Less Than Zero was named for an Elvis Costello tune. So is
Imperial Bedrooms - “Life turns out like a TV serial”, sang Elvis in that song.
So the best man will do his best again
Now they're getting dressed again
Blushing bright red from her head to her feet
Sneaking out of the bridal suite
The imperial bedroom, the regal boudoir
This casual acquaintance led to an intimate bonsoir
We know who you're with and where you are
In the imperial bedroom, the regal boudoir
Which provides a nice undertone for the whole book. "They made a movie about us," Clay re-starts his story, 25 years after we left him in
Less Than Zero. Clay's not happy with Ellis' book either, the way that wannabe writer turned him into some sort of
... handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That’s how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That’s how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That’s how I became the boy who wouldn’t save a friend. That’s how I became the boy who couldn’t love the girl.
But at least, Clay grants, the book stuck to what actually happened, whereas the movie turned into a pastel-coloured anti-drug ad that none of them recognized. But the years came and went, and now Clay's the one writing movie scripts. Sometimes they even let him help with the casting. So once again, he returns to Hollywood from the east coast, and when a beautiful but awful actress offers him herself in return for a role... why not? And all his old "friends" are still here, still in the business they grew up in, and soon the plot starts to look awfully familiar.
Ellis' novels have always had a metafictional layer, especially his last one (
Lunar Park), and it's here too: Clay is the narrator not only of the novel, but as a supposedly successful screenwriter of the entire American dream. And so, bizarrely,
Imperial Bedrooms becomes Ellis' perhaps tightest plot ever; a typical noir detective story, with femmes fatales, friends in trouble, mighty people behind the scenes and a heroic role for Clay to play... if he can only stay sober, and stop bursting into tears without warning, and if he's even allowed to meddle with the plot...
Writing a sequel to a generational novel like
Less Than Zero isn't easy; you have to somehow make it more than just an epiologue, write a new novel that says something more without invalidating the original. And in its best moments,
Imperial Bedrooms is quite good, a vicious slapstick about a Hollywood (and a society hooked on Hollywood stories) that just keeps recycling itself, hiding the emptiness that was already there in the first novel under layers of plastic surgery. Where you can't shoot an 80s period piece since every young actress is 20 pounds lighter and 2 bra sizes bigger then she would have been in '85. Where writers are supposed to write stories that only appear to surprise but really just confirm what we already know. Where everyone can be written out or killed to forward the same old plot - and not just in the movies.
I don’t recognize Rip at first. His face is 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.
And in the middle of it all is Clay, hero, rugged good guy out to clear his name, and the one who narrates the story runs the world... except that he might just be horribly mistaken of what his role is here. Because in a big machine, no one cog can ever do anything but turn around and grind.
And yet. For all its interesting meta angles, and as interesting it is to revisit the characters, the story doesn't hold up completely. Ellis' fans and critics have always agreed that his books deal with sensationalism, superficiality, materialism etc - they just can't agree if his books are a parody of it or an example of it. And as much as I'm sure he likes playing up that ambiguity,
Imperial Bedrooms doesn't so much balance on that fine line as lean, half-bored, against it. For every good scene, there's a few too many that just kick in doors that have been open since
Sunset Boulevard. It chugs along, feeling like a Bret Easton Ellis novel, but doesn't really go anywhere. Like far too many Hollywood sequels, it reminds us why we liked the original, but it means less.
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