imperial bedrooms: a review

i was somewhat concerned when i read, a few months ago, that bret easton ellis would be publishing a sequel to his first novel, less than zero. less than zero is one of my favorite books. i read it for the first time many years ago, when i was way too young to be reading it, because i found it in my brother's room. the cover was a photo of the three principals from the horrific movie version and i no longer have the book because i read it so many times that it fell apart.

i didn't see myself in any of the characters but i loved the way it was written and it reminded me in some ways of the catcher in the rye. both are books about young men (clay is 18, holden is probably 16) who are obsessed with how people see them and who spend a short period of time wandering somewhat aimlessly around the cities where they grew up, which they no longer recognize. this is not to say that less than zero was my catcher in the rye; no, the original, which i read in seventh grade, was fine for that.

i didn't like the violence in less than zero but i took it in stride. i felt like there was more to clay, which we get a bit of in the flashbacks and in how he talks about his grandmother. he seems shocked by some of what his friends are up to in LA after having been gone for only a few months. there's a little paranoia--what is up with the "disappear here" signs?--but it's not overwhelming. not, say, like the paranoia in glamorama, a book so ahead of its time that it probably wouldn't be published now. i should read it again. not like the paranoia in lunar park, my least favorite BEE novel.

so, on to imperial bedrooms. we are back with clay, 20-odd years later. the book opens with him talking about how someone wrote a book about him and his friends and then the book was made into a movie--how meta! clay is a screenwriter (of course) back in LA for an indefinite period of time after living in NYC. the idea of clay in NYC brings to mind alvy singer in los angeles with more perversion and less laughs.

clay ends up at a party at blair's house where he meets an aspiring actress named rain who wants a part in a movie he's written and which he's producing. he falls for her and she becomes his downfall. in ways that are not entirely clear even after reading the book, clay gets entrapped into a complex scheme involving rain, julian (who was running some kind of prostitution ring that rain was a part of), rip, rain's roommate, and another actor named kelly who was murdered (perhaps by mexican drug dealers). toward the end of the book, there is the typical BEE sexual violence but it feels--even more than in other books--wholly unnecessary and since i don't remember clay this way from less than zero, it even feels out of character.

and that's my biggest problem with the book. we know clay. we have known him for a long time, even if we've been out of touch, so to speak. he does things in this book that don't make sense and since we have been out of touch so long, BEE doesn't let us know what happened to clay in the interim that would make him into this type of person that he supposedly hated and do the kinds of things that he tells us--even at the beginning of imperial bedrooms--that he found appalling.

in a ranking of BEE's books, i would put this toward the bottom. it's not as bad as lunar park but i think the rules of attraction might be better, and that's saying a lot.