Donna Tartt is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, and is currently at work on a third novel. Read her review of Imperial Bedrooms:
As Dante’s hell is circular, so is Bret Easton Ellis’s L.A. Everywhere in Imperial Bedrooms there is a sense of time frozen, time collapsed and time rounding back on itself in various diabolical ways. The novel marks a return to the characters of Less Than Zero, twenty-five years on, where it’s still the same old scene, camera flashes and sun-blinded gloss--only this time, there’s a persistent echo of unease, the sadness of moving in a young world while no longer young in it. Clay, casting teenagers for his eighties period film, ominously named "The Listeners," finds himself eyeing the sixteen-year-old actors dressed in the style of his youth and thinking they are friends of his, though of course they aren’t. His old friend Julian, affable as usual, is rumored to be running a teenage hooker service ("Like old times," as Clay comments acidly), while Rip, he of the trust fund that "might never run out," is in his middle age so disfigured from plastic surgery as to be practically unrecognizable, though he still has the whispery voice of the handsome boy he once was.
This is the most Chandleresque of Bret’s books, and the most deeply steeped in L.A. noir. No one is trustworthy; everyone is playing everyone else. Moreover, as in all Bret’s novels, fiction collides with reality, and fiction with fiction. Clay is being followed, for reasons he comes to suspect may have to do with the girl he’s fallen for. There are mysterious texts (from a dead boy? the previous tenant of Clay’s apartment?) a message written in red on a bathroom mirror: Disappear here. Running throughout are cocktail-party rumors of vans in the desert, ski masks, chains and mutilations, mass graves, a videotaped execution, though--as will be no surprise to any reader of Bret’s books---the rumors aren’t entirely rumors, in fact, the truth is rather worse than anything one has imagined. But what stays with one is not so much the concluding note of betrayal and horror as the mournfulness of the book, its eerie sense of stasis: clear skies, vacuum-sealed calm, the BlackBerry flashing on the nightstand in the middle of the night, everywhere the subliminal hum of menace, while the surgically-altered Rip brings his lips close to the ear and whispers in a voice so quiet as to almost be swallowed by the surrounding emptiness: Descansado. Relax.
(Photo © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)
While critics fondly recalled Ellis's groundbreaking debut, they denounced this follow-up, although equally grim, as repetitive and trite. "Who needs to read fictionalized accounts of the rich and wasted when we are constantly bombarded by the real thing?" demands the Dallas Morning News. Part of the way through Ellis's reexploration of Hollywood's moral vacuum, "the book develops genre aspirations" (New York Times) and expands into a lackluster whodunit--ostensibly a tribute to Raymond Chandler, but also, perhaps, an acknowledgment that the story lacks the power it had in 1985. One-dimensional characters and gratuitous violence blight the story further. Readers who cherished Less Than Zero will have to decide how much they really want to catch up with Clay, Blair, Julian, and Rip.
