Facade and Charade

Imperial Bedrooms
by Bret Easton Ellis
2010, Alfred A. Knopf


Bret Easton Ellis was one of my first favorite authors. My interest in cinema is what turned me onto his writing in the first place, around the time that American Psycho was adapted into a film. I have a rather bizarre aversion to reading novels based on films in close proximity to one another. Somehow I believe that each experience should stand alone from one another; to read a book after seeing a film is dilute the experience of each with inevitable comparisons to the other.

As such, I didn't read the brilliant American Psycho until much later when I was in college, but by then I was a sworn devotee of Ellis's. Among my early memorable experiences with his novels were Glamorama and The Rules of Attraction, both of which were seductive in their borderline nihilistic culture vulture characters. Ellis's work undulates with a hidden strain of intense moralizing that is only revealed by considering how thoroughly he abuses (punishes?) his characters for their lack of faith in man or themselves. This idea was intensely appealing to me as a fledgling intellectual and Mr. Ellis's masterful interplay between content, context and subtext was, and still is, impressive.

Over the course of the last few years, I make it a point to look for his novels when drifting (as I do so often) purposelessly in the public library. Eventually, my familiarity with his work increased and the only novel of his I hadn't read was Less Than Zero and so it was with some amount of self-kicking that I discovered his new novel was ostensibly a sequel to it.

Mr. Ellis recently came to Boston to read from Imperial Bedrooms and I dragged along a friend who I had been trying to inspire to read more by buying him American Psycho and making him meet the author. The reading did the trick and while my friend has still not read American Psycho, we both bought copies of Imperial Bedrooms and finished them within the week (he in one day!).

Imperial Bedrooms is essentially a sequel to Less Than Zero and begins with a neatly self-referential passage about the 1980-something adaptation of the book into a film. The narrator of both books, Clay, acknowledges the existence of both the previous book and its adaptation, basically claiming that the book was a fictionalized (but accurate) version of his life. This bit of post-modern twisting neatly cuts off an indebtedness to the previous book that I think ultimately benefits me in my ignorance of that book's contents.

Imperial Bedrooms is composed in a series of vignettes as Clay returns to Los Angeles to cast a movie that he has written. His subsequent descent into sexual debauchery, self-medication and paranoia serve as the not-unfamiliar premise of Ellis's book.
At the reading I attended, Ellis cited Raymond Chandler as a primary influence in cultivating the tone of this book, and in truth, I feel that these back-to-back blog entries might seem a bit redundant, when one considers that both books share similar virtues. Imperial Bedrooms, like Farewell, My Lovely, uses Los Angeles as a backdrop for alarmingly immoral activities. Drugs are omnipresent in the pages of Imperial Bedrooms and Clay abuses them freely. The extended use of drugs throughout the novel lends the character an air of defeatedness; Clay seems to use drugs because he is too bored or broken to do much else and the other characters in the book use drugs as a shield from behind which they are protected from scrutiny, by self or others.

Among Los Angeles's other temptations are the of-the-flesh variety. Clay indulges in a fair bit of gratuitous sex throughout the novel, as do most of the characters who surround him. He abuses his position of authority (however slight) by granting sexual favors to aspiring actors and actresses and failing to follow up in the implicit quid pro quo.

On a side note, this is one of the things that I so adore about Ellis's work in general: his willingness to portray gay and bisexual characters; they proliferate his novels. But it's not that Ellis merely populates his environments with a PC Big Brother-esque rainbow of lifestyles. Ellis is genuinely interested in utilizing these characters to their fullest, which often entails a rather heroically unflattering portrayal of their sexual vices and moral squalor.

During his stay in Los Angeles, Clay becomes increasingly paranoid: he believes he is being followed by at least two different cars, he begins receiving anonymous threatening text messages, acquaintances go missing, etc. As Clay's desperation intensifies, so do his sexual misadventures. An aspiring actress he has been stringing along begins to reveal her mistrust in Clay's power and so their sex becomes increasingly depraved with Clay's role as sexual tormentor becoming starkly revealed. Towards the end of the novel, Clay engages in a scene of sexual torture that is startling in its brutality; it reads like something from American Psycho.

Beneath the narrative, Imperial Bedrooms is laced with an inherent solipsism. Clay is unable to connect with anyone, and the auxiliary characters in the novel remain as mysterious to the reader as they are to Clay. Ellis provides them virtually no flesh within which to inhabit their bodies, and so they seem rather like the drug-induced paranoid hallucinations that one might imagine our narrator being afflicted by.

Moreover, there seems to develop in the novel the sense that there is a larger plot construct within which Clay's narrative takes place that neither he nor we are not privy to. The side characters begin to inspire suspicious, conspiratorial thoughts as the novel betrays some sense of plot unfurling around us, obscured by Clay's self-involved worldview.

The Clay of Imperial Bedrooms is a man who is incapable of making a connection with his fellow man, especially his former friends who populated Less Than Zero. Ellis's work, which is often teeming with immoral characters engaging in reprehensible material, has often attracted a great deal of controversy or scorn from conservative-minded readers.

While there is nothing palatable in Ellis's (usually quite blase) description of disgusting behavior, I've often said that his work is firmly directed by an implicit moral compass. In the case of Imperial Bedrooms this moral compass takes the guise of Clay's seemingly endless self-loathing. As Clay becomes more desperate, so too do his actions, and the character arc is indistinguishable from a classic tailspin with all its panic and gravity.

The film industry setting for the novel is clever. Ellis is no stranger to glamor-industry settings for his novels (Wall Street, the modeling world, etc.) but the facade and charade of film proves a perfect backdrop for the endless deception and interpersonal fraudulence that permeates Clay's life. The film setting lends a particular eeriness to aforementioned conspiratorial paranoia; it is like Clay is a secondary character in someone else's drama. In this way Imperial Bedrooms reads almost like a diary from a bit player on a film for which he has not read the whole script.

The book's title is apropos, not simply for the neat parallelism in Costello references. In the novel, the bedroom becomes the only place Clay can assert his power, bolster his self-image. The bedroom is where he subjugates men and women alike, building his empire. But Clay, like all empires and emperors, is blinded by ego - in this case, not by inflated but rather deflated ego. Clay is oblivious that since Less Than Zero was written about his life, he has become less and less the main character of his own story.