Bret Easton Ellis shot to fame at the age of 21, while still a student at Bennington College, with Less Than Zero. The book, which took its title from an old Elvis Costello song, attracted rave reviews when it was published in 1985 – the New Yorker described it as “an extraordinarily accomplished first novel” – although, frankly, it left me cold.
The trouble with its depiction of Clay and his morally bankrupt college friends is that you don’t actually care about any of them. I much preferred the work of Jay McInerney, whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published the previous year.
Both writers and both books, despite one being set in New York and the other in Los Angeles, cover similar thematic territory – sex and drink and drugs with a little violence and rock’n’roll thrown in for good measure – but McInerney was, and is, much the better writer; a superior prose stylist as well as on the money when creating complex characters about whom you care and a narrative arc with a serious moral compass.
But Less Than Zero did, for many people, capture the zeitgeist. When Daniel asks Blair where she goes to school – it’s the University of Southern California – she replies: “I go to the University of Spoiled Children.” And she’s not wrong. But if reading about spoilt little rich kids home in LA for the Christmas vacation, drinking too much booze and doing too many drugs, was your sort of thing, well, Less Than Zero was just the sort of thing for you.
He’s knocked out five more novels – The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, his apologia for a serial killer which his original publisher declined to publish, The Informers, Glamorama and Lunar Park – which have all enhanced his reputation as the contemporary bad boy of American letters. And now, 25 years after he first hit the headlines, Easton Ellis returns in Imperial Bedrooms to those less than likeable characters with whom he first made his name.
In this very knowing sequel to Less Than Zero – it opens with the words “They had made a movie about us” which, of course, they did – Clay is now a Hollywood scriptwriter, his old girlfriend Blair is married to Trent, now, as then, a bisexual philanderer, Julian is a recovering addict running a high end escort agency and their old dealer Rip Millar is opening clubs, running with the Mob, screwing a girl so young that Clay mistakes her for his daughter and has had so much work done on his face he “looks deformed”.
So far, so familiar. The same crowd doing the same things a quarter of a century on, except they’re no longer in their late teens and early 20s, they’re middle aged. But once he has reacquainted us with his cast and crew – and, while it often reads more like a movie script than a novel, Easton Ellis has a good eye and a good ear for the nuances of life in Los Angeles – he serves up a quite different proposition.
It is a sequel, of course, especially in its architecture – Clay returns to the west coast from the east just as he does at the beginning of Less Than Zero – but it’s also something else. There’s a blue Jeep parked outside Clay’s apartment. When he looks at the phone the screen says “I’m watching you”, and the violent death of a producer called Kelly Montrose is the talk of the town. This isn’t just a study of teenage alienation or disaffected middle-age; it’s a paranoid contemporary thriller, albeit one that remains grounded in a Los Angeles familiar – emotionally and intellectually, as well as geographically – from the movies.
Imperial Bedrooms is much better written than Less Than Zero, more subtle and more sophisticated and with a more serious moral purpose. The book has a rather natty cover, too, with a semi-transparent yellow dust jacket revealing the horns of the devil on the boards underneath.
Roll on the final part of what I’m sure will be a trilogy, featuring Clay and his chums as septuagenarians…
Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
Picador, £16.99
