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    Imperial Bedrooms
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    Imperial Bedrooms
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    Imperial Bedrooms
    Audiobook4 hours

    Imperial Bedrooms

    Written by Bret Easton Ellis

    Narrated by Andrew McCarthy

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Bret Easton Ellis's debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age.

    Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, an influential manager who's still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame, fortune and power. Then there's Clay's childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past.

    But Clay's own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens completely out of control, he has no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.

    A genuine literary event.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 15, 2010
    ISBN9780307735065
    Unavailable
    Imperial Bedrooms
    Author

    Bret Easton Ellis

    Bret Easton Ellis is the author of several novels, including Imperial Bedrooms, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, and a collection of stories, The Informers. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers have all been made into films. His first work of non-fiction, White, was published in 2019. He is the host of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast available on Patreon. He lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for Imperial Bedrooms

    3/5

    322 ratings23 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Read because I love Less than Zero, this is the sequel and, to my regret, I still care about the characters. This book doesn't. It flails around, creating fake drama where it doesn't belong in absence of actually being about anything. Feels like half-an-effort of a famous author who no longer feels like he has to try.
    • 4/5
      There's an excruciatingly disturbing scene (as opposed to just the raw standard disturbing scene) in Less Than Zero, involving pre-teens, a boy and a girl, who are raped and then murdered in a "snuff" movie bought for $400 by Rip, infamous drug dealer, for the viewing pleasure, or, rather, the viewing dispassion and ennui of his client, Clay, and other coked-up collegiates on winter break in Los Angeles, partying in Rip's posh Century City condo, that, twenty five years later, in Imperial Bedrooms, has essentially come full circle - the "snuff" movie motif - in the "life" of Clay, narcissistic narrator of both novels, though now a borderline-sociopath and full blown boozer in the latter.Clay, despite being such a remorseless, unforgivable creep in Imperial Bedrooms, is by far the least depraved of characters in the diminuitive (only 169 pages) novel. His old friends from Less Than Zero: Blair, ex-girlfriend, married to his old bisexual best buddy, Trent, are worse. So's Julian, once a high-priced teenage male whore pimped by Rip to pay off his ginormous drug debt to Rip, is now a pimp himself, (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em) pimping out his latest girlfriend, Rain, who'll do literally anything (or anyone) especially if they're a Hollywood mogul, or even just a lowly screenwriter like Clay, as long as they're holding out the promise of an acting gig in one of the movies they've written, if the young thespian-wannabe hottie will spend some quality time with him in his Doheny high rise apartment. A movie of Clay's called The Listeners is the current carrot being held before the boldly ambitious (and kinky, remember Rick James' 1981 hit, "Super Freak'?, the ditty's unmentioned in Imperial Bedrooms, but practically every other '80s hit is - that's her! - the "kind of girl you don't take home to mother") actress. The irony, of course, so important to Ellis - irony, IRONY (and the more bitter the IRONY, the better!) - is that while offering her a role in his (Clay's) movie, The Listeners, nobody in the novel is ever listening to anybody! Get it? Especially Clay. Rip, Blair, Julian, even Rain, all try and warn Clay...but will he listen? No. Because he, like they, are always too busy listening to the dictates of their mostly fiendish, sometimes repulsive, always self indulgent and over-the-top, desires, for any real communication - or connecting - to occur.Isolation? Check.Alienation? CheckHaute couture? Check.Grotesque murders? Check."Pauses," paranoia, and palm trees? Check.Psychiatrists? Check.Sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Duh.Bret has written this novel before - and better. No surprise there. It was called American Psycho; it was called Lunar Park. In fact, he keeps writing the same damn novel over and over and over again... And his enabling fans - I'm an enabler, I admit it! - keep buying them, over and over and over again, the same damn novel, with a different title and dust jacket... Because his novels are like comfort food to me (and to millions of others) or maybe like crack, I mean. Even the aesthetic layout of Imperial Bedrooms: Uber-wide margins, vignettes rarely more than a page long, and each first letter of each vignette ten times the size of the rest of the text, mirrors the layout of Less Than Zero (or, really, long before LTL, in the short novels of Joan Didion).There's not much substance to this novel, I guess is what I'm trying to say, even despite so many illegal substances.But if I'm going to have a serious problem, Bret Easton Ellis (and Imperial Bedrooms), his latest, if not gravest, novel, is nevertheless, a pretty good serious problem to have.
    • 4/5
      Sequel to 'Less than Zero' but simply not as good as that. It's a book with all the well-known BEE cliches, there are aimless yuppies, alienation, sex, drugs and brutal violence but this time it feels like an alibi... nothing new or interesting here.
    • 3/5
      I probably should have read Less than Zero before Imperial Bedrooms. But standing in the aisle at the library, Imperial Bedrooms sounded more interesting and I had no clue it was a sequel. Excuse my language, but this book was fucked up in an intensely real way. I can't say anything else. Just read it. Also, some of the best dialogue I've ever read, hands-down.
    • 3/5
      Like much of Ellis' work, and more specifically Less Than Zero, this book featured a cast of unlikable characters doing unlikable things. For some reason though I still enjoyed it. Maybe because it was short...
    • 4/5
      A nice fuck-you-world read from Ellis.
    • 4/5
      This book made me cry. I was so excited for this sequel because I absolutely adore Less than Zero. I rarely cry so that just goes to show what a fantastic writer Bret Easton Ellis is and just how attatched I am to the characters. He will forever and always have a place in my heart as one of my favorite authors. If you enjoyed its predecessor pick up this book because you will not be disappointed. Even twenty years later Ellis's abilities have not waned a bit.
    • 5/5
      The Basics

