My brother has been telling me to read Bret Easton Ellis for a long time now. He has recommended that I read American Psycho, then teasingly taken back the recommendation – maybe it’s too gory for me, he says (I have seen the movie – surely not more gory than that? apparently it is?). So sometime last fall I found a copy of The Rules of Attraction in my hands, and it took all of about one afternoon to read. I wasn’t sure what I thought of the book, wasn’t sure what I’d taken away from it. I’m still not?
But when Imperial Bedrooms came out earlier in the month, I bought a copy, along with a copy of Less Than Zero, which is Ellis’s debut novel, and the novel to which Imperial Bedrooms is the sequel. Incredibly, Ellis wrote Less Than Zero (also a movie I haven’t seen, but which is referenced in Imperial Bedrooms) when he was 20. I read it yesterday in a few hours. If American Psycho is disturbing, well, I can’t see how Less Than Zero is much less disturbing; without the gore, perhaps, but disturbing nonetheless. It’s a window into this alien world (to me, and I felt so naive reading it, my cat curled in my lap and a cup of tea next to me – all rather distant from Ellis’s characters, who snort mountains of cocaine first thing in the morning), which is set in LA, where everybody’s young and tan and rich and nobody has any sense of what is right, or if they do, they don’t show it, and they all seem so horribly bored and drugged and indifferent – I’ve never read anything like it. It is one thing to imagine being so indifferent to the world; it’s another to read Ellis’s brilliantly-crafted dialogue and realize that it had to have come from SOMEWHERE. Creepy.
Anyway, I finished Less Than Zero and wondered if, as the author of the book, Ellis had experienced, even fractionally, the life in LA he set out for his characters – and if he had, then how, um, was he still alive? hadn’t he died of a drug overdose yet? or crashed a car while driving drunk? or contracted some sort of disease from…anything, needles, strangers?
Well: not only is Ellis still alive, but lots of his characters from Less Than Zero are too – and Imperial Bedrooms is all about them. It’s a much more plot-driven book than its predecessor. I like that. It’s a thriller, too (apt that he quotes Raymond Chandler at the beginning of the book). Once again, it’s set in LA, and all our morally decrepit characters from L.T.Z. are middle aged but, in many cases, surgically altered so that they don’t look like it. They’re still tan, maybe not doing as much cocaine?, and at various stages either are or are not talking to each other over issues pertaining largely to sex and drugs. Nothing’s changed for these guys except now they use iPhones instead of payphones.
Ellis’s characters are bad people. And bad things happen to them. But Ellis writes great dialogue and his books are revealing and exciting. Imperial Bedrooms utilizes the same formula of sex, drugs, and ambivalence as Less Than Zero (and The Rules of Attraction, for that matter), but what keeps it from being tiresome is the thrill of its plot. It’s just a pity that it took Ellis four years to write – and isn’t quite 170 pages long.
Susie
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