In any other decade, this would be a Hollywood trade story. In 2026, it is a diagnosis.

Young men now quote Bateman the way a previous generation quoted Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, which is to say that American Psycho has migrated into aspirational territory. Young men want to be the novel’s looksmaxxing, empty-sex-chasing protagonist. Mary Harron, who directed the original 2000 film version, keeps telling interviewers she is “mystified” by this. She always understood the novel as satire — specifically, “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” Harron is a careful reader and a better director, and she still cannot quite say the obvious thing. It is not mystifying at all. A culture that elected Donald Trump twice — Bateman’s explicit role model in the 1991 novel — was always going to lose the ability to distinguish satire from a mirror. The Bateman problem is not that readers misunderstand Ellis. It is that they understand him the way a thirsty man understands an oasis.

The trends that culminated in the valorization of Bateman were already latent when the novel and the Trump presidency were mere gleams in the eyes of ambitious men. When Ellis came on the literary scene, it was as part of a Bennington College cohort that also included Jonathan Lethem, whose work the new film will inadvertently eulogize. Lethem attended Bennington College in Ellis’s class of 1986 but dropped out halfway through sophomore year, having had what he later called an “overwhelming collision with the realities of class” — his bohemian parents, he discovered, had actually been poor; the Bennington students were actually rich. 

Lethem went back to Brooklyn and spent the next 30 years writing the inverse book to everything Ellis produced. Where Ellis’s characters sit sealed inside their class privilege like terrarium specimens, Lethem’s characters can’t avoid their neighbors, can’t unsee the block, can’t pretend the adjacent kid’s trouble is not also theirs. The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s breakout book, pays homage to Jane Jacobs, a pioneer of urban community preservation, who valued neighborhoods above all else. Lethem’s Fortress is the great Jacobsian novel of the post-Jacobsian era, a long aching chronicle of the Brooklyn block as moral organism and what gentrification does to it — which is not only to displace people, but to implicate the remaining residents in the displacement.

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The cancelled prophet of the racial Right 

By Richard Greenwald

Call Ellis’s model the city of fear. His urbanism is vertical, predatory, cold; the characters don’t walk, but are driven, their class positions reinforced by every sealed surface. The streets happen to other people — people they don’t look at, people for whom the correct response is either the averted gaze or the raised partition. 

Call Lethem’s model, by contrast, the city of guilt. His urbanism is horizontal, all stoops and sidewalks, the corner store whose owner knows which kid’s mother is sick, and its governing emotion is the impossibility of moral insulation. For a long generation, American urban writing ran an unofficial referendum between these two visions, with every essay on gentrification mentioning Jacobs and her opposing force, the builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed whole neighborhoods in New York City in the name of Progress. Every Jacobs-versus-Moses seminar, every fight over bike lanes and broken-windows policing contests the ground between them. 

The referendum is over. Ellis won.

He won in the obvious places. Bateman’s Manhattan is now the Manhattan that turned SoHo into an outdoor luxury outlet and converted its own middle-class adulthood into an unwinnable quest for success and hipness. He won in the less obvious ones, too: in the Ubered, DoorDashed, Amazon-Primed private-city experience of the educated young, who have been trained to encounter the public street the way Bateman encountered it, as an interruption between secured spaces. He won in the quiet disappearance of the mixed-use retail block, the conversion of the corner bodega into a ghost-kitchen, the diner into a co-working subscription. He won, most painfully, in the Brooklyn Lethem actually wrote about. The Boerum Hill neighborhood — the central nervous system of The Fortress of Solitude — was gentrifying even during Lethem’s childhood; brownstones there cost between $3.5 to $8 million today. Nearby Bed-Stuy lost its black majority during the Eric Adams mayoralty. There, brownstones that sold for $50,000 during the period the novel depicts now trade north of $3 million. The homeowners who cashed out are not, in the main, analogs to the people Lethem’s narrator grew up watching. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellis settlement.