      In this sequel to Less Than Zero, we catch up with Clay and his old friends, all of whom are now middle-aged and much the same as we left them. In this universe, Less Than Zero was a successful book and a movie that missed the point, much as it is in ours. Clay isn’t satisfied with the way he was portrayed, so the question becomes, “can he show his audience that he’s a different man than that?”

      My Thoughts

      I’m about to say the most controversial thing I could possibly say: Imperial Bedrooms is better than Less Than Zero. I’m gonna let that hit you while I don my armor.

      As I attempted to explain in “The Basics”, Clay and Julian and everyone we encountered in the previous book are officially over-the-hill. In this universe, the previous book exists in universe, and Clay acts somewhat insulted by the way he’s written, as this kid who can’t feel because he’s so detached and disassociated. This is something the book does incredibly well. Clay genuinely believes he’s a good, giving, kind person. He sees nothing of Less Than Zero Clay in himself. He wants us to believe that was all a lie. He’s not that person; he’s better than that.

      And then proceeds to reveal himself as being even worse. Here’s where I think the book loses people. For a lot of folks, I think Clay seemed like an anti-hero. Imperial Bedrooms paints him a lot differently. It seems to be saying that if someone really were that detached from everyone around them, that sociopathic, they would be a pretty terrible person. No one wants to hear that. They want Clay to be a symbol for something rather than a character. Personally, I believe I took Less Than Zero a lot differently than most, because his behavior in Imperial Bedrooms didn’t seem so off-the-wall to me. It felt like an extension of what the years between that we didn’t see could’ve turned Clay into. That he was predisposed to being uncaring and cruel, and it only got more pronounced as he got older. It makes sense to me.

      I also thought that Clay trying to solve a mystery that simply wasn’t solvable because he didn’t have all the information was clever. Not only did it feel realistic, like “mysteries” don’t wrap up neatly in reality, but it also felt like another example of Clay’s monstrous ego. He wants to believe so badly he can change things, when really it’s all a selfish move on his part anyway.

      What I’m trying to say is that this book was a brilliant character study. I believe if all of Ellis’ books could be taken that way, they’d be more widely enjoyed.