Review
“Taut and ultimately terrifying….In six novels, the author has emerged as one of the most gifted and serious novelists working in America today.” —Hari Kunzru, Financial Times
“Brutally conceived, and effectively done….There is no doubt that Ellis retains the ability to startle and disquiet.” —Stephen Abell, The Times Literary Supplement
“Ellis remains a bold ignorer of literary boundaries. Imperial Bedrooms is but another unexpected swerve in a wonderfully weird career.” J. Robert Lennon, London Review of Books
“Enough talk of [Ellis's] literary genius, let's call him what he really is: a terrific horror writer. Imperial Bedrooms is an absolute creepfest [and] a festival of panting paranoia.” —Thomas Conner, Chicago Sun-Times
“A profoundly talented—and occasionally even brilliant—writer…Ellis has a fictional territory all his own and, heaven forbid, a mastery there.” —Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
“A page-turning read [with] a sneaky subtlety…Holding a mirror to our desires, Ellis shows us how much scarier what we think we want can be when severed from even the possibility of innocence, [employing] noirish staples to lure his reader along while subtly circling back to the older—and more frightening—theme: the dead soul.” —Michael McGregor, The Oregonian
“This is the most Chandleresque of Bret’s books, and the most deeply steeped in L.A. noir…As Dante’s hell is circular, so is [Ellis’s] L.A. Everywhere in Imperial Bedrooms there is a sense of time frozen, time collapsed and time rounding back on itself in various diabolical ways…What stays with [the reader] is not so much the concluding note of betrayal and horror as the mournfulness of the book, its eerie sense of stasis: clear skies, vacuum-sealed calm, the BlackBerry flashing on the nightstand in the middle of the night, everywhere the subliminal hum of menace.” —Donna Tartt, Amazon.com
“A page-turner…Imperial Bedrooms is a quicker, more controlled fire than its predecessor, and, like a good showman, Ellis has learned to save the best of the novel’s many tricks for last…Devastating…Old age and treachery have served Bret Easton Ellis quite well.” —Foster Kamer, The Village Voice
"Arrestingly spare…Imperial Bedrooms will leave you feeling bruised, guarded and a little nervous about noises at night…What you really notice is Ellis's newfound love of noir. He's reinvigorated and ready to get mysterious and mean…As ever, Ellis's details crystallize into elegant remoteness (and) if this is shallowness, the word needs a new definition." —Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
“It’s worth following Ellis down this rabbit hole.” —Sam Kaplan, Philadelphia City Paper
“Hypnotic…A haunting vision of disillusionment, 21st-century style.” —People Magazine
“This sequel is very much on target…[Ellis] uses the thriller framework to infuse nerve-rending unease into this look at Tinseltown mores, a dissection that also comes nicely weighted with both bleak hilarity and firsthand authorial experience.” —Clark Collis, Entertainment Weekly
“Visceral and often harrowing, Ellis delivers a work that matches such career peaks as Lunar Park and the infamous American Psycho…It is remarkable how [he] has tailored the narrative in exactly the same style as the original novel, yet offering an assured and mature voice to chronicle Clay’s nightmarish return to L.A.” —Jorge Carreon, The Examiner
“Reading Ellis is a thrilling and strangely voyeuristic experience, [and] you can’t look away.” —Venus Zine
“Its dirty charms are indisputable.” —Amy Grace Lloyd, Playboy Magazine
“Ellis explores what disillusioned youth looks like twenty-five year later in this brutal sequel to Less Than Zero….The story takes on a creepy noirish bent as it barrels toward a conclusion that reveals the horror that lies at the center of a tortured soul….Though the novel's synchronicity with Zero is sublime, this also works as a stellar stand-alone.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
About the Author
Bret Easton Ellis is also the author of American Psycho, Glamorama, The Informers, Less Than Zero, Lunar Park and The Rules of Attraction. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. He lives in Los Angeles.
From The Washington Post
In the past quarter-century, Bret Easton Ellis has produced less an oeuvre than a franchise, a series of storyboard-simple tales that riff on its origin myth, "Less Than Zero." His plots revel in the narcotized demimonde of celebrity and its wicked forms of sycophancy. His initial effort, written when Ellis was just 20, reads now like a literary growth spurt, a writer's sudden awareness that there's a book in the whole swirl of adult problems as experienced by kids. There was, of course, more than a book -- a Robert Downey Jr. movie and several similar fever-dreamy books and now, inevitably, a sequel.
To a reader anywhere near Ellis's age when "Less Than Zero" appeared in 1985, that first book presented itself as a generational testimony of a sexy subset of Angelenos but served more widely as a voyeuristic report for those less practiced in bingeing and bisexuality. It was not America's first soft-core young adult novel -- Judy Blume's "Forever" comes to mind, indelibly -- but "Less" was a decidedly ambitious attempt to redo "Fear of Flying" as "Fear of Merging."
