"Les Éclats" (Robert Laffont editions) appears Thursday in French, two months after the original version, which received a mixed reception in the United States.

"I am a very divisive American writer," said the author, interviewed by AFP in Paris.

The author of the bestseller "American Psycho" (1991) explains it by a positioning that does not please readers on the left or the right. In his previous book, "White", he sharply criticized the direction taken by some, the "woke" ideology. For others, he remains irretrievable, the novelist of drugs and unfettered bisexuality.

Europe cares less about putting him in boxes and he even admits to being "embarrassed" to be compared to classics like Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann, who exposes the baseness of the upper layers of society.

Kim Kardashian High School

In view of these flattering criticisms, "I am laughed at in America. In America I am divided. I have my fans, people who love me, and I have a lot of people who don't like me," he said.

"Les Éclats" is a novel of apprenticeship that illustrates Rimbaud's famous verse: "One is not serious, when one is seventeen years old".

The narrator, Bret, is a mature man who looks back on his last year of high school, at an upscale Los Angeles school, in 1981-1982. The author kept the name: Buckley, which has seen other world celebrities like actor Matthew Perry ("Friends") or Kim Kardashian.

Bret Easton Ellis at the 70th Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2013 at the Lido of Venice © GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP/Archives

Bret and his classmates live in large villas with swimming pools, come to class behind the wheel of a sports car, and their money opens all the doors for them. Sex and drugs punctuate their free time.

If the story is sprinkled with films and songs of the time, these young Californians remain perfectly uneducated. Including Bret, who wants to become a writer by describing the adventures of his peers.

Classical culture, literature? "I care. But for my characters, no," admits Bret Easton Ellis.

"Messed up"

"We were privileged. Much more privileged than I ever thought," he recalls. "The first time we started to have a little acne, hop! Overpriced dermatologist. In Beverly Hills, none of my friends had acne."

"I write about the rich and always have. I've never done anything but write a novel about the rich, and how they're out of whack, and what they go unpunished for."

Reading it in the first degree, some readers can admire its characters. Even the sadistic serial killer of "American Psycho" has his fans: "Patrick Bateman has become a meme! (viral image on the internet, Editor's note)," says his creator with dismay.

But, he adds, "I'm not going to lecture them. If people simply enjoy the pleasure of reading about the rich (...) It's funny to see them, it's nice to see them in their beautiful houses."

Bret Easton Ellis in Paris on September 20, 2019 © JOEL SAGET / AFP/Archives

For him, the challenge was to revive a vanished world. Looking up the names of his former high school classmates during the 2020 lockdown, he "found nothing, as if they had evaporated".

"There are very, very few engraved memories of that whole era," says Bret Easton Ellis. "So much has changed, these places are now tall buildings, shopping malls, etc. It haunted me."

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