      Final Rating

      5/5
    • 4/5
      While this books works on its own, it is really recommended reading Less than Zero to get the most out of Imperial Bedrooms. This book is set 25 years later, Clay has seemed to have moved on but when he finds himself back in Hollywood, he is sucked back into this world. My problem with Less than Zero as probably the fact that I read it 25 years too late; so it felt dated and I was probably too old to get the most out of it. Imperial Bedrooms seemed to be a better book, I’m not sure it’s the fact that Bret Easton Ellis has improved as a writer, or that it didn’t feel dated. Ellis has a very unique style of writing, very descriptive making the characters feel very shallow in a well thought out way. He uses this tactic in American Psycho a lot and it made me feel like I was going psycho; so this book just ended up been an entertaining and interesting book to read.
    • 3/5
      Grim and funny with some unexpected twists. Gets dull at times, but then Ellis likes to grind you down a bit with tedium like any good S&M artist. It's hard to read the novel without picturing Robert Downey, Andrew McCarthy and James Spader in their respective roles. Which I'm sure Ellis is conscious off and has fun with. Still, this is far from Glamorama, which for my money is Ellis at his best.
    • 1/5
      Ugh. I don't even know why I bother with transgressive fiction. Horrible writing style, pointless violence and rape - I'd go on the internet to see such things.
    • 2/5
      Like American Psycho and Less Than Zero but twenty years too late and hopelessly derivative. And seriously, it's barely 100 pages. BEE's books have been successful because they resonated with their historical context - this one has all the authenticity of a hipster 80's night.
    • 5/5
      This book takes you to some very dark places and does not tell you how to get back at all. You don't have to have read Less Than Zero at all and the violence is not gratuitous in any way. The writing here forces the reader to examine his or her own soul in a way that I found uncomfortable. You can see parts of yourself in these characters and if you really can't connect with this novel then you probably haven't lived life that much yet. A truly disturbing piece of writing, Ellis still has a way of touching me that no other author has quite managed in the same uncomfortable way. Superb!
    • 2/5
      A disturbing monotone novel based on characters from Ellis's masterwork Less Than Zero. This revisit of these characters as they've aged years later seems initially to be contrived, but fans of Less Than Zero will fall into the previous cadence fairly quickly. The book begs the reader to have read 'volume 1' to make the characters in Imperial Bedrooms have any depth, which doesn't speak well of the quality of this book. The book includes gratuitous violence--the progression of Ellis toward American Psycho has not wanted--disturbing and not essential for the book. Overall a flat, uninspired effort that puts paid to Ellis's wandering, and for the most part still showing spots of brilliance, fiction journey after American Psycho.
    • 4/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)I came of age in the first half of the 1980s, which means that I was heavily influenced in my youth by things like punk music and performance art, right there at the time in everyone's life when their brain is still relatively empty but especially hungry for input, making the arts more influential to us at that point than at maybe any other time in life. And definitely one of the authors back then I was enamored with was Bret Easton Ellis, whose first two novels (1985's Less Than Zero and 1987's The Rules of Attraction) were veritable anthems to me and my art-school undergraduate friends; and so when it was announced earlier this year that Ellis' newest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, would be a direct sequel to Less Than Zero on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, you better believe that I excitedly put it on reserve at my local library so that I wouldn't have to wait long for it, and added Less Than Zero to that reserve as well, since it had been literally decades since I had read it last. And that turned out to be a very good idea, something I encourage you to do as well if you're going to read the newer title; because it not only provided a refresher course on the events of the first book, which you will absolutely need in order to fully enjoy the sequel, but reminded me all over again of why my friends and I found it so culturally disruptive in the first place, and why the work of people like him and his contemporaries Jay McInerney and Eric Bogosian spoke so passionately to us to begin with.Both are set in Los Angeles, respective to their times, and are both told through the eyes of our passive everyman hero Clay, who is widely assumed in the first book to be a stand-in for Ellis himself, but with the Clay in the second book mentioning Ellis by name and claiming that he was simply another hanger-on in their scene, and who distorted a whole series of truths in the original to make for a better story; and indeed, this is an early sign of exactly how Ellis has changed as a writer in the last