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In ‘The Shards,’ Ellis melds the horror of ‘American Psycho’ with the Sherman Oaks anomie of ‘Less Than Zero.’

That feeling of rootlessness and discontent, of society coming unstuck — the academic term is anomie — definitely isn’t unique to this country, but it gets massively amplified by our national narcissism and our physical isolation.

But there is enough space, even within this anomie, to work together to carve out new understandings of gender, and reimagine the relationship between men and women.

Both Banks and Heffington make plain that what we need is not more babies, more breathless calls for more babies or more calcifying cliches about anomie.

Perhaps this is what Sultan meant when he used the word “staged,” because he is asking his dad to play a formulaic role of late-middle-age anomie.