He won, too, in Altadena, a close-knit California community that was a suburban equivalent of Bed-Stuy. A year after the January 2025 fires, nearly 70% of severely damaged homes there show no rebuilding activity, and black and Asian homeowners — Altadena was an anomaly of black homeownership, with an 80% ownership rate in 2023, roughly double the national average — are the most likely to remain stalled. Commercial lease prices in the surviving blocks have spiked. The people who understood Altadena the way Lethem’s narrator understood Boerum Hill’s Dean Street are being priced into storage. The speculators circling the burned lots understand those lots the way Ellis’s characters understood the street: as inventory, passed through tinted glass.

The TikTok embrace of Bateman is therefore not a misreading, but a graduation certificate. The readers who now quote him admiringly grew up in the city he built — organized around sealed interiors and contempt for exteriors — and correctly identify him as a role model in this new world. Guadagnino’s casting trouble is the final footnote. You can no longer play Bateman ironically if there is no longer a shared moral floor against which the irony registers. The actors who have passed on the role may or may not have theorized it this way, but they have felt it. The character no longer reads as the predator he was designed to be, because the culture has lost its capacity to recognize predation. The only honest performance now would be the straight one, which might be why so many A-list actors have turned down the role. 

Some untidiness, however, mars Ellis’s victory. On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on the most Lethemite platform of the postwar era: a four-year rent freeze on roughly a million rent-stabilized units; the addition of 200,000 permanently affordable units over 10 years; a revived Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; public grocery stores and free buses; and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. The campaign was unapologetically Jacobsian in its moral grammar — the block as moral organism, the tenant as legitimate claimant on the landlord’s conscience, the city as shared custody rather than asset class. Mamdani’s election, and the wave of younger Gothamites who embraced him, suggest a new playbook for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. Lethem’s vision returned like the repressed: the city of guilt asserting itself as policy after two decades of being merely literature.

Mamdani’s first 100 days have been a tutorial on why Ellis won. The new mayor inherited a $12 billion deficit and has cut it to $5.4 billion, in part by appealing a court order that would expand the city’s rent-voucher program — thus breaking a promise he had made on the trail. He proposed a 9.5% property tax hike that the deputy speaker of his own progressive council immediately branded “not equitable,” opening the first crack of what could become a tax revolt. Former Mayor Eric Adams, in his final weeks, stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees designed to delay the rent freeze; the preliminary vote is not expected until May, the final until June, and any freeze would not take effect before October.

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The Right understands the power of aesthetics

By Rosie Gray

The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan released in early April has already drawn the attention of Trump’s Justice Department. The pied-à-terre tax requires the state legislature’s cooperation, which Albany is withholding. None of this is precisely a failure — yet. It is the normal friction of governance meeting the permanent architecture of American urban capital. It is also, without exception, the machinery Ellis described. The real-estate state — the phrase is the author Samuel Stein’s — is not moved by elections. It is moved by ownership, and ownership is a formidable opponent. 

The wave of socialist mayors should be read honestly. It is not the Lethem vision reasserting itself as lived urban reality. Neither is it a victory for Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses. It is the Lethem vision appearing as electoral ethics inside cities whose physical and financial architecture is permanently Ellis. Americans now vote for the city of guilt and live in the city of fear. The vote registers the yearning; the architecture registers the verdict. You can campaign against the real-estate state, but you govern inside it. You can read The Fortress of Solitude on the F train, but the F train is delivering you to a neighborhood that priced out the families Lethem wrote about a decade before the book came out.

Guadagnino’s film, when it arrives, will be an accidental document of this settlement. He will find a Bateman, or he will not; the picture will be well-reviewed, or it will not; Bale’s ghost will be appeased, or it will not. None of that matters. Ellis’s novel, written in 1991 as a scalding joke about a world the author assumed his readers would recognize as grotesque, is now read by those readers as reportage — or even a how-to guide. Lethem’s novel, published in 2003 as an elegy for a Brooklyn block that was already mostly gone, is now read — when it is read — as speculative fiction. The city of fear won. The city of guilt is what we are now obliged to feel about having let it.

