Bret Easton Ellis’ downbeat, creepy sequel to his seminal “Less Than Zero” begins with a surprising revelation:
“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 details had been altered, and our names weren’t changed, and there was nothing in it that hadn’t actually happened.”
With that passage, Ellis informs us that Clay Easton, until now the presumed narrator of his 1985 debut, didn’t really write that book.
But he is certainly, without doubt, the fictional author of “Imperial Bedrooms.” Now middle-aged and a successful screenwriter, Clay returns to Los Angeles after a prolonged stay in New York to help with the casting of his new movie “The Listeners” — alluding to the film adaptation of Ellis’ “The Informers,” which was released last year.
This commingling of fact and fiction, which Ellis managed so well in his previous (and best) novel, “Lunar Park,” initially gives “Imperial Bedrooms” an irresistible pull. In an early flashback, Clay, his ex-girlfriend Blair and their junkie pal Julian attend a private screening of the 1987 film adaptation of “Less Than Zero” and talk about how the movie portrayed them.
“The book was blunt and had had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. . . . I also suddenly became the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use and trying to save Julian.”
But the timid film of “Less Than Zero” bore little resemblance to Ellis’ nihilistic portrayal of rich, vacuous youths in 1980s Los Angeles. And “Imperial Bedrooms” reminds you that Clay is no one’s idea of a moral compass. Ellis has an uncanny ability to conjure up unspeakably dark evil beneath glittering surfaces, and, 25 years later, L.A. has become even more treacherous and toxic. Instead of snuff films and gang rape, it is now rife with murders and executions, many connected to the film industry, which has rarely been depicted with such venom.
Because of Clay’s profession, Hollywood is the focus of “Imperial Bedrooms.” The plot consists of Clay’s infatuation with Rain Turner, a beautiful young actress who sleeps with him to land an audition for “The Listeners.”
Clay knows she has zero chance of getting the part, but he falls so hard for her that he strings her along, dangling the role so she won’t leave his side. His ex, Blair, is so bitter she can barely speak to him, while Julian appears to have cleaned up his act and kicked his heroin habit (but not his tendency for shady, dangerous business).
Clay’s former coke dealer, Rip Millar, also returns, playing a much more prominent role and sporting the unnatural look of too much cosmetic surgery. “I’m so alarmed by his appearance, I don’t recognize Rip at first. His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized.”
“Imperial Bedrooms” — which, like “Less Than Zero,” takes its title from an Elvis Costello song — has more plot than its predecessor had. Clay starts receiving ominous text messages from blocked phone numbers (“I’m watching you”). A blue Jeep follows him everywhere he goes, and someone visits his apartment whenever he’s not home.
But Ellis has never been much for thorough story structure, and although Rain makes for an intriguing femme fatale, the character feels like a plot device, never a real person, and the central mystery, when resolved, amounts to less than zero.
The real subject of “Imperial Bedrooms” is the film industry and the lengths to which people will go in order to break into it. Ellis has been working in Hollywood for several years now, and, as in his first novel, he’s simply writing about what he knows. Although he’s improved considerably since his debut, which he wrote at 21, Ellis still delivers that “Less Than Zero” feeling with long, rambling sentences that stir something akin to nostalgia in anyone who read the novel when it was first published.
But the Hollywood as Hades theme is well-worn, and these characters are no longer as compelling as they once were. Part of the notoriety that fueled the success of “Less Than Zero” was its depiction of ruined, zonked-out youth — of people barely out of their teens, or still in them, exposed to a world that would make most adults blanch.
“Imperial Bedrooms” is more of a sigh of lament about an insular, privileged world. “Sadness,” Clay thinks, “is everywhere.”
Ellis is still capable of shocking you when he wants to: The occasional violence approaches “American Psycho” levels, and the book’s final pages carry a wallop of a revelation about our most unreliable of narrators. But the novel ultimately doesn’t amount to anything — a slight story about beautiful, ugly people, improbable conspiracies and riddles with answers you couldn’t care less about.
FICTION
Imperial Bedrooms
by Bret Easton Ellis, $25
