Imperial Bedrooms is a novel by American author Bret Easton Ellis. Released on June 15, 2010, it is the sequel to Less than Zero, Ellis' 1985 bestselling literary debut, which was shortly followed by a film adaptation in 1987. Imperial Bedrooms revisits Less than Zero's self-destructive and disillusioned youths as they approach middle-age in the present day. Like Ellis' earlier novel, which took its name from Elvis Costello's 1977 song of the same name, Imperial Bedrooms is named after Costello's 1982 album.
The action of the novel takes place twenty-five years after Less than Zero. Its story follows Clay, a New York-based screenwriter, after he returns to Los Angeles to cast his new film. There he becomes embroiled in the sinister world of his former friends and confronts the darker aspects of his own personality. The novel opens with a literary device which suggests the possibility that the narrator of Imperial Bedrooms may not be the same as the narrator of Less than Zero although both are ostensibly narrated by Clay. In doing this, Ellis is able to comment on the earlier novel's style and on the development of its moralistic film adaptation. In the novel Ellis explores Clay's pathological narcissism, masochistic and sadistic tendencies, and exploitative personality, which had been less explicit in Less than Zero. Ellis chose to do this in part to dispel the sentimental reputation Less than Zero has accrued over the years, that of "an artifact of the 1980s". Imperial Bedrooms retains Ellis' characteristic transgressive style and applies it to the 2000s (decade) and 2010s, covering amongst other things, the impact of new communication technologies on daily lives.
Ellis began working on what would become Imperial Bedrooms during the development of his 2005 novel, Lunar Park. As with his previous works, Imperial Bedrooms depicts scenes of sex, extreme violence and hedonism in a minimalist style devoid of emotion. Some commentators have noted however that unlike previous works, Imperial Bedrooms employs more of the conventional devices of popular fiction. Reviews were mixed and frequently polarized. Some reviewers felt the novel was a successful return to themes explored in Less than Zero, Lunar Park and American Psycho (1991), while others derided it as boring or self-indulgent.
Background The development of Imperial Bedrooms began after Ellis had re-read Less than Zero during the writing of his 2005 pseudo-memoir, Lunar Park. The novel takes its name from Elvis Costello's 1982 album Imperial Bedroom, just as Less than Zero had been named for a Costello single. Upon reading Zero, Ellis began to reflect on how his characters would have developed in the interim. Soon, he found himself "overwhelm[ed]" by the idea of what would become Imperial Bedrooms as it continually returned to him. After gestating the idea, and making "voluminous notes", Ellis realised that his detailed outline had become longer than the finished book. He felt that this process of note-taking limited him to the novels that he genuinely wanted "to stay with for a couple of years". To this, he attributed having "written so few novels".
Ellis described the novel as an "autobiographical noir [written] during a midlife crisis". His most significant literary influence was American novelist Raymond Chandler, citing his particular brand of pulpy noir fiction. He found particular inspiration in the opacity of Chandler's fiction, citing the lack of closure in some of the books, which he called "existentialist masterpieces." He also admired the cynical worldview that Chandler created, and his particular sense of style and mood. In terms of his own plotting, however, he opined that "plots really don't matter", nor solutions to mysteries, because it's "the mood that's so enthralling... [a] kind of universal, this idea of a man searching for something or moving through this moral landscape and trying to protect himself from it, and yet he's still forced to investigate it." Part of the "impetus" behind Imperial Bedrooms, which Ellis "wrestled with", was to try and dispel the "sentimental" view of Less than Zero that made it, to some, "an artifact of the 80s" alongside "John Hughes movies and Ray-Bans and Fast Times at Ridgemont High"; he felt he began assessing audience's reactions to his work when working on Lunar Park.
On April 14, 2009, MTV News announced that Ellis had nearly finished the novel and it would be published in May 2010. At the time, Ellis revealed that all the novel's main characters would return. Prior to publication, Ellis had been convinced by his persuasive editor to remove some of the more graphic lines from Imperial Bedrooms' torture scenes, which he later regretted. "My most extreme act of self-censoring in Imperial Bedrooms," he said, however, was to omit a three-line description of a silver wall, because he felt that Clay would never have written it. Ellis stated he had no plans to make changes to the book as it stands in a second edition. Months prior to the book's release, Ellis tweeted the first sentence of the novel, "They had made a movie about us." The Random House website later announced the on sale date of June 22, 2010, in both hardback and paperback. With it, they released a picture of the book's cover and a short synopsis, which described the book as focusing on a middle-aged Clay, now a screenwriter, drawn back into his old circle. Amidst this, Clay begins dating a young actress with mysterious ties to Julian, Rip, and a recently murdered Hollywood producer; his life begins to spin out of control.Imperial Bedrooms , Randomhouse.biz In Imperial Bedrooms, Los Angeles returns once again as the book's setting. It is, along with New York, one of the two major locations in Ellis' fiction.