The story follows Victor Ward, a vacuous and handsome male model swanning about Nineties Manhattan. Victor’s world revolves around the most inane concerns possible: clubs, paparazzi, celebrities. But soon, weird things start happening. People keep telling Victor they’ve seen him in places he hasn’t been: a hotel in Miami, a Calvin Klein show. Victor is offered an unusual new job: finding a girl he went to college with who has supposedly disappeared in London. He’s booked into a first-class cabin on the QE2, and here the narrative starts to veer sharply from the aimless frivolity of the opening sections.

In London, Victor finds the girl, another model. He falls in with her group of roommates, also all models. Victor is thrilled to be going to such cool parties with such hot people, blinded by their good looks and designer clothes. But it soon turns out these models are terrorists. Their cover is beauty and fame, and their crimes are violent and gruesome. On a party tour of Paris, Victor is blackmailed to stay with the cell, closely controlled by its leader, the supermodel Bobby Hughes, who “had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze”. Under Bobby’s leadership, the group pulls off a series of major attacks all while air-kissing their way around the glitzy Paris fashion world. Everyone is being watched, everything is being filmed, people aren’t who they say they are, and Victor’s reality collapses in on itself, conspiracies layering and deepening.

The actual goals of the model-terrorists are never explained, and they aren’t the point. The spectacle is. The first order of business is aesthetics. During a bombing in Paris, Victor thinks: “It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.”

Yet Victor’s conscience haunts him. He tells Bobby he doesn’t want to be involved, that he’s not political. “Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby tells him. “It’s something you can’t help.” Bobby tells Victor he trusts him precisely because of his shallowness: “Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’.” Stupidity has made Victor vulnerable, and ultimately dangerous. People who are political, who do have an agenda, have taken advantage of Victor because he’s distracted by surface glitz.

There are many more potential Victors out there today. In Glamorama, the allure of beauty stupefies people, turning them into the pawns of those who know how to manipulate it. The same is true on the internet, which has provided an incredibly powerful tool for politicization, even radicalization, cloaked in soft-focus lifestyle content or in quasi-ironic memes. It’s all too easy to be misled by a pretty face — or a fine set of abdominals.

It is now commonplace for dead-serious political ideas, even extreme ones, to filter into the mainstream on the basis of aesthetics alone. The “Trump Gaza” AI video that depicted the territory as a glamorous beach resort, which went viral when the President himself shared it, was meant as “satire” according to its creator. But in Trump’s hands it became a tool to normalize the idea of a full takeover of Gaza. The puerile imagery of belly dancers and golden statues sanitized the sobering reality of what this takeover would mean.

The Right has long understood the importance of looks. Roger Ailes used to evaluate potential Fox News hosts by watching them on mute. Trump’s career can be seen as a large-scale experiment in how far one can get in politics by putting image first. More so than any recent president, Trump has generated an instantly recognizable aesthetic, turning his agenda into an easily consumable visual brand. His movement is adept at using the internet’s visual language to promote his agenda through imagery that elides its gravity — one example is the Studio Ghibli-style AI cartoon of a crying Dominican woman being arrested by ICE, which the White House tweeted this spring. In sneering at his unsubtle tastes for glitz and gold, Trump’s opponents have missed that these tastes are what many Americans find aspirational, even beautiful.

The pull of beauty — of what we most want to look at — has come to determine in many cases which news events capture the public imagination, and which don’t. Aesthetically appealing images get attention, and attention is today’s most valuable asset. Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a particularly cinematic recent example, optimized to go viral. From the first grainy surveillance video, showing a peek of Mangione’s chiseled jawline, the internet was hooked. It’s true that Mangione’s story tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with American healthcare, but I’m not sure he would have become a beloved online figure if he didn’t happen to be good-looking.