In "Imperial Bedrooms," Ellis returns to his crime scenes and finds that his characters have aged but not matured. Clay is again the narrator, and his affinity for Los Angeles's seamy side is as keen as when he was a jaded student returning home from college, cavorting with the melodramatic Blair and the tragic Julian. Now a novelist-turned-screenwriter, Clay continues his higher learning through the new generation of prescription drugs and ingénues. An incoming class of pretty women wants to be discovered, and the big reveal in Clay's own personal reality show pivots on his discovery that young talent is secretly reliant on the oldest profession.
C'mon, the casting couch is old enough to have lost its springiness, and yet Clay, after all these years, is somehow putty in one comely gamine's hands. But when the plot slows toward the third act, Ellis molds him into an antagonist a la "American Psycho," another of the author's novels that sketched out what became another brightly gloomy B-movie. Clay is at the height of his powers, and he manipulates a no-name starlet into something resembling sex slavery. Actually, Rain Turner, with her marquee-ready name, is complicit but not complex. Forced sex reads like just idle rutting, and even as the characters get caught in an escalating volley of pain and vengeance, all the on-demand coupling gets monotonous and, eventually, gross.
I'm not complaining about the libertinism; I don't doubt it's real and worth documenting. Write a clever, circuitous road map to the sexual frontier, and I'll follow. But by now Ellis and his characters should be sufficiently acquainted with the movies -- porn included -- to understand that the best scenes are when the actors make out like they mean it. Late in the game, Ellis warns that there will be payback but no payoff. "This isn't a script," Julian tells Clay. "It's not going to add up. Not everything's going to come together in the third act."
Just as Clay wastes his talent so, too, has Ellis. After all this time, his characters have squandered and regained and squandered privilege and status, yet they still seem captives of their glamorous trappings: blasé at Golden Globe parties, stalked by ominous SUVs, hung over in glass-walled condos. It's all told in truly, madly, deadly prose: "At the casting sessions it was all boys and though I wasn't exactly bored I didn't need to be there, and songs constantly floating in the car keep commenting on everything neutral encased within the windshield's frame . . . and the fear builds into a muted fury and then has no choice but to melt away into a simple and addictive sadness."
In places, Ellis's writing veers into a minimalist neo-noir, as if Raymond Carver could be mashed up with Raymond Chandler, but sometimes less is simply less. Describing numbness is as futile as describing boredom -- or worse, describing dreams, and for ridiculous purposes, Ellis relies on a recurring one to haunt Clay's remnant conscience.
To his credit, Ellis proved he was on to something a quarter century ago, and I fear that his new premonitions about technology and torture may come true. He did popularize present-tense narration and song-title book titles, and he's still pledging allegiance to Elvis Costello and Warren Zevon, all the while seeking some allegiance from cool-kid cognoscenti, or anyone slouching in Band of Outsiders suits, slurping Belvedere on the rocks. Ellis's curation of surface is as kitschy and catchy as Andy Warhol's silk-screens and Jeff Koons's sculptures. He bought in early on the mania for L.A.'s modernism and similarly understood, through Julian, the iconic value of Richard Gere's heavy-lidded languor in "American Gigolo." Novelist Bruce Wagner, through his cellphone trilogy, appears to be both an Ellis heir and rival, as do the cinematic yet vacuous TV spectacles like "Gossip Girl" on the CW or MTV's "The Hills."
Midway through "Imperial Bedrooms," the narrator finds out that his transactional relationship with Rain, propelled by breathless texts and lurid jpegs, is actually a bizarre love triangle. Then it's a rectangle. Then it's a metastasizing polygon that accumulates more and more sides but never any new dimensions.
Reviewed by Ned Martel
Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few detailshad been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlookingthe Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away. Other examples: my girlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons belowMulholland, and a Christmas Eve dinner at Chasen's with my family that I had casually complained about to the author was faithfully rendered. And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang-raped--I was in that room in West Hollywood with the writer, who inthe book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed to accurately describe how I had actually felt that night--the desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy whom the girl I was dating had halfway fallen in love with.But the writer would never fully return her love because he was too lost in his own passivity to make the connection she needed from him, and so she had turned to me, but by then it was too late, and because the writer resented that she had turned to me I becamethe handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understoodhow anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.
