Bret Easton Ellis, the ageing enfant terrible of American letters, first gained notoriety long before American Psycho, with his 1985 novel Less Than Zero. Published before he left university, and adapted into a cult film, it detailed, in Ellis’s own words, “a wealthy, alienated young man’s Christmas break from an eastern college in Los Angeles — more specifically Beverly Hills — and all the parties he wandered through and all the drugs he consumed and all the girls and boys he had sex with and all the friends he passively watched drift into addiction, prostitution and vast apathy”.
Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel of sorts, catching up with his blank-eyed, damaged party boys and girls a quarter of a century later. Where, in the first novel, though, they were neglected by their parents and exploited by other adults, in this one they themselves have become hardened exploiters: directors, agents or pimps, preying on aspiring actors and actresses.
As in its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms sees the narrator Clay (now a screenwriter) returning to Los Angeles at Christmas, and follows his progress around a series of parties and unwholesome sexual encounters. After a bit of self-referential game-playing — “They had made a movie about us,” says Clay, before complaining about his own depiction by Ellis in Less than Zero — it settles down to become a kind of thriller. Where that book was plotless, repetitive and circular, this one is densely, even hectically plotted. Carrying an epigraph from Raymond Chandler, it is a murder mystery — a woozy, paranoid, hallucinatory version of LA noir.
Early on, Clay reveals that one of the main characters will be brutally killed. On the way back from the airport, he finds himself being followed by a green Jeep; soon after, he realises that someone is breaking into his condo and rearranging things. At a party he meets a beautiful femme fatale, who may or may not be called Rain, and he demands sex from her in return for getting her an audition for a film he has written. As Clay becomes increasingly obsessed with her, he learns that she is linked with the strange disappearance of an acquaintance called Kelly Montrose. Behind it all is the figure of Rip Millar, last seen in Less Than Zero leading the gang rape of a young girl, and now so transformed by debauchery and cosmetic surgery that his sudden appearance at Clay’s elbow in a hotel lobby leaves him terrified: “He looks like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed.”
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Relentless, glib and frequently loathsome, Ellis’s novels inspire a strong desire to condemn. As Norman Mailer put it: “How one wishes this writer was without talent!” But at his best, he is very smart and funny, with an eye for a resonant story, a good ear for a certain kind of drawled dialogue and a convincing command of social detail. On the downside, however, his books tend to bang away at one idea ad nauseam. (As has often been said, American Psycho could have made its point about consumer nihilism on Wall Street at novella length. At 400 pages, it is probably unfinishable, except by adolescents and sociopaths.) And then, of course, there’s the brutality. Ellis’s stories start as social comedies and end up as depictions of souls in hell. En route, gruesome violence, and particularly sexual violence, is a vital way station.
Imperial Bedrooms is no exception. Having started as an artful, sinister take on a familiar genre, it descends into a phantasmagoria involving torture, online snuff videos and the appalling abuse of prostitutes and rent boys. Ellis claims to be a moralist, by which I guess he means that it is the emptiness of the modern world that causes his characters to behave in a spectacularly louche and/or homicidal fashion. But as with many satirists, it is unclear whether he is criticising the horrors he depicts, or simply wallowing in them.
Either way, Ellis’s determination to rub the reader’s face in the gore carries some heavy costs. Many people have no strong desire to read sustained passages of pornographic and misogynistic violence, in which, for instance, masked men urinate on a bound actress, “an eyeball is dislodged, bulging from its socket” etc, etc. These sequences also chip away at the novel’s realistic texture, and leave you wondering if Imperial Bedrooms has any meaning, beyond that of the average slasher film.