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When I met Luigi Mangione

By Gurwinder Bhogal

It seems our culture can’t resist a handsome criminal. Jeremy Meeks, the “hot felon” whose mugshot for gun charges went viral in 2014, parlayed his fame into a modeling career after getting out of prison, walking in fashion week shows in Milan and New York. He now has nearly 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Even fictional killers can be influencers these days if they have the look: Ellis’s better-known protagonist, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, has recently inspired a cologne and a namesake Manhattan cocktail bar — on top of a wealth of memes.

While Patrick Bateman channels the nihilism of 4chan, Victor Ward embodies the insidious triviality of TikTok. In Glamorama, Ellis captured the feeling of scrolling through a social media feed long before such a thing existed: a barrage of decontextualized images, a flurry of brands and people and eventually ideologies. If the novel had been written today, Victor’s journey would take place somewhere in the endless scroll.

Just as Victor is sucked into a dark reality through his unquestioning participation in a culture of images, many people nowadays find themselves funneled into various ideological corners by what seems at first to be innocuous content tailored to their interests. Motherhood accounts are full of gauzy day-in-the-life videos that eventually turn out to be promoting free birth or Biblical submission to your husband. Men seeking lifestyle hacks find themselves swept up in the manosphere. People can and do become indoctrinated without realizing it, drawn in by an attractive veneer. “We’ll slide down the surface of things,” Victor often thinks in Glamorama.

The models in Glamorama understand that images define reality, and not the other way around. In a 1999 interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Ellis said he chose the fashion world as the setting for his story because “where would these terrorists want to unleash this conspiracy where no one else would look for it?… They’d do it in a world where image is truth, where surface is truth.” The terrorists operate from within a “beauty culture” that “feasts on insecurity” and “makes us act in ways I don’t think we normally would act”, Ellis said.

Today, beauty culture is even more pervasive than in the Nineties. The question is: how far will we go to keep up with it? “The better you look, the more you see,” is Victor’s catchphrase — and it takes on an increasingly sinister tone as the novel goes on. In Glamorama, beauty is a trap, a smokescreen that dulls our reason. It is a warning for the image-saturated world we live in.

Jacob Furedi: Bret, you’ve spoken before about the struggle you had writing this book. You first tried in 1981, and then again a number of times in the decades since. What changed that meant you could write it now?

Bret Easton Ellis: I’m old. That’s really why I ended up writing this book. I was 16 or 17 when I started writing Less Than Zero. I was in high school at Buckley, Los Angeles, and something happened in my senior year. The writer in me suddenly got a little out of control. I started to embellish a lot. I started to make up things. I was a fabulist. I believed things were happening that really weren’t happening.

I had a girlfriend, one of the most popular girls in our senior class at Buckley, but I was gay, and only pretending to be a boyfriend. I was having a secret affair with a closeted football player, and that was a whole other drama. (Unfortunately, I told a good friend of mine about it, and he confronted the football player.) I made up stories about an English teacher. I was making up stories about my family. And everything kind of collapsed. Becoming a writer had spilled over into my real life. And it was like an origin story: how do you control this superpower? How do you make it work, and not wreck your life and wreck the lives of others?

This was in my senior year, in 1981 and 1982, and I realised I had to pull back. And that was the moment when I moved from being a teenager to being a man, when the corruption of adulthood happened and moved me into the world of adults.

I interrupted Less than Zero and I tried to write The Shards, but it was just too big, too complicated. There were too many characters, too many things that happened to me that I wanted to dramatise. So I forgot about The Shards, and went back to writing Less Than Zero, which was a vibe novel: parties, the beach, nightclubs. It wasn’t heavily plotted, there was very little characterisation. It seemed like the easier book to write. Decade after decade, I would go back to The Shards and try to figure out how to write it, but I never could.

Then the pandemic hit. And the Hollywood dream I had chased for 14 years — of directing the scripts that I had written — died with lockdown. We were all stuck in our apartments. And I found myself doing something that I never did, which was going on Facebook, thinking about classmates from that senior year — a lot of classmates that I had perhaps betrayed.

