Drenched in a sappy 80’s soundtrack comes Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis’ follow-up to his juvenile debut, Less Than Zero. Like its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms is also named after an Elvis Costello work. This time the title comes from Costello’s 1982 album Imperial Bedroom. Slap a plural on there and off we go!

The book opens by touching every tired shock-value scenario that could have been found in TV shows and movies years ago. The narrator tells us that a movie (based on the first novel, Less Than Zero) had been made about the book’s cast of characters and that “there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened”:

“For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon … where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked … Other examples: my girlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons below Mulholland … And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang raped …”

After these cheap hooks, Ellis fills us in on what happened between the two novels. Clay, the novel’s protagonist moves back to Los Angeles after living in New York for a number of years, in order to help cast an adaptation of his work. With the link between Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms made, and its shock-value tone set, we set off on a journey through Ellis’ hellish L.A.

Imperial Bedrooms takes the characters from Less Than Zero and extends them to what Ellis believes are their logical conclusions, twenty-five years later. A few pages into the book we are reintroduced to Julian Wells, Clay’s long-time friend who is a recovering heroin addict and former male-prostitute. Ellis doesn’t hold back at all and hurls Julian’s battered, rotting corpse at us almost immediately:

“The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later [after the movie-version of the first book], his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed — his face struck with such force that it had partially folded in on itself — and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner’s office counted one hundred fifty-nine wounds from three different knives, many of them overlapping.”

After properly teasing us, Ellis jumps backwards in time and drags us along on a particularly boring plot-line. The story is essentially a soap opera that has been littered with routinely violent and “shocking” elements to keep it going. It follows Clay through a relationship with an aspiring, talentless actress who is using him because he promised her a spot in his movie. In a typically melodramatic passage Ellis contrasts the love-interest theme with the mystery-crime theme:

“I’m thinking about the blond girl on the veranda and I imagine Blair’s [Clay’s ex-girlfriend] thinking about the last time I made love to her. This disparity should scar me but it doesn’t.  And then Blair’s talking to a guy from CAA and a band begins playing, which I take as my cue to leave, but really it’s the text I suddenly get that says I’m watching you that pushes me out of the party.”

From here, the plot takes all the expected turns. It turns out that she’s cheating on him, she’s mixed up in every illegal racket you can think of, and he totally fell for her. Clay even spends a period of time in a depressed, drunken stupor where he runs into his drug-dealer friend who has had a lot “of work done.” Being the “moralist” he claims to be, Ellis doesn’t pass up the opportunity to brood on the trend of plastic surgery and fake tanning:

“I don’t recognize Rip [Clay’s drug dealer] 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. The lips are too thick. The skin’s too orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fells off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque”

Imperial Bedrooms is hell-bent on damning what its author clearly sees as a corrupt culture of excess. Maybe that would have been interesting reading ten years ago, but in 2010, it’s poorly-aged and obvious. Even so, the manner in which the subject is analyzed is shallow. The novel dwells more on appearance and hollow character analysis than anything else. It comes off like a typical Hollywood screenplay, its characters pawns moving toward a predictably violent, yet boring end.

Ellis’ style tends to get in the way of the reading. It’s blatantly Hemingway with a face-lift: constructed with page-long run-on sentences and generic “minimalist” wordings. In an especially lengthy passage, where Clay is sort of wondering about his girlfriend’s mysterious background, Ellis indulges:

“You ignore why she left Lansing at seventeen and the casual hints of an abusive uncle (a made-for-sympathy move that threatens to erase the carnality) and why she dropped out of the University of Michigan (I don’t ask whether she’d ever enrolled) and what led to the side trips to New York and Miami before she landed in L.A. and you don’t ask what she must have done with the photographer who discovered her when she was waitressing at the café on Melrose or about the career modeling lingerie that probably seemed promising at nineteen and that led to the commercials that led to a couple of tiny roles in films and definitely not putting all her hopes into the third part of a horror franchise that panned into nothing and then it was the quick slide into the bit parts on TV shows you’ve never heard of, the pilot …”

It goes on and on and on. I considered not reprinting this monolith, but it’s important to see how particularly not-enjoyable it is to read Ellis’ writing. Often he presents the reader with literary exercises which make for tedious reading.

Imperial Bedrooms seems to be set in a technologically-2010 Los Angeles, but it’s scored almost exclusively to a soft-rock, 80’s soundtrack. Like the time when Clay reflects on how “many people died last year,” and Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” plays in the background. Or like the time when Clay is at a party in Bel Air where “U2 Christmas songs [are] drowning everything out.” Or the time when Clay’s drug dealer ominously tells Clay that “Julian’s disappeared” and “The Boys of Summer” keeps repeating itself in the background. Or the time when Clay is having a nightmare and David Bowie’s “China Girl” is echoing “throughout the condo.”

Ellis is more interested in creating a mood and imagery than the content itself. He even admitted to this in an interview: “The plots really don’t matter. The solutions to mysteries don’t matter. Sometimes they’re not solved at all. It’s just the mood that’s so enthralling.” This could work if he were a good writer. Or maybe it doesn’t matter because Ellis’ obvious goal is to generate a lot of cash in a short amount of time by selling the film-adaptation rights. In that case, the imagery and mood are probably good things to concentrate on. Especially when you consider that in the film adaptation everything else will probably change.

Imperial Bedrooms reeks of the intent of film-adaptation. Months before its release, Ellis was already speaking to journalists about the adaptation of the book as a sequel to the film-version of Less Than Zero, which starred Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and, most notably, Robert Downey, Jr. Currently, Ellis’ fans have overrun Imperial Bedrooms’ Wikipedia page, littering it with references to its big-screen adaptation and rumors about Robert Downey, Jr. One source is even reporting that Ellis has already sold the movie rights to Imperial Bedrooms, only days after its release.

The book comes to its half-baked conclusion: the revelation that L.A. is hell on earth, a gigantic corrupting engine that leaves nobody innocent or untouched. It completes itself with even more rape scenes, sexual coercions, “viral” internet death videos, set-ups and ambiguous connections to Mexican drug cartels.

Imperial Bedrooms is self-serving and narrow-minded. It is Ellis playing it safe by following his standard formula of using cheap tricks to appease fans and turn his book into a Hollywood money grab at the same time. This book is the result of an author who is immersed in the culture of Hollywood and trying to write about its decadence. In the end Ellis proves that even he is unable to escape its clichés.