Sun, Jun 13, 2010 page14

• Hardcover: US: Finally, ‘Less Than Zero’ gets its sequel

  Bret Easton Ellis’ follow-up doesn’t match the brilliance of his debut novel

  • By Bruce Machart / NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis published his bestselling debut novel, Less Than Zero, which was quickly adapted into a “Brat Pack” movie. At the time, Ellis was still an undergraduate, and his book was lauded for its terse depictions of the Hollywood elite, of the perennially anesthetized kids and their morally ambivalent parents.

  Twenty-five years later, Ellis now offers a short sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, and the premise brilliantly assimilates his first novel’s Hollywood buzz: “They had made a movie about us,” the novel begins. “The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew.”

  For Ellis fans, this must come as quite a shock. After all, for a quarter of a century they have assumed that the events in Less Than Zero were described by its protagonist narrator, Clay, the cocaine-bolstered undergraduate who comes home for Christmas break to find a host of demons run amok in the City

  of Angels. As it turns out, Clay,

  now presumably the narrator of Imperial Bedrooms, had been misrepresented in the first novel by “someone we knew.” This someone remains unnamed, though cross-referencing the two texts makes the identity clear.

  Otherwise, nothing has really changed. Clay, now a successful screenwriter who returns to LA to help cast his latest film, is still myopic and monomaniacal. He routinely uses his power in the industry to coerce aspiring actors into his bed, and the psychosexual relationships that ensue are as unfulfilling as ever. When Clay grows obsessed with an untalented but beautiful actress named Rain Turner, he manipulates her with promises of a part in his movie.

  The old gang is still around, too, and filthy rich despite their apparent lethargy. There’s Blair, Clay’s high school girlfriend, and Julian, his oft-abused chum. Rip, Clay’s former drug dealer, is now disfigured by his predilection for plastic surgery. And then there is Trent, now a successful Hollywood insider and Blair’s husband of convenience.

  The only novelty of Imperial Bedrooms is in the noirlike mystery Ellis constructs. From the moment Clay arrives in the city, he is being followed. Dark-windowed cars lurk on the street below his high-rise condo, their drivers sending threatening text messages from blocked numbers.

  Yet Ellis seems far more interested in befuddling his readers than in creating fully developed characters. It is no coincidence that the old chess metaphor (and the LA band X’s song lyrics) “this is the game that moves as you play” appears so often in his work. While most metafiction aims to call attention to the artifice of art, Ellis seeks to confuse reality with artifice. And who can blame him? In a novel where the narrative rules are fluid (and therefore not rules at all), where the game changes as it’s played, the author is unfettered by such inconveniences as character motivation, causal relationships between events and plausibility.

  In the end, Clay is either delusional or very, very unlucky. Only a handful of days in Los Angeles, and he finds himself (and this no-talent actress to whom he’s so drawn) at the heart of a pulsing miasma of evil involving drugs, prostitution, murderous Mexicans, torture and comparatively pedestrian sins such as infidelity. It’s really quite a mess.

  Perhaps more troubling is the fact that, for all his struggles, Clay remains unknown to the reader. We are told during a session with his psychologist that “the pattern that keeps repeating itself is again pointed out, and its reasons are located, and we practice techniques to lessen the pain.” Again we are given only abstractions, as neither “the pattern” nor “its reasons” nor the “techniques to lessen the pain” are revealed.

  But Ellis is savvy and clearly aware of what he puts on the page. In Less Than Zero, after returning from New England, Clay is forever described by his suntanned friends as being pale. At the end of Imperial Bedrooms, the last thing Blair says to Clay is, “You don’t look like anything has happened to you. And you’re so pale.” No doubt Ellis intends this pallor as a metaphor for Clay’s interior life, but it also serves as a description of yet another inferior sequel, which is drained of its vitality and not only less than Less Than Zero, but less than fully alive on the page.

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