Jacob: What do you mean by “betrayed”?

Bret: Well, certainly, my girlfriend. And certainly the boy who was closeted. I had certainly made up stories about things I felt bad about. I started looking at these people who I hadn’t spoken to in decades. Some I couldn’t find. They didn’t have any social media presence. And that began to haunt me.

As with every book I’ve written, it starts with a feeling. I was confused about not finding those people. I was feeling nostalgic. I began to look for all the places that we hung out, the coffee shops, the malls, the movie theatres, the restaurants, the nightclubs — they were gone. All of them are gone. I started listening to the music from 1981 and 1982 — Icehouse, Kim Wilde, Blondie — and things began to swirl around me.

The novel just poured out of me, in a way that none of the fiction that I’ve ever written has, and it upsets me now to realise, at the age of 58, that I wasted those key, great years, your forties and your fifties, when a lot of American writers produce their masterpiece. They’re really at the height of their powers. And I had been in Hollywood chasing a mini-series, and trying to get movies made that had just died. This book should have been written 10 or 15 years earlier, and then I could have gone on a book tour and at least been appealing to groupies!

Jacob: So you think you’ve missed your opportunity to write a “masterpiece”?

Bret: I’m not immune to the idea of how people perceive me. I do read my reviews: I know there are a lot of five-star and one-star reviews on Amazon. Some even say DNF — Did not finish!

But at the same time, I’m not a career writer. Books are a hobby. I’m not that writer who works with an editor at a publishing house and says, “OK, I’m gonna have this book in 18 months, and you’re going to publish it.” I don’t really write for an audience. I dedicated my new novel, The Shards, to no one. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for myself. And it was a very emotional thing to write. That’s how every single novel I’ve written works.

Someone once asked me why I haven’t written a memoir, a proper memoir. But I have written my memoir, over nine volumes of them — my novels. All have a narrator of the same sort of age as I was, and they are all a reflection of whatever pain, confusion, distress I was going through at the time. And writing each novel helped me move through those problems.

Jacob: What was that catharsis in American Psycho? What did Bret Easton Ellis reveal about himself in that novel?

Bret: The catharsis was that I had moved into a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. I didn’t want to be a man, and I was becoming a man. I was out of college. I was living on my own in Manhattan. I was making money from my books and I wanted to fit into the world of adults. But I just hated the world that was being presented to me.

It was the end of the Reagan era: yuppies, Manhattan, Wall Street. What it meant to be a man, how masculinity was defined, was very different from what I aspired to be. And yet… I wanted to fit in.

I felt, in a lot of ways, like Patrick Bateman, because I don’t think Patrick Bateman is necessarily as insane as people perceive him… He wasn’t wrong about a lot of things that he noticed! There’s a truth to his criticism of the society that he was a part of, which comes out every now and then in the novel.

I was also interested in creating fiction, which is what Patrick Bateman does. Is Patrick Bateman fantasising about all of this? Is it real? Is it not? Is he creating these narratives because he’s so angry, so crazy, so upset about stuff? The only way he can feel anything is to have these insane violent fantasies.

I was also deeply impacted by growing up in California, in the late Seventies and into the Eighties, when it was home base for serial killers. They were everywhere: two or three operating at once. Cults, too — it was just part of the wallpaper. I was five or six when the Manson murders happened. I was talking to Quentin Tarantino about this as well. Because he grew up in California at the same time. And he said: “Man! The Manson murders just really freaked everyone out.” And it traumatised me too.

Jacob: Now you’re 58, do you feel more comfortable than you were when you wrote American Psycho?

Bret: I do feel somewhat embarrassed exhibiting myself now, in a way that I didn’t at 28 or 38. When I started doing book tours, I was the youngest person in the room. Now I’m the oldest. I do feel at 58 that it is kind of unbecoming: you’ve aged out of that notion of having fun on book tours, staying up all night, then doing interviews on Oprah the next day.

