Eldritch
06-26-2010, 10:56 PM
I liked Ellis' first four novels, thought the last two (Glamorama and Lunar Park) were both utterly unreadable garbage. Now he's back with his sevent novel:
Imperial Bedrooms
By Bret Easton Ellis
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GFeMYOcnQuM/S7A2XQY6QHI/AAAAAAAAAr4/0Hjs_CWs2EU/s1600/BEE+Imperial+Bedrooms.jpg
For any reader familiar with Bret Easton Ellis' oeuvre, the pages of Imperial Bedrooms will offer a strong sense of deja vu - and not just because this novel is intended as a sequel to Less Than Zero, Ellis' breakthrough novel that, 25 years ago, launched him as the voice of America's emotionally inert, coked-up, overprivileged youth.
Nor will the book seem familiar just because it begins with the story of the publication of Less Than Zero, told from the perspective of its protagonist, Clay (who, in a neat trick of authorial self-abnegation, decries Ellis for "showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all").
No, Imperial Bedrooms is familiar because it's pretty much all of Ellis' books, rolled up into one. It's Less Than Zero crossed with name-dropping Glamorama and paranoiac Lunar Park (plus occasional violent speckles of American Psycho), a vast spiral of postmodern self-referentiality that will leave your head spinning. Imperial Bedrooms can be held up as the very definition of authorly meta: Ellis is either so deeply enmeshed in his own creepy little insular world that he can't write his way out of it, or else he is such a genius that he's created an entire parallel universe that folds and unfolds on itself like some kind of Escher print.
Imperial Bedrooms is not another story about lost, nihilistic teens doing decadently horrible things to themselves and others. It's a story of those teens grown up into despicable adults, doing even worse things, mostly to others. Clay's all grown up now, and whatever redeeming qualities he once had have long-since vanished in an alcoholic haze. Now he's a self-absorbed, middle-aged screenwriter of middling success who dyes his hair and wears age-inappropriate surf shirts and coerces actresses (and actors) to have sex with him in exchange for nonexistent parts in his films. He is, in modern parlance, a sleazeball.
The story begins when Clay arrives back in Los Angeles to help cast his new film, The Listeners (a riff on The Informers, which Ellis himself adapted into a film last year). He drinks his way through a series of parties, bumping into the entire cast of characters from Less Than Zero: His ex-girlfriend Blair (still the moral center of Ellis' work) and her Hollywood manager husband, Trent; his former dealer Rip (now a malevolent club owner); and the surprisingly hapless Julian, whose former hustling skills have been put to work managing a hush-hush escort service.
What starts out as a tour of the emphatic emptiness of the Hollywood scene - all bad plastic surgery and vulgar sexuality and aggressive self-aggrandizement - takes a left turn when Clay takes up with a mysterious young actress named Rain Turner. Suddenly, we're in the middle of a noirish thriller, where gruesome murders are taking place in Palm Springs, shady business deals are being negotiated in darkened high-rises, and pretty much every character is double-timing (or triple-timing) everyone else. Who's driving the green Jeep that's stalking Clay? Who isn't Rain sleeping with? Is Clay hallucinating, or is someone really breaking into his condo to scribble text from Less Than Zero on his bathroom mirror?
In many ways, Imperial Bedrooms is a return to form for Ellis, after the stylistic departure that was Lunar Park (a comparatively conventional genre thriller starring a famous author named Bret Easton Ellis). Here are the short choppy chapters; the flat run-on passages; the authorial ennui and banal recitation of brand names - all of which felt fresh when he premiered them in Less Than Zero and now have been cribbed by two decades worth of Comp Lit majors.
One thing this book does have that Less Than Zero didn't is a plot. Even though a character warns, early on, that "this isn't a script. Not everything's going to come together in the third act," at least a few of the book's mysteries are ultimately resolved.
...
"It makes me wonder what else isn't real," a character in Imperial Bedrooms muses, at one point.
"That's because you're a writer ..." responds another. "Writers tend to worry about things like that."
Perhaps, for his next endeavor, Ellis should stop worrying and start looking for the exit of his own personal rabbit hole.
