Violence and the Sacred

by Matthew Gasda

This essay appears in Issue 5 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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The Shards: A Novel

by Bret Easton Ellis

Vintage Press, 608 pp., $17.06

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Above all else, Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Shards is a pornographic book. It is about teenage guys fucking each other—a deeply homoerotic work of fiction. You realize very quickly, opening The Shards, which Ellis originally released as an audiobook in 2021, and which was thus spoken and recorded and re-recorded, that the novel was written to be savored, so to speak: There is a strong element of release, catharsis, a Proustian kind of erotic recollection that permeates the entire book. The Shards is fucked up, updated Proust: Proust on Quaaludes and tequila and coke (rather than whatever weird Victorian sleeping pills Proust himself was on when he wrote In Search of Lost Time).