I did not do a book tour for The Shards in the United States. I refused to do one, although it was very problematic for my publisher there. But the media in the United States is insane. There’s no reason to try to deal with a fake media that’s really out to get you — and is far snarkier than in England.

But in England, I am also publishing my new novel in a very different way. I have left Picador, which had been my publisher since I was 21. They didn’t want The Shards, so I am publishing it with Swift instead.

I didn’t know anybody at Picador’s new regime. I don’t know why they didn’t want the novel. Maybe it’s because I am a white privileged male, writing a novel with no diversity or inclusivity. I think they wanted me to write more about the Nicaraguan maid that Bret [the character in The Shards] was with. I’m not really joking! I do think that there is something about the tenor of the times, and this book itself, that they didn’t want.

Jacob: While we’re on the subject of publishing, you must have heard about sensitivity readers. Can you imagine The Shards in the hands of a sensitivity reader? Or American Psycho?

Bret: Well, The Shards did get through my publishing house in America, which does employ sensitivity readers. And look, I know they exist. I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.

Maybe part of the reason The Shards got through is just because I’m old — I was grandfathered in. But still I heard the view that there was way too much sex in the novel, and that it was not a “positive” portrayal of homosexuality. I mean, what is a positive portrayal of homosexuality?

Jacob: Ok, but at the same time, if you look at Amazon UK, The Shards is currently sitting at number one… in the section for Gay Biography.

Bret: Did you have to tell me that? It’s not Gay Biography at all.

Jacob: There is a biographical element to it, though. And that seems to be quite common these days. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans — a lot of fantastic creators are going back to their pasts. By writing The Shards, were you trying to escape the present?

Bret: I think you hit an age where you want to go back into the past, and you want either to romanticise it, or to understand the shadow history of which you weren’t aware at the time. A lot of great film directors have done that. At a certain age, Federico Fellini made Amarcord about his childhood; Alfonso Cuarón made Roma; Woody Allen made Radio Days; Ingmar Bergman made Fanny and Alexander. I’m writing fiction that took place in 1981. I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it.

Jacob: But you still keep an eye on the present. Your last book, White (2019), was rooted in contemporary politics — on the state of liberalism and Trump.

Bret: It wasn’t about any of those things. It was about Generation X — a cultural examination of Gen X and their attitudes. It wasn’t a defence of Trump (which is what the crazy moment of 2019 thought the book was); it was about the reactions to Trump.

And as a member of Gen X, I was interested in why we had gotten into such a hysterical divide. I think part of the reason why Gen X is the most conservative of the generations — much more than boomers, much more than millennials — is that we had the most freedom. We looked to be shocked. We wanted to be offended. We loved dirty jokes. We loved music.

But today, the world has to be childproof. And you have to think like the better people. I didn’t experience that. So I think part of the reason why Gen X is 10 to 12 points more conservative in the polls in the US is precisely because of this reaction against this kind of authoritarian language. That’s what White was about. It was not a defence of Trump or an attack on liberalism. I was a liberal — what are you talking about? It just so happened that the culture had moved so far over to this other side that I guess I wasn’t anymore. So that’s what that was about and why it was written in a very heated moment in 2019.

I would never write that book now. I was asked recently whether I would write that last chapter again, where I was talking about working with Kanye West for five years on projects that never happened. Kanye is a bit crazy. But the Kanye now is really no different from the Kanye I met in 2013. He is the same person. He is outrageous. He is a provocateur. He is going way too far on the platform he is on now…

Jacob: Is he an antisemite?

Bret: I don’t believe he’s an antisemite. No, I do not believe that at all. I believe that he’s a destroying artist. And I believe that he’s at a point in his career, because I’ve been I’ve been there too…

Jacob: But you’ve never said anything that could be as construed as antisemitic as he as.

