Book Review - Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis - NYTimes.

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By ERICA WAGNER
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Published: June 25, 2010

At first you think: That’s a nice conceit. “They had made a movie RECOMMEND What’s Popular Now
about us,” Bret Easton Ellis’s new book begins, and of course, they TWITTER The Greatest Yachts, Both New
did, allowing us at least an early glimpse of the genius of Robert Composers - A and Used, Are
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Downey Jr. The movie, it should go without saying, is the film MAIL

version of “Less Than Zero,” Ellis’s headline-grabbing 1985 debut. PRINT

Neither the book nor the movie is named, but titles aren’t necessary, REPRINTS
for here are the old familiar names: Blair, Julian, Trent — and Clay, SHARE
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the narrator of that novel and this one, “Imperial Bedrooms,” which Sign up for ticket offers from Broadway shows and other
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takes up their stories a quarter of a century on. So there’s a neat,
postmodern, self-referential beginning, with Clay, the cool observer See Sample | Privacy Policy

of his own actions and feelings — or lack of them — observing

himself being observed, an acknowledgment that his version of the
story may be only one of many.

Enlarge This Image So what happened to all these people? Fair enough for
their maker to be curious as to their fates. You could
make a cynical argument that sequels are written for the
most venal of reasons, to continue a franchise or revive
interest in a flagging brand, and that’s no doubt true if
you’re talking about, say, “Star Wars.” But when authors
create memorable characters it’s usually because they
can’t help themselves. Imaginary people become lodged in
the creator’s consciousness; it can be hard to get them to
leave. At any event, Ellis’s work has always been stitched
with cross-reference and self-reference, threaded through Advertise on NYTimes.com

with a sense that the boundary between fantasy and

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reality is disturbingly fragile. It’s what makes his work, at
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its best, so striking. I can well believe the haunted
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fascination that sparked off “Imperial Bedrooms.” But the 1. To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test
Bret Easton Ellis
resulting novel falls flat. 2. A Path Is Sought for States to Escape Their Debt
Burdens
IMPERIAL BEDROOMS
For what starts off neat swiftly becomes pat, lazy and 3. The Greatest
By Bret Easton Ellis
effortful all at once. There is a story here, of sorts. “The 4. Timothy Egan: Myth of the Hero Gunslinger
169 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95
real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, 5. The Love Affair With the Fireplace Cools

overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir 6. F.D.A. Sees Promise in Alzheimer’s Imaging Drug
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soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was 7. David Brooks: Amy Chua Is a Wimp
Excerpt: ‘Imperial Bedrooms’
8. Paul Krugman: China Goes to Nixon
(June 24, 2010) murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an
9. Op-Ed Contributor: Why Parents Fear the Needle
Books of The Times: ‘Less Than abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had
10. Your Money: With Retirement Savings, It’s a Sprint to
Zero’ (June 8, 1985) been tortured to death at another location.” So it’s quite a the Finish
Books of The Times: ‘Imperial conventional story, really: Who killed Julian Wells? That’s
Bedrooms’ by Bret Easton Ellis Go to Complete List »
the dime-store path the novel wanders. As in “Less Than
(June 24, 2010)
Zero,” Clay has come home at Christmastime. He is now a
screenwriter, back in Los Angeles to oversee the casting of

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Book Review - Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis - NYTimes.com 22/01/11 01:00

a movie he’s written. “This is the official reason why I’m in L.A. But, really, coming back
to the city is an excuse to escape New York and whatever had happened to me there that
fall.”