quarter-century, in that with each new title he has grown more and more metafictional, and more and more interested in blurring the line between fiction and real life, an idea that existed in only a rough, unpolished form in his early work. Because to be sure, whether you love it or hate it, the '85 Less Than Zero is clearly a case of style over substance, with a storyline so insubstantial that it barely exists -- teenage children of Hollywood film executives party their way to oblivion, basically, completely unmoved emotionally by any of the monstrous ways they treat each other, their lives utterly defined by fashion labels, mountains of cocaine and unspoken bisexuality -- with it not being until later novels that Ellis grew out of this fog of flashy, empty Postmodernism, and started applying better and better metaphorical points to his work. (And in fact, in what's easily a career highlight, this new novel opens with a brilliant chapter in which the Less Than Zero characters discuss their reaction to seeing the very real 1987 Less Than Zero movie, a notorious flop starring such "Brat Packers" as Andrew McCarthy, James Spader and Robert Downey Jr., with an infamously mauled screenplay that turns the entire thing into a hysteria-filled Reagan-Era anti-drug screed, one that literally kills off one of the major characters as punishment for him having too much fun.)So why did my friends and I react so intensely to this back then, given that it was essentially the literary equivalent of MTV? Well, that might be your answer right there; that when I look back on it with unbiased eyes, I realize that the youth of the early '80s were clamoring for an alternative to the funky, earthy, always deep and always morally convoluted counterculturalism that had defined the arts since the early '70s, the same compulsion back then that brought about the moral absolutes of Reaganism and the crisp style of preppie fashion that occurred in the same years. It's easy now to see all this as signs of the disaster the last 30 years of American history has been, but back then this yearning for style over substance was seen as a relatively original and benign idea, in many ways simply a response to the "culture of malaise" that Jimmy Carter and his supporters had created in this country by the late '70s, in which there were no more good guys or bad guys but rather this murky gray muddle in the middle, and where every aspect of our lives was expected to be endlessly discussed to death in the shag-carpeted offices of therapists and family counselors. No wonder my friends and I were screaming so loudly those days for empty, pretty things, despite not really understanding why until decades later, and no wonder that we were simultaneously attracted in those years to such seemingly clashing concepts as, say, DIY hardcore music and capitalist consumerism as lifestyle.This is possibly the most interesting thing about Imperial Bedrooms, then; that after a first half of exploring the long-term fallout of these '80s characters, now middle-aged and most of them involved in Hollywood just like their parents were, the story quickly turns into a straightforward contemporary noir with light supernatural touches (or at least a heavily creepy vibe that pervades the entire thing), with a plot that much more tries to make an actual point than the '85 original did. And like I said, this is simply a reflection of where Ellis' entire career has gone in the last 25 years; because for those who don't know, the second half of Ellis' oeuvre is marked by book after book featuring creepy vibes, violent details and supernatural subtones. (1994's The Informers, for example, is about contemporary vampires; 1991's infamous American Psycho is about a serial killer; and then there's my favorite Ellis novel of them all, 1998's Glamorama, which is perhaps about a New York club promoter who stumbles across a nefarious ring of supermodels who moonlight as bomb-planting terrorists, or might possibly be about a man having a mental breakdown without realizing it right in front of our eyes, with us not entirely sure which is the case until the very last chapter.)And indeed, Imperial Bedrooms features all of these types of elements too, an increasingly gruesome story that eventually enfolds an underground call-girl ring, mysterious torture-filled deaths in the Mexican desert, and a main character who ends up being not nearly what he seems at first. And that can be a little frustrating, to tell you the truth, which is why it's not getting a higher score today, because by its end the book can often feel not like a sequel at all, but rather a completely unrelated tale that just happens to steal the names of the Less Than Zero characters. But on the other hand, maybe this is the perfect way for a sequel by Bret Easton Ellis to feel, since it so exactly mirrors Ellis' own role in literary history -- one of the last big writers of the Postmodernist Era, expressly by taking the hallmarks of Postmodernism and pushing them to cartoonish extremes, but who has reinvented himself in our post-9/11 "Age of Sincerity" into a writer with a lot more to say, and who in good 2000s style uses the trappings of genre fiction in an inventive new way in order to bring his message to the masses. It has its problems for sure, and I suspect won't appeal nearly as much to those who aren't already long-term fans of Ellis like I am; but for those like me whose adult lives have mostly been defined so far by the snotty irony and empty pop-culture of Postmodernism, and now find themselves wondering just how to feel about the world in our new Obamian Age of emo and authenticity, a lively and instructive reading experience awaits you with these two books. It's for all of you that Imperial Bedrooms is specifically recommended today.Out of 10: 8.6