Bret: … I’ve had a lot of a Jewish boyfriends. But look, my Jewish boyfriend and I make antisemitic jokes all the time. What’s wrong with an antisemitic joke? But the problem is that with Kanye, he wants to live in a world that is completely free and… To not be able to say that you liked voting for someone or that you like this… And that there’s this entire industry that is trying to shut down free speech and label a lot of stuff hate speech… I think that’s what Kanye is reacting to. I don’t really know why he wants to die on this particular hill, but I kind of get it, knowing Kanye the way that I did. He just wants to say “fuck you” to everybody. “I can say whatever the fuck I want. If I want to say that I like fucking Adolf Hitler, what are you going to do about it?”

My boyfriend’s Jewish. And my stepfather is a Jew who lost his family in the Holocaust… I know, I know. Saying that is so stupid… And he fought in the Israeli war and everything. And he just shrugged and said “Kanye is a moron”. He didn’t turn it into some gigantic tornado of hysteria that the American press liked to do — and that corporate culture likes to now punish. But I would not rewrite that chapter about Kanye or add that into it because that took place in 2018. That chapter was a reflection of that moment, and where we were, and I thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of who Kanye was overall.

Jacob: I want to pick up on something you said earlier. You talked about that freedom that you and Gen X had, but also how conservative that generation has become. How did that happen? And does that mean you’ve become a conservative?

Bret: I don’t know how to answer that. That is such a millennial question! I don’t even know how to start answering that question.

Jacob: Try and answer it?

Bret: What was the first part of it again?

Jacob: I’ll rephrase it. Are you a conservative or a liberal?

Bret: I’m nothing. I’m not a conservative or a liberal. At least in the US, I can’t agree with either of them. I think they’re both completely bonkers. I don’t watch the news anymore. We have the Food Network on all of our TV screens, or video games. I’m done.

It’s very hard to follow it when it all seems like a simulacrum, a preordained narrative that is being fed to you. The mainstream press in the United States right now just seems so fucking fake.

Jacob: That seems the perfect place to go to the audience for questions.

*

Is anyone going to write the great millennial novel?

Bret: No. Last time I was here, everyone was telling me that Sally Rooney has written the great millennial novel. And I think: she’s fine. Whatever. But I just don’t know whether the novel is vital to millennials as a way of expression. There’s nothing bad or wrong about that — they just won’t write it.

I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.

I’m not saying that’s indicative of everyone, but it was telling in terms of what the novel meant to them. Thirty years ago, everyone had read the Pulitzer Prize winner of that year, even if you were not a writer. People then had a different relationship to novels from what they do now.

So how can there then be the great millennial novel? I hope I’m wrong. I’ve read novels by millennials, and some are good. But I just don’t think novels mean as much to their generation as they did to Gen X or Boomers.

*

America’s culture of violence has clearly influenced your novels. What do you see its role being?

Bret: Violence is tense, it’s gripping, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional. Tarantino once said that he uses violence in the way that people use the musical numbers in movies. They’re just there. They’re fun, they’re exciting. They lift the movie up into another tier and they’re integral to his vision of the world.

I feel the same way about my books. I don’t think that the violence is gratuitous, as people would argue about American Psycho. It’s not only part of my sensibility, but also part of the subjects that I write about. It would be inauthentic to write about a serial killer without certain details about the murders.

I never forgot when Jean-Luc Godard was taken to task for having bloody scenes in his movies. And he said: “That’s not violence, that’s red.” Violence is just part of my aesthetic, but then again, I can’t over-intellectualise it. It just seems like an authentic part of some of the books that I’ve written.

*

Sorry to bring this back to politics, but how are we going to get ourselves out of this mess?

Bret: I don’t know how we’re going to do it. In the last two American elections, there were tens of millions of people who thought they were fraudulent. They don’t believe in the process. There is a huge divide in that country. You would be shocked at the percentage of people who said 2020 was an illegitimate election. And then the other side said that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016, or that the Russians aided him or whatever.

