FICTION: Imperial Bedrooms By Bret Easton Ellis Picador, 178pp, £16.99
NO JUNGLE could provide scenes as vicious as those enacted in the name of ordinary daily living by the characters in Bret Easton Ellis’s latest bulletin from the outer fringes of hell. His vision of society is bleak; his dark studies of the human animal as shocking as ever.
When on form, as in Glamorama(1999), he is a formidable satirist. His seventh novel comes as a sequel of sorts to his bravura debut, Less Than Zero(1985) in which bored Hollywood teenagers looked to sex, drugs and drink to ease the pain of growing up – or should that be existing? In it the narrator Clay returns from his college in New Hampshire to rejoin his buddies in Los Angeles for the Christmas vacation. Nothing is going well, least of all his half-hearted relationship with girlfriend Blair. On Christmas morning he watches his mother as she sips champagne, and notes "my sisters open their gifts casually, indifferent. My father looks neat and hard and is writing out checks for my sisters and me and I wonder why he couldn't have written them out before. . ."
That was then. Less Than Zero was funny, daring and satirical. None of the characters, Clay, Julian, Trent, Rip the drug dealer, Blair, were particularly sympathetic, most were stoned. The narrative was a study of boredom, the over-indulged battling their own excesses. Now several of the same characters have returned; 25 years older, more despairing, corrupted by life and corrupting. Clay has become a screenwriter, living in New York. He comes back to LA to cast his new movie. Is Hollywood intended as a variation of ancient Rome? Is the movie industry a coliseum?
Ellis is a bizarrely moral writer who specialises in evoking the amoral. But while the characters are the kids from the class of 1985, this book is far closer to his remarkable third novel, American Psycho(1991). This new book is not pleasant either; there are few laughs, none in fact. It is dark and unsettling, at times sickening. At one stage the narrator asks of a woman, desperate to be in his movie and prepared to secure a role at any price "How do you live like this?" Her reply sums up the approach adopted by most of the characters, "I pretend I don't."
Clay the detached youth has become largely immune. He seems to take pleasure in knowing that the condo he purchased had been redesigned by the boy who had died unexpectedly in his sleep “after a night of clubbing.”
Clay ponders this space, and the world it overlooks: “the large white-tiled balcony drops into an epic view of the city that reaches from the skyscrapers downtown, the dark forests of Beverly Hills, the towers of Century City and Westwood, then all the way to Santa Monica and the edge of the Pacific. The view is impressive without becoming a study in isolation; it’s more intimate than the one a friend had who lived on Appian Way, which was so far above the city it seemed as if you were looking at a vast abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide.”
There is no friendship, no trust, just need. These people don’t like anyone. They feed off one another. Clay relies on his one chat-up line: “Do you want to be in a movie?”
In a place like Hollywood, it usually works. This time though the girl offers an interesting variation on yes. “Why? Do you have a movie you want to put me in?”
Just as he did in Lunar Park(2005), Ellis uses self-consciousness as a device. In this new book it drives the lives of the characters as well as the narrative. "They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in. . ." This prologue refers back to the earlier book and mentions one of the most convincing incidents in it as Blair runs over a coyote. "Its eyes are wide and frightened looking and I watch it start to die beneath the sun, blood running out of its mouth."
The detachment of the younger Clay is convincing. It is as if Ellis as a young writer had also read his Camus. It was possible to share the paralysis crippling Clay. Throughout his fiction to date Ellis has observed closely and convincingly, if not always engagingly. His despair is blunt, factual and seldom approaches the laconic unease of JG Ballard. Still, Ellis is prophetic in his vision of a society engaged in eating, a theme he took to extreme levels in American Psycho.Something strange and horrible happens in this new novel, caught as it is between the worlds of Less Than Zeroand American Psycho. What begins as a tentative sexual attraction between Clay, known for his bad relationships, and a woman with an objective on her mind, quickly develops into an ugly game in which both players use each other.
No one is innocent; even a minor character, a personal trainer, is on the alert, waiting for his chance. Hollywood is a place where even a chance introduction may lead to a part. Clay notices the newcomer whose voice “manages to sound both cheerful and hostile at the same time.” Clay quickly realises that the other man is “sitting in a way that makes you realize he’s waiting for someone to notice him.”
Imperial Bedroomsis a bleak performance, and ultimately a slight, even queasily offensive one, more incomplete than ambivalent. It makes a tired study of the vacuous and has the feel of a screenplay being improvised by a cast not quite fully committed to the project. Ellis leaves it undecided; Clay shifts from damaged to depraved in a narrative that consists of too many doors being left slightly ajar, and not enough rooms, or opportunities, being fully explored.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