Link. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/RVD51DTNOL.DTL)
Imperial Bedrooms
By Bret Easton Ellis
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GFeMYOcnQuM/S7A2XQY6QHI/AAAAAAAAAr4/0Hjs_CWs2EU/s1600/BEE+Imperial+Bedrooms.jpg
For any reader familiar with Bret Easton Ellis' oeuvre, the pages of Imperial Bedrooms will offer a strong sense of deja vu - and not just because this novel is intended as a sequel to Less Than Zero, Ellis' breakthrough novel that, 25 years ago, launched him as the voice of America's emotionally inert, coked-up, overprivileged youth.
Nor will the book seem familiar just because it begins with the story of the publication of Less Than Zero, told from the perspective of its protagonist, Clay (who, in a neat trick of authorial self-abnegation, decries Ellis for "showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all").
No, Imperial Bedrooms is familiar because it's pretty much all of Ellis' books, rolled up into one. It's Less Than Zero crossed with name-dropping Glamorama and paranoiac Lunar Park (plus occasional violent speckles of American Psycho), a vast spiral of postmodern self-referentiality that will leave your head spinning. Imperial Bedrooms can be held up as the very definition of authorly meta: Ellis is either so deeply enmeshed in his own creepy little insular world that he can't write his way out of it, or else he is such a genius that he's created an entire parallel universe that folds and unfolds on itself like some kind of Escher print.
Imperial Bedrooms is not another story about lost, nihilistic teens doing decadently horrible things to themselves and others. It's a story of those teens grown up into despicable adults, doing even worse things, mostly to others. Clay's all grown up now, and whatever redeeming qualities he once had have long-since vanished in an alcoholic haze. Now he's a self-absorbed, middle-aged screenwriter of middling success who dyes his hair and wears age-inappropriate surf shirts and coerces actresses (and actors) to have sex with him in exchange for nonexistent parts in his films. He is, in modern parlance, a sleazeball.
The story begins when Clay arrives back in Los Angeles to help cast his new film, The Listeners (a riff on The Informers, which Ellis himself adapted into a film last year). He drinks his way through a series of parties, bumping into the entire cast of characters from Less Than Zero: His ex-girlfriend Blair (still the moral center of Ellis' work) and her Hollywood manager husband, Trent; his former dealer Rip (now a malevolent club owner); and the surprisingly hapless Julian, whose former hustling skills have been put to work managing a hush-hush escort service.
What starts out as a tour of the emphatic emptiness of the Hollywood scene - all bad plastic surgery and vulgar sexuality and aggressive self-aggrandizement - takes a left turn when Clay takes up with a mysterious young actress named Rain Turner. Suddenly, we're in the middle of a noirish thriller, where gruesome murders are taking place in Palm Springs, shady business deals are being negotiated in darkened high-rises, and pretty much every character is double-timing (or triple-timing) everyone else. Who's driving the green Jeep that's stalking Clay? Who isn't Rain sleeping with? Is Clay hallucinating, or is someone really breaking into his condo to scribble text from Less Than Zero on his bathroom mirror?
In many ways, Imperial Bedrooms is a return to form for Ellis, after the stylistic departure that was Lunar Park (a comparatively conventional genre thriller starring a famous author named Bret Easton Ellis). Here are the short choppy chapters; the flat run-on passages; the authorial ennui and banal recitation of brand names - all of which felt fresh when he premiered them in Less Than Zero and now have been cribbed by two decades worth of Comp Lit majors.
One thing this book does have that Less Than Zero didn't is a plot. Even though a character warns, early on, that "this isn't a script. Not everything's going to come together in the third act," at least a few of the book's mysteries are ultimately resolved.
...
"It makes me wonder what else isn't real," a character in Imperial Bedrooms muses, at one point.
"That's because you're a writer ..." responds another. "Writers tend to worry about things like that."
Perhaps, for his next endeavor, Ellis should stop worrying and start looking for the exit of his own personal rabbit hole.
Link. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/RVD51DTNOL.DTL)