Plot The action of Imperial Bedrooms depicts Clay, who, after four months in New York, returns to Los Angeles to assist in the casting of his new film. There, he meets up with his old friends who were characters in Less than Zero. Like Clay, they have all become involved in the film industry: his philandering friend Trent Burroughs—who has married Blair—is a manager, while Clay's former classmate at Camden, Daniel Carter, has become a famous director. Julian Wells, who was a male prostitute in Less than Zero, has become an ultra-discreet high-class pimp representing struggling young actors who do not wish to tarnish future careers. Rip Millar, Clay's former drug dealer, now controls his own cartel and has become disfigured through repeated plastic surgeries.
Clay attempts to romance Rain Turner, a gorgeous young woman auditioning for a role in his new film, leading her on with the promise of being cast, all the while knowing she will never get the part because of her complete lack of acting skills. His narration reveals he has done this with a number of men and women in the past, and yet often comes out of the relationship hurt and damaged himself. Over the course of their relationship, he is stalked by unknown persons driving a Jeep and is frequently reminded by various individuals of the grisly murder of a young producer whom he knew.
As the novel progresses, Clay learns that Rip also had a fling with Rain and is now obsessed with her. When Clay discovers that Julian is currently Rain's boyfriend, he conspires with Rip to hand Julian over to him. When Julian is then found murdered, Rain confronts Clay about his role in the affair and is raped by him in response. He later receives a video of Julian's murder from Rip which has been overdubbed with an angry voicemail from Clay as a means to implicate him in the crime. The novel then depicts sequences of the savage sexual and physical abuse of a beautiful young girl and young boy, perpetrated by Clay. Clay experiences no feelings of remorse or guilt for this, or for exploiting and raping Rain. In the last scenes, it is strongly implied that Blair has been hiring people to follow Clay. In return for his giving her what she wants, she offers to provide Clay with a false alibi that will prevent the police from arresting him as an accomplice to Julian's murder.
Characters Much critical attention has been given to the development of the characters from the original book, 25 years on. One review opined that "[Ellis'] characters are incapable of growth. They cannot credibly find Jesus or even see a skilled psychologist or take the right medication to fend off despair. They are bound to be American psychos." Their development, some critics have observed, illuminates the ways they have not developed as people; Clay is, for example, "in mind and spirit if not quite in body, destined to remain unchanged, undeveloped, unlikable and unloved." In Less than Zero, though the characters of the novel compose for some "the most hollow and vapid representation of the MTV generation one could possibly imagine", they remained to other reviewers "particularly sympathetic". Like the novel, its characters were equally cultural milestones, described by a reviewer as "seminal characters" (of American fiction). On the subject of the 1987 film, Clay describes that "the parents who ran the studio would[n't] ever expose their children in the same black light the book did". To Bill Eichenberger, this shows how "the children have become the parents, writing scripts and producing movies, still imprisoned by Hollywood's youth and drug cultures – but now looking at things from the outside in." Eisinger comments for the New York Press, that while "they're in careers now and new relationships and different states of mind... their preoccupations are just the same."
Clay, the protagonist of Less than Zero, "once a paralyzed observer, is now a more active character and has grown to be a narcissist". The reason behind this shift in character personality was due to Ellis's lack of interest in the other characters—thus the solipsism is mirrored in the fiction. For Ellis, this became "an exploration of intense narcissism." In 2010, Clay is now a "successful screenwriter" with the "occasional producer credit". He returns to LA to help cast The Listeners (reminiscent of Ellis' involvement with the 2009 film adaptation of his short story collection The Informers). Now 45, and no longer a disaffected teen, Clay is described by Details as "arguably worse than American Psychos Patrick Bateman"; Ellis says that he would not disagree with this, citing the ambiguous nature of Bateman's crimes. In terms of Clay's psychology, Ellis notes his preponderance for a "masochistic cycle of control and rejection and seduction and inevitable pain", which "is something he gets off on because he's ...a masochist and not a romantic." The Los Angeles Times notes how Clay "shares biographical details with Ellis", a successful party-boy, who in 1985 was "often conflated with his fictional counterpart." Ellis asserts to the contrary, "I'm not really Clay." As opposed to his portrayal in Less than Zero, Clay is more unambiguously manipulative in Bedrooms; he is, in Ellis' words, "guilty". As in Zero, Clay has stagnated in an impassive and jaded state, abusing alcohol and sedatives such as ambien, "living with a kind of psychic "locked-in" syndrome." As in Zero and Psycho, the novel also poses the question of Clay's perception of reality, The Independent asking "Is Clay really being followed or is he being dogged by a guilty conscience for crimes committed, even when they are crimes of inaction?" Over the novel, "Clay shifts from damaged to depraved"; a "final scene in Imperial Bedrooms of unremitting torture... enacted by Clay on two beautiful teenagers who are bought and systematically abused" demonstrates "Clay's graduation from a passively colluding observer to active perpetrator... who either indulges in torture or fantasizes about it."