"Imperial Bedrooms" by Bret Easton Ellis

Putatively a sequel to Less Than Zero, Ellis’s latest actually has nothing in common with his audacious debut except for the same setting and character names. Twenty-five years after the fictional birth of coked-out-of-his-mind teenager Clay, here he is again as a 43-year-old screenwriter, newly returned to LA after a years-long stint in New York. (Like its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms takes place in a four-week span over the winter holidays.) But any other textual links are curiously absent. One would think that in 25 years, the characters, Clay included, would have lived lives and probably considered their tangled relations as teenagers and the questions left at Less Than Zero’s end. Instead, Ellis fairly wipes the slate clean and turns Imperial Bedrooms into a half-baked thriller about the Hollywood machine.

The novel opens unimaginatively (albeit calculatingly) with an extended description of how Clay and his pals felt about the movie adaptation of Less Than Zero. (First line: “They had made a movie about us.” Yawn.) More surprising is the conceit that one of their posse wrote the book himself, and it’s interesting to see how Ellis wrestles with this meta-twist. Clay describes Less Than Zero’s fictional author, for instance, as “someone who floated through our lives and didn’t seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he’d shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.” In trademark fashion, Ellis lets those words just sit there, along with their themes, even though they seem like ample—and relevant—ground to base the sequel on.

Instead, after about 10 pages, the prelude and meta quality are dropped, and we find Clay at an industry party at the Bel Air home of his former flame Blair, now married to Clay’s former pal Trent. Bitter pleasantries are exchanged and then suddenly Clay comes face to face with a struggling young actress. His first words to her? “Do you want to be in a movie?” From there a dysfunctional relationship (and plot) takes off, as Clay tries to get the actress a part in his latest script (he’s a co-producer) while the two engage in increasingly violent sex. As their affair wears on, we learn the pair is caught in a larger network of sexual pathology, which results in several characters being bumped off. Ellis seems to want Imperial Bedrooms to be an of-the-minute morality tale about LA, but the novel actually describes a bizarro world untethered to the “real” city.

Less Than Zero, whether it was your cup of tea or not, was one-note perfection: Ellis relayed Clay’s fried point of view with aplomb, never allowing him to register an assessment, let alone an opinion, of the always bizarre, sometimes debased antics he witnessed. (One of the few times he endeavors an emotion—and barely one at that—is while watching a seriously gory snuff film.) But an unthinking narrator like this makes sense for an over-privileged, under-parented 18-year-old with a drug problem. The 43-year-old Clay of Imperial Bedrooms may now prefer vodka to blow, but he still apprehends his life as if he had a lobotomy. It’s all the stranger considering he’s a successful screenwriter—surely he knows the importance of psychological insight, back story, narrative tension, and strong character dynamics. Alas, all this is missing from Imperial Bedrooms , a vacuous tale driven solely by outlandish plot reveals. (Although I give Ellis credit: despite the book’s numerous faults, I kept reading simply to see what the next sick development would be. Only he could dream up these scenarios.)

Throughout his career Ellis has often been called a nihilist for his unblinking depictions of gruesomeness and excess, but with Imperial Bedrooms , he truly deserves the tag. He manages to write 150 pages of a “sequel” to Less Than Zero without saying anything at all. In a way, it’s a perfect Hollywood product, which Ellis no doubt knows. After all, he makes his living nowadays as a script doctor in La-La Land.