Less Than Negative One

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

June 15, 2010

Knopf

169 pages

The harrowing and sublime sequel to 1985’s Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms fast-forwards 25 years to a movie-industry-obsessed Los Angeles that, because of its author’s maturity, outshines its previous incarnation as a grim and deeply effecting dystopia, one void of compassion and saturated with a sense of distrust that seems frighteningly universal. This smoothly rendered thriller may lack the scope and wit of previous works like Glamorama, but Ellis’s portrayal of Clay, now a successful screenwriter, and his increasingly despicable circle of friends, cuts satisfyingly to the core of a bleak tunnel with no existential light at its end. In an era where blond bangs and Ray-Bans have been replaced by Botox and botched eyebrow lifts, Clay must ask himself what it looks like to be aging in a city that exists only for the young. The answer: not pretty. Ellis reaches his usual quota of (real or imagined?) squirm-inducing torture scenes and ultra-depraved, drug-fueled sex trysts. But the book’s quietest moments – the vibration of an iPhone, the digital billboards beaming images into the desert night, the condo lights left on when no one’s supposed to be home – are often its scariest, perfectly capturing an odor of uneasiness and of time being frozen, of a middle-aged man’s struggle with, and eventual acceptance of the darkest moments that have come to define his sad, plastic life. Equal parts Raymond Chandler L.A. über-noir and spot-on postmodern satire, Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’s most polished, succinct novel to date, and his most disturbing since 1991’s American Psycho.