Over the course of six novels and one book of short stories, Bret Easton Ellis has put together one of the most entertaining, fascinating, and fucked-up bodies of work in contemporary literature.
The release of Less Than Zero (1985) saw Ellis painted by the media—with varying degrees of admiration and disgust—as