That “whatever” is an echo of the weirdly vibrant nothingness that makes “Less Than
Zero” such a startling, powerful book. Ellis’s first novel has that “Catcher in the Rye,”
“Bell Jar” trick, the ability to make something from nothing, to let a willed lack of
emotion stand in for emotion. It reveals the void at the heart of a culture obsessed by Tax incentives and Hollywood
surface — a culture that would become ubiquitous. It was Ellis’s gift, or curse, to know ALSO IN BUSINESS »
Turning off devices before flight
that it would. There are no cellphones in “Less Than Zero,” and the Betamax machine is Beer tasting at Duane Reade
a thrilling new technology. But young Clay’s Christmas break back home in Los Angeles
now seems like a premonition of the pornographic emptiness that is almost inescapable
today: online, on television, on your iPhone. The violence at the end of “Less Than Zero”
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is shocking; and it shocks Clay, too, though the most he can muster is “I don’t think it’s
right.”
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Nothing can shock Clay 25 years later. Does that surprise you? Are you, indeed,
surprised that Julian ends up dead? No, I didn’t think you were. Julian trying to
Watch today's top videos
wheedle money out of Clay to pay for an abortion in “Less Than Zero” becomes Julian
who owes money to Blair (“Well, 70 grand, but for him that’s a lot of money”). Nobody See the news in the making. Watch
changes, not really. Rip, Clay’s dealer, has had a lot of plastic surgery: “His face is TimesCast, a daily news video.

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. The lips are too thick. The
skin’s orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he’s been quickly
dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque.” Like
Martin Amis, Ellis still has a flair for such perfect, surreal description. But, again like
Amis, he can struggle to set it in an effective context. The plot — the trajectory toward
Julian’s death, Clay’s obsession with a girl who may or may not be called Rain Turner, Ads by Google what's this?
the threatening texts he receives from blocked numbers that say things like “I’m
watching you” — is a clunking machine. For all its zoned-out 21st-century accessories, Why Pay Hotel Rates?
it’s as old-fashioned as something by Arthur Conan Doyle. Furnished 1,2 & 3 bedroom units
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“Imperial Bedrooms” is more violent than “Less Than Zero.” It goes without saying, I www.cardinalsuites.com
suppose, that’s it’s not as violent as “American Psycho,” but it is infused with the same
toxicity. Toward the end of the novel, Clay buys himself a boy and a girl: “The girl was
impossibly beautiful — the Bible Belt, Memphis — and the boy was from Australia and
had modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch.” He does terrible things to them, and makes
them do terrible things to each other. Why? Maybe because, as the novel’s closing line
has it, “I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.” Didn’t we know that already? The
reader has to wonder what Ellis is trying to prove. That people numbed by the poison of
a society based solely on money, fame and beauty are capable of practically anything? If
that’s not news to us it’s thanks, in large part, to Bret Easton Ellis. But what purpose can
simple repetition serve?

We, the modern audience for novels like this, have gotten over being shocked. There’s
nothing left. From “A Clockwork Orange” to “Antichrist,” and with “American Psycho”
along the way, we’ve seen it all. We too have been poisoned, so that when we see pictures
from Haiti or from Abu Ghraib, they appall us, perhaps, but not for long. They are part
of the landscape: they are what we expect to see, and we must blunt ourselves to their
power if we are to survive as feeling human beings. That’s not a call for a return to the
past — for the veil of doubt cast over Tess Durbeyfield as she lies in a wood at Alec’s
mercy. Nor for the stark moralism Dickens suggests with the death of Bill Sikes, even his
poor dog’s brains dashed out in despair. But a skilled novelist, one who wants to
examine the way we live and why, needs to move the conversation forward. The
obligation is even greater if he’s returning to a world he’s depicted before.

“History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,” runs one of this
novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s
the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.

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Book Review - Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis - NYTimes.com 22/01/11 01:00

Erica Wagner is the literary editor of The Times of London and the author, most
recently, of the novel “Seizure.”

A version of this review appeared in print on June 27, 2010, on page

BR9 of the Sunday Book Review.

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Past Coverage
Back to Zero (June 27, 2010)
TBR: Inside the List (September 4, 2005)
Hero and Heroin (August 14, 2005)
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Coaxed Down the Rabbit Hole With Bret or 'Bret' (August 11, 2005)

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