Same old perversions

Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25 years ago is bound to end in tears, screaming and blood. And so it does, with grim efficiency. No sooner has our protagonist, Clay, checked back into his Hollywood apartment complex, than he is plunged feet-first into a swamp of paranoia, sin and violent double-cross. As the doorman says to him on his return, ‘Welcome back.’

So what’s Clay been up to all these years? Becoming a screenwriter would be the literalist’s answer, but drifting further into Easton Ellis’s subconscious is more the truth of it. Imperial Bedrooms begins with Clay’s description of a movie, ‘based on a book written by someone we knew’. That book: Less Than Zero. That movie: the real-life 1987 adaptation of Less Than Zero. Immediately we know we’re in the same fact-as-fiction twilight zone that Easton Ellis explored so compellingly in his previous novel, Lunar Park.

Easton Ellis’s easy familiarity with this world certainly shows — so much so that, at times, this feels like a work of journalism. The weight and accuracy of description is unnerving. From the buzz of a text message to the pale glow of a thousand iPhones this is nothing less than a book of, and for, the Here and Now. Like John O’Hara, Easton Ellis builds a collage out of the details of contemporary life, and lets whatever plot there is swell naturally from there.

And the overall picture is disturbing in the extreme. There’s the gore and sex, of course, often mixed together as they are in Easton Ellis’s other books. But that’s just a general symptom, not the cause.