Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Read this having recently reread Less Than Zero, the prequel. (And what a prequel it was!) Ellis launches the sequel by invoking the prequel and the movie based on it, explaining that the writer has changed but the narrator has not. A tidy little link, there. A good way to stitch together tomes otherwise severed by 25 years.
In my review of Less Than Zero I mentioned that when I had originally read it I was impressed, and when I read it again recently I was not so impressed. What I didn’t mention was that after reading Less than Zero the first time I read American Psycho and was impressed, but promised myself I would never read it again. After my second reading of Less Than Zero I was beginning to think maybe my promise was silly and I should reread American Psycho after all and see if my attitude towards it would change as well. But now that I’ve read Imperial Bedrooms, I don’t need to re-read American Psycho, since Ellis has done so for me.
Yeah. I’m calling Imperial Bedrooms “Less Than Zero plus American Psycho.” Also, Glamorama. Also a bit of Lunar Park, but only a bit. Also, some Mulholland Drive, but without any of David Lynch’s style (which should not be taken as praise or insult). Also, Fight Club, but not really.
Ostensibly, the cast of Less Than Zero are middle-aged now… but if alienation is a theme, there’s no way for those of us who are middle aged will in the least identify with anything going on in this book. Not at all. Aside from a few comments a few people make, there’s little or no use to which this middle-agedness is used. So why bring it up? I guess because the ennui of the 80s elite is the same as the ennui of the over-the-hill elite. Young people have energy now, but old people, well, they’ve always been and always will be self-indulgent pricks.
Imperial Bedrooms ends up being about sadism, and nothing more. And we learn that sadism is not merely cruelty. A sadist does not merely enjoy causing pain, but enjoys the pain caused to someone who asks for it. But the person asking for it cannot enjoy it—or it’s not pain. The sadist thrives on the contradiction of a person’s wanting something he or she doesn’t want. Yeah, I’m going to call Ellis a sadist. I’m going to say he wants us to want the bruises this book causes, bruises we don’t enjoy.