Imperial Bedrooms

Imperial Bedrooms

by Bret Easton Ellis
Knopf, 192 pp., $24.95

Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis' debut 1985 novel, was a classic case of right place, right time, chopping the Reagan years' lines of privileged white anxiety out with a steady hand. The book's main characters – Clay, Julian, and Blair – were of the Lost Boys generation, at once self-absorbed and codependent, reckless and sad, and yet you still wanted to see their minimalist apartments and velvet-rope-lined meltdowns. Ellis basically scripted The Hills with more blow, and in 2010, celebrity hamster wheels like TMZ offer whiffs of LTZ's vapidity, only now the paranoia is more potent with the proliferation of technology.

The question hanging over this sequel to Less Than Zero: Why? Twenty-five years later, Clay, Ellis' mirror, is a screenwriter back in L.A. temporarily, swiftly plunged into his old haunts. There's a manipulative wannabe actress, bitter friends, mysterious texts, and a few murders in the desert. Ellis pulls on the I'm-being-followed thread of 1998's Glamorama and, this being L.A., could have easily made Clay an accidental Philip Marlowe type, investigating something he doesn't really want to find out. Ellis has a hypnotic way with dialogue, but at less than 200 pages, Imperial Bedrooms mostly just looks through the peephole instead of tracking the city's more desperate corners.

In past books, Ellis' unreliable narrators gave them their punch. Here, the explanation for fortysomething Clay's troubles is the stuff of bad 3am cable. The cast of return characters has been cut and medicated into predictable L.A. stereotypes; at least the teenage versions of Clay, Julian, and Blair could claim boredom as an excuse for their behavior. Here, the violence against women and time spent fluffing the limp lives of producers and directors and addicts and fuckups feels familiar, but the writing reads like it was sleepwalked through.

Not much has changed in Ellis' city. People are still nihilists and channel emotions into senseless brutality, which doesn't answer the hanging question. Despite its mazelike narrative style, 2005's Lunar Park was essentially dark comedy masquerading as horror, but Ellis was trying something different, commenting on our times from a different perspective. It's something he should have continued, instead of just falling back into, as Clay says 22 pages in, "the dead zone."