The scenes from the novel that hurt the most chronicled my relationship with Blair, especially in a scene near the novel's end when I broke it off with her on a restaurant patio overlooking Sunset Boulevard and where a billboard that read disappear herekept distracting me (the author added that I was wearing sunglasses when I told Blair that I never loved her). I hadn't mentioned that painful afternoon to the author but it appeared verbatim in the book and that's when I stopped talking to Blair and couldn'tlisten to the Elvis Costello songs we knew by heart ("You Little Fool," "Man Out of Time," "Watch Your Step") and yes, she had given me a scarf at a Christmas party, and yes, she had danced over to me mouthing Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?"and yes, she had called me "a fox," and yes, she found out I had slept with a girl I picked up on a rainy night at the Whisky, and yes, the author had informed her of that. He wasn't, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close toany of us--except of course to Blair, and really not even to her. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference,the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.
But there was no point in being angry with him. When the book was published in the spring of 1985, the author had already left Los Angeles. In 1982 he attended the same small college in New Hampshire that I'd tried to disappear into, and where we had littleor no contact. (There's a chapter in his second novel, which takes place at Camden, where he parodies Clay--just another gesture, another cruel reminder of how he felt about me. Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anythingin the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.") Because of his presence I stayed at Camden only one year and then transferred to Brown in 1983 though in the second novel I'm still in New Hampshireduring the fall term of 1985. I told myself it shouldn't bother me, but the success of the first book hovered within my sight lines for an uncomfortably long time. This partly had to do with my wanting to become a writer as well, and that I had wanted to writethat first novel the author had written after I finished reading it--it was my life and he had hijacked it. But I quickly had to accept that I didn't have the talent or the drive. I didn't have the patience. I just wanted to be able to do it. I made a few lame,slashing attempts and realized after graduating from Brown in 1986 that it was never going to happen.
The only person who expressed any embarrassment or disdain about the novel was Julian Wells--Blair was still in love with the author and didn't care, nor did much of the supporting cast--but Julian did so in a gleefully arrogant manner that verged on excitement,even though the author had exposed not only Julian's heroin addiction but also the fact that he was basically a hustler in debt to a drug dealer (Finn Delaney) and pimped out to men visiting from Manhattan or Chicago or San Francisco in the hotels that linedSunset from Beverly Hills to Silver Lake. Julian, wasted and self-pitying, had told the author everything, and there was something about the book being widely read and costarring Julian that seemed to give Julian some kind of focus that bordered on hope andI think he was secretly pleased with it because Julian had no shame--he only pretended that he did. And Julian was even more excited when the movie version opened in the fall of 1987, just two years after the novel was published.
I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasn't clean yet and kept bitinghis nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation. (I saw Blair walk in with Alana and Kim and trailing Rip Millar. I ignored her.) The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything--allthe pain I felt, the betrayal--I couldn't help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereasthe movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn't recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the characterthe author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. ("I'll sell my car," I warn the actorplaying Julian's dealer. "Whatever it takes.") This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group--jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalizedversion of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. "Be good to her," Julian tells Clay. "She really deserves it." The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must havemade the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.
As the movie glided across the giant screen, restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience--the book's actual cast--quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was becausethere was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material--surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality--had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir--the cinematography was breathtaking--andI sighed as it kept streaming forward, interested in only a few things: the new and gentle details of my parents mildly amused me, as did Blair finding her divorced father with his girlfriend on Christmas Eve instead of with a boy named Jared (Blair's fatherdied of AIDS in 1992 while still married to Blair's mother). But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because inthe book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the lastten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a beat before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm treesas I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.
The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment buildingin Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed--his face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself--and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner's office counted one hundred ...
