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kill me now.
From ‘Less Than Zero’ to More Anomie
By JANET MASLIN
IMPERIAL BEDROOMS
Bret Easton Ellis’s “Imperial Bedrooms” can be described euphemistically as an extension of, sequel to, meditation on or deliberately cobwebby meta-reworking of “Less Than Zero,” the debut novel that put its disaffected young author on the map 25 years ago. It can also be seen as an act of desperation, and it may be all of the above. Whatever its genesis, what this vacant new book does best is demonstrate that there are more ways to be bored and boring in Los Angeles in 2010 than there were in 1985.
Back in the day Mr. Ellis’s restless, druggy characters had to drift around in expensive cars, leaf through magazines, develop anorexia and watch pornography on Betamax cassettes with the sound turned down. Now, thanks to the iPhone, the Internet and their having grown older, the same people have found new ways to stay unamused.
So Clay, Mr. Ellis’s autobiographical main character in both books, can notice a friend’s grotesquely bad cosmetic surgery. He can snort cocaine and watch “The Hills.” He can check out an aspiring actress’s screen credits on the Internet Movie Database and decide they don’t count for much. He can notice that she’s getting to be past her prime, “and it will not be fun to watch her grow old.” It’s not fun to watch Clay grow old either. As “Imperial Bedrooms” begins, he is whinging that “someone we knew” wrote an unflattering book about Clay and his friends, and that the book was made into a movie. “The writer,” as Clay calls that parasitic author, sounds a lot like Mr. Ellis. Clay resents him for turning Clay into “the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness.” But Clay, who seems to resemble Mr. Ellis, has no business complaining about any other writers “showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.” He, Clay, has gotten mileage out of the horror-of-it-all bit too.
“Imperial Bedrooms” barely has time to set up this hall-of-mirrors conceit before abandoning it. The narrative stays with Clay and reintroduces his “Less Than Zero” crew. Clay is now a successful writer himself, having created “The Listeners” (Mr. Ellis wrote “The Informers”), and he has come to Los Angeles to work on the movie adaptation. The film version of “The Informers” was released in 2008.
Anyone with the determination to find cleverness in “Imperial Bedrooms” can spot its in-joke parallels with “Less Than Zero.” Locations are revisited. Events are echoed. Clay’s girlfriend, Blair, told him he looked pale at the start of that first book, and she’s still telling him that at the end of “Imperial Bedrooms.” In between Mr. Ellis has written “The Rules of Attraction,” “American Psycho,” “The Informers,” “Glamorama” and “Lunar Park.” Hit or miss, each of those books had more vigor than this one.
Clay settles into the condominium that he bought from the parents of “a wealthy West Hollywood party boy.” It’s typical of Mr. Ellis to write a very long descriptive sentence about the soft beiges and recessed lighting and white-tiled balcony of the place while making only passing, casual reference to the party boy’s death. It’s also very like him to make the apartment a backdrop for casual cruelty. After all, Los Angeles is full of actors. Actors seem willing to do anything if Clay will help them land roles in “The Listeners.” And a book of Mr. Ellis’s is nowhere without a mean streak.
Clay meets his match in a manipulative actress named Rain, who turns up at a Christmas party. (“Less Than Zero” also took place at Christmastime.) “Do you want to be in a movie?” he asks her. Her reply: “Why? Do you have a movie you want to put me in?” Has Mr. Ellis written that as a self-consciously vapid exchange, a reflection of the film business’s shallow opportunism and Clay’s inability to make real human connections? Or is he just being lazily uninspired? Either way, the same tone persists throughout “Imperial Bedrooms,” as the book develops genre aspirations and sets up a pattern of exaggerated noir menace that is more talk than action. As in: “You don’t even realize how afraid you should be, do you?” Clay is told. And: “It’s much more complicated than you know.” And: “It’s just ... bigger than you think.”
Julian, a “Less Than Zero” holdover (memorably played in the movie by Robert Downey Jr.), has been horribly murdered. Clay thinks someone is following him. Threatening text messages either contemplate the banality of text messaging or embody the multiple possibilities of this new writing form. For whatever reason, Mr. Ellis sees fit to include this: “why are u with him? Why Are You With Him??? WHY ARE YOU WITH HIM???”
Somewhere beyond this posturing there’s an element of real malaise in “Imperial Bedrooms.” The anomie and plot-derived menace may be contrived, but there’s a dread that feels genuine — and not because the book actually includes the line, “Sadness: it’s everywhere.” It’s the sense that options have narrowed for Mr. Ellis, whose most polarizing (“American Psycho”) or wild-eyed books (“Lunar Park”) have turned out to be his most vital ones.
Despite Chip Kidd’s cover art, which features a traffic-stopping Satanic image and Mr. Ellis’s name in the book-jacket equivalent of big red neon letters, “Imperial Bedrooms” is without shock value. It’s a work of limited imagination that all too deftly simulates the effects of having no imagination at all.
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