    • 4/5
      As a big fan of Ellis's writing I found this follow up to Less Than Zero a bit disappointing. The flat, precise style was typical Ellis, but somehow the characters did not measure up to their younger selves. The storyline sagged and the ending was no ending at all. As in all Ellis's books there were some lines of real precision and beauty and his ability to turn a banal scene into something atmospheric remains. Not great, but not a bad read either.
    • 4/5
      A very good sequel to Less Than Zero. I liked how he moved the characters forward, and make their lives seem believable. This is not always the case, but I think the author has succeeded in the case of Clay and his friends from Less then Zero. Overall a book I would recommend to all fans of Bret Easton Ellis' books.
    • 4/5
      It's as fashionable to dislike Bret Easton Ellis as it is to like him - he's polarizing, if you will. He gets criticized for his interest in ultraviolence, for his experiments, for not experimenting, for being too cool for school, for being so yesterday. I like him. I like the way he writes, I like all the metafictional layers, I adore the snark and the studied irony. At his best he cuts like an Exacto blade - it bleeds a lot right away and doesn't hurt until later.I liked Less Than Zero when it came out. I even liked the movie, if only because it was fun to watch Andrew McCarthy shamble about all googly-eyed and sincere while Robert Downey, Jr. chewed up all the scenery around him portraying someone who was, essentially, Robert Downey, Jr. (how's that for self-referential work?). I liked the book because it successfully captured how damned boring everything and everyone was at the time along with all the stupid boring things people did to quit being bored. It wasn't as successful as it might have been and is a bit of period piece, but I still like it.I was worried when I read that Ellis had revisited Less Than Zero - sequels are so often awful. I shouldn't have been. In a sense Imperial Bedrooms is what Less Than Zero would've been had its writer been more mature. Yes, the characters have aged, but the more things change the more they stay the same - it's all still incredibly boring and everyone does lots of stupid things that are just as boring to try to stop being bored - to try to feel something.Both books share a certain feeling that seems rooted in L.A. to me. L.A. is all long drives to nowhere, looking out the passenger window at the lights going by at night, trying not to get off on the wrong exit (or trying to get back on the freeway if you do). It's surface shiny and bright and gritty right underneath the fingernails and if I was more of a car person I might really like that, but as it is I tend to want to admire it and its superficiality from a fictional distance. Ellis gets L.A. and I like that, too.With nods to the first book, to the movie, to the city, and to Raymond Chandler this isn't a book where a great deal happens and it doesn't need to be. Its pleasures are in the small careful observations - the graffiti carefully drawn onto the back of the Walk/Don't Walk sign that passes by almost too quickly to see as the car slides into the night.
    • 3/5
      "California Dreaming on such a winter's day".Imperial Bedrooms is the follow up to Brett Easton Ellis's book, Less than Zero. The book picks up with the lives of the teenagers of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and now finds these same kids in their teetering middle age. What does it mean to get old in Los Angeles a mythic space where youth is rewarded and age is not!? The book looks at how the puppeteers, the writers, the producers, the directors can at times manipulate others as if they are puppets on strings.The city appears at one time a garden of paradise, at another time a hallway in the hell hotel. The city lives on the word "Yet!" the mirage of it all. The city lives on fear of the finality of living in a fragile place. The city knows it could fall into the pacific if there is a large enough earthquake. Imperial Bedrooms explores the conflicting pictures of Los Angeles and the Southern California Dream. The book disturbed me, because it hits on the tragic film strips that run the city, and keeps it a place of dreams. The final note from the author is: "All of the pictures are fake." Page 162
    • 3/5
