.
In a text that constantly plays with the border between reality and fiction, we follow “Bret Ellis”, a Californian teenager from the 1980s, and his group of extremely wealthy friends who take their torpor in sports cars through the streets of Hollywood. They are young, beautiful, popular and completely free – the adults being indifferent, failing or simply absent. The narrator’s world is limited to his gang, his affairs of sex and the heart, his amazing evenings, the news of the time being approached only by the almost obsessive review of films and songs of the moment. The real, ultimately, is only one element of the whole.
But this glitzy setting worthy of a Hollywood sitcom is disturbed by a series of sordid assaults and crimes which coincide, is it a coincidence, with the arrival of a new student in high school – even more beautiful, mysterious and fascinating than the others. In this universe of zombies in designer clothes, where eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, everyone is suspect, ultimately, and anxiety rises a notch.
heinous crimes
The reader finds himself carried away through the pages in the feverish spirit of “Bret”, obsessed by this newcomer who seems to please everyone, terrified by these atrocious crimes which seem to move no one. He himself, at the time of entering adulthood, is looking for himself, a disenchanted dreamer, a popular high school student but terribly alone, a heterosexual of convenience overwhelmed by his homosexual desires, an inveterate liar impatient to make other people’s masks fall off.
The writing, cinematographic, watches with “Bret” the actions of his peers and clinically reveals a half-smile, an inflection in the tone, an almost nothing that would serve as proof. As for the rawness of the scenes of sex and violence, omnipresent, it increases crescendo as the apprentice writer loses his footing, drawn towards the bottom by the dark projections of his powerful imagination.
The character is the writer and the writer, perhaps, the character? Like a criminal, the author blurs the tracks, and likes to disorient his reader in an endless game between the true and the false. In this labyrinthine palace of mirrors, Splinters are those of a seductive, sharp and brilliant story, from which we do not come out unscathed.
#sex #lies #teenage #crimes