I don’t want to blame the media because, when you look at TV ratings and newspaper circulation, you wonder: where are people getting their information? If CNN has, like, 300,000 people watching it, is CNN really the devil as the Right likes to say? The distrust of elections is out of control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I’m not the right person to ask this because I’ve veered away from politics. You can’t really have that kind of debate, or help people see things in a different light. Talking about America is now like talking into a mirror.

Will I vote? I guess it depends on who’s running. But I am in the majority of Americans who don’t vote. The majority of Americans don’t trust the political system, and they don’t like the people running. And so why would you vote, if you feel that way?

*

When I was in my mid-teens, I wanted to be a writer, and showed my dad something I’d written. He didn’t like it very much, and I’ve struggled to write since. You started at a very young age — did you ever have a moment like that? 

Bret: I’ve noticed that millennials have a huge sense of shame, which my generation simply didn’t have. I did not care what my parents thought about my books. I do know that my parents were not happy with some of my books. I found out after my father died that he described Less Than Zero to my mother as “that dirty little book that our son wrote”. My mother is proud of me, but I don’t think I write the kind of books that my mother particularly likes. That’s fine. They weren’t written for her.

Wanting to be liked was not part of Gen X. But I do think it’s a major — and crushing — part of my boyfriend [musician Todd Michael Schultz]’s millennial generation. He wants to be liked. He wants to be followed. He wants likes on Instagram, a lot of views on his YouTube video. He is exhibiting himself. He’s not a typical millennial — he is very critical of his generation, which might be one of the reasons why we’ve gotten along, and been together for as long as we have. But he wants to be accepted in ways that I just never did, and my generation never did.

A teacher reading something I wrote and slamming it made no difference to me. At college, my professor read one of the first stories I had turned in, and said, why all the brand names? Why are you mentioning the songs people are listening to, or what’s playing on TV? And my reaction was, well, this is part of the wallpaper, the background noise of their lives. That’s life. And he took me to task and said: “You’re going to end up on the ash heap of literature. If you keep writing books like this, you’re going to date yourself.” And I really didn’t care.

*

What are you reading at the moment?

Bret: A collection of essays by David Mamet, the playwright. He’s a big free speech advocate and these essays are a very interesting take: short, to the point. I’m also reading a collection of non-fiction pieces by Michel Houellebecq, which are just absolutely terrific. Mamet and Houellebecq understand our moment better than anybody; they see through the hypocrisy, what they call the “authoritarian liberalism” that has been infecting Europe as well as the United States. They locate it, they decimate it, and it’s pretty great. I’m also reading Great Expectations.

The last great book I read was The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, which I’d never read before, and it is absolutely amazing — with a spectacular ending, so terrifying. It’s just wonderful. I was also blown away by Lost Illusions by Balzac. I’m disappointed with a lot of contemporary fiction.

*

What would you have been if you had failed as a writer?

Jacob: That’s a great question. Because, Bret, when you were asked this before, you once answered that you would have been a porn star. Were you serious?

Bret: Well, I hope I would have been a successful porn star! But seriously… I don’t know. There are days when I think I am a failure.

As a writer, I’ve had a really strange career in terms of being equally liked and equally hated, never nominated for a prize. The American mainstream literary press thinks I’m a bit of a joke — they don’t really take me seriously. So I don’t wake up in my bed, clutching my Pulitzer Prize, my National Book Award, my framed great reviews in The New Yorker, whatever. I never had that kind of adulation. And I didn’t really care about any of that.

What I do care about are the tactile, tangible, pragmatic things that you have to deal with in your everyday life. You know, I have ageing parents. I have a boyfriend who went through major addiction issues two years ago. I’m really worried that this is the first time I’ve left him alone for two weeks… I’ve had major plumbing issues in my apartment for fucking ages. It’s been a Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to get the plumbing sorted and it’s so expensive. And I’ve been thinking about these things much more than I have about The Shards. That stuff really is the main part of my life and so… Failure? Success? I don’t know. I’m just a human being, with other concerns.

The Shards is published by Swift Press.