      I read this on account of lingering curiosity about whether the milieu of "Less than Zero" and "American Psycho" could still seem as shocking, as nihilistic and anti-bourgeois, as they had to readers at the time. (I have not read either book.) From an art historical point of view, Ellis belongs with Koons and Salle: it's all smooth surface and insouciance, and the "ultra-violence" (the term from "A Clockwork Orange") is just a necessary, inevitable accompaniment of a late capitalist life cleaned of any morality -- not the hidden underbelly of consumerism, but its traditional contrasting twin. This book is not shocking at all: its violence isn't shocking, Ellis's insouciance about the violent scenes isn't shocking, the character's coldness and confusion isn't shocking. A sign of how little violence signifies is that the "Guardian" critic didn't even mention the descriptions of rape, torture, and snuff films. And so it goes without saying that the slick, cold surface of the characters' emotions and lives (they report they cry the way they report the weather, or what they're wearing) cannot highlight the violence, as reviewers said it did in "American Psycho." I imagine Ellis's books of the 1980s were disturbing only to people for whom bourgeois accounts of bourgeois life are simply, adequately true. To anyone else, they are X-Rays, simple and smooth and portentous black-and-white versions of ordinary fantasies that underly ordinary upper-class first-world consumer-driven late capitalist life.This book is apparently, but not quite, about people who occasionally figure out something about their superficiality or disengagement or the superficial psychological problems that drive their behavior. It's not quite about those things because it isn't a reflection on them, but an example of them. The only thing that ripples the still surface of the book is the very occasional stylistic quirk or lapse. Ordinarily Ellis is perfectly fluent, as Koons and Salle aspire to be: but he also has barely audible lapses from perfect flatness: his punctuationless paragraphs sometimes go on too long and end too predictably with surprises; he uses the names of pop songs too often to set moods; he relies a couple of times too many on scenes where characters refuse to tell other characters the whole truth. Those slight slips, residual awkwardnesses, are crucially important, because they show that introspection must be possible, that the author has done it in the past, if only to his writing and not to his characters' lives. That nearly inaudible evidence of the possibility of depth ruins the book. Flat needs to be flat, as "In Cold Blood" was perceived to be, as "Less than Zero" was perceived to be, as some of Larkin, Kavanagh, and Beckett, and nearly are. Otherwise even a hint of transcendence ruins the game.
    • 4/5
      There's an excruciatingly disturbing scene (as opposed to just the raw standard disturbing scene) in Less Than Zero, involving pre-teens, a boy and a girl, who are raped and then murdered in a "snuff" movie bought for $400 by Rip, infamous drug dealer, for the viewing pleasure, or, rather, the viewing dispassion and ennui of his client, Clay, and other coked-up collegiates on winter break in Los Angeles, partying in Rip's posh Century City condo, that, twenty five years later, in Imperial Bedrooms, has essentially come full circle - the "snuff" movie motif - in the "life" of Clay, narcissistic narrator of both novels, though now a borderline-sociopath and full blown boozer in the latter.Clay, despite being such a remorseless, unforgivable creep in Imperial Bedrooms, is by far the least depraved of characters in the diminuitive (only 169 pages) novel. His old friends from Less Than Zero: Blair, ex-girlfriend, married to his old bisexual best buddy, Trent, are worse. So's Julian, once a high-priced teenage male whore pimped by Rip to pay off his ginormous drug debt to Rip, is now a pimp himself, (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em) pimping out his latest girlfriend, Rain, who'll do literally anything (or anyone) especially if they're a Hollywood mogul, or even just a lowly screenwriter like Clay, as long as they're holding out the promise of an acting gig in one of the movies they've written, if the young thespian-wannabe hottie will spend some quality time with him in his Doheny high rise apartment. A movie of Clay's called The Listeners is the current carrot being held before the boldly ambitious (and kinky, remember Rick James' 1981 hit, "Super Freak'?, the ditty's unmentioned in Imperial Bedrooms, but practically every other '80s hit is - that's her! - the "kind of girl you don't take home to mother") actress. The irony, of course, so important to Ellis - irony, IRONY (and the more bitter the IRONY, the better!) - is that while offering her a role in his (Clay's) movie, The Listeners, nobody in the novel is ever listening to anybody! Get it? Especially Clay. Rip, Blair, Julian, even Rain, all try and warn Clay...but will he listen? No. Because he, like they, are always too busy listening to the dictates of their mostly fiendish, sometimes repulsive, always self indulgent and over-the-top, desires, for any real communication - or connecting - to occur.Isolation? Check.Alienation? CheckHaute couture? Check.Grotesque murders? Check."Pauses," paranoia, and palm trees? Check.Psychiatrists? Check.Sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Duh.Bret has written this novel before - and better. No surprise there. It was called American Psycho; it was called Lunar Park. In fact, he keeps writing the same damn novel over and over and over again... And his enabling fans - I'm an enabler, I admit it! - keep buying them, over and over and over again, the same damn novel, with a different title and dust jacket... Because his novels are like comfort food to me (and to millions of others) or maybe like crack, I mean. Even the aesthetic layout of Imperial Bedrooms: Uber-wide margins, vignettes rarely more than a page long, and each first letter of each vignette ten times the size of the rest of the text, mirrors the layout of Less Than Zero (or, really, long before LTL, in the short novels of Joan Didion).There's not much substance to this novel, I guess is what I'm trying to say, even despite so many illegal substances.But if I'm going to have a serious problem, Bret Easton Ellis (and Imperial Bedrooms), his latest, if not gravest, novel, is nevertheless, a pretty good serious problem to have.
    • 3/5
      In the 80’s Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were the hot new writers commenting on contemporary society through their fiction, sort of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald for Generation X. In the past year both have put out books revisiting their early successes, Ellis with his new “Imperial Bedrooms.” “Imperial Bedrooms” is Ellis returning to the characters of “Less Than Zero,” I would say this is a nostalgic return to these characters but I don’t think they’re capable of feeling nostalgia or much of anything else. The book opens with Clay, the writer, returning to L.A. to work on a screenplay and he revisits the feelings and after-effects of the success of his first book. It‘s sort of art imitating life imitating art and Ellis keeps pushing and moving the boundary of where real life meets fiction and how it folds in on itself. In the beginning “Imperial Bedrooms” very much has the feel of “Less Than Zero,” you can still feel all the characters ennui as Clay runs into them. As Clay works on his screenplay and attends trendy parties he finds himself being followed by a blue Jeep and embroiled in a mystery. That’s where the novel seems to change in it’s feeling, Ellis moving the story from his style to a standard mystery. Mysteries seem to be the genre du jour and Ellis is trying to exploit that and apply his own brand of existential angst to the genre, but in doing so gives his novel an almost schizophrenic feeling as the last third bears almost no resemblance to the first two-thirds, and when he moves the story into full mystery mode they don‘t even seem like Ellis‘ characters any more. “Imperial Bedrooms” delves into the darkest of hearts and offers no light at the end of the existential tunnel; Ellis’ L.A. is a blackhole where no light can escape. This is the L.A., the city of night created by John Rechy or Jim Morrison. I’ve never been one to demand the “Hollywood Ending” to literature or movies, but Ellis’ characters in “Imperial Bedrooms” are beyond redemption and have no way out, even Jim Morrison was waiting for the dawn.Earlier this year Jay McInerney published “How It Ended” a book short stories that revisits his early successes. Though McInerney’s journey is more nostalgic it reinforces his stature as one of the best literary writers of contemporary fiction. I don’t think “Imperial Bedrooms” does the same for Brett Easton Ellis.
    • 2/5
      Usually I wait a day or so after finishing a book to write the review…let the words and the story and the tone simmer a bit in my mind. With “Imperial Bedrooms”, though, I can’t imagine feeling any differently about it tomorrow, so I think I’ll just put fingers to keys right now.Possibly the lightest tone of the book comes at the beginning, as we start another month long odyssey in L.A. with Clay, the main character from “Less Than Zero”. And by light, I mean, “I fall asleep to the music coming from the Abbey, a song from the past, “Hungry Like to Wolf,” rising faintly above the leaping chatter of the club, transporting me for one long moment into someone both young and old. Sadness: it’s everywhere.”This sequel is much like the first book about Blair, Clay, Julian, Trent… They care about nothing, drink and snort everything, sleep with anyone… Reading about them is the same kind of blur of nothingness and overload that the characters experience. But where in the first book, the reader can hope or pretend that they might change, that at least one of them might find their way out of the hell that is their over privileged lives, with the sequel, that hope is destroyed.In this book, there is also an element of cruelty – almost evil – that makes reading it even more depressing. This lifestyle is not one of young experimentation, borne of too much money and teenage angst – this is a chosen destructive and worthless path.“You should be more compassionate,” she says later, in the darkness of the bedroom. “Why?” I ask. “Why should I be more compassionate?” “You’re a Pisces.” I pause, letting the statement hang there while it defines where I’ve ended up.”And the end, the end of the book is where the author really doubles down. The destruction and waste and desperation for any sort of feeling spew from the pages – making me want to skim, turn away.I think there’s a reason the cover of my copy of the book features a shadowy figure with horns…and it’s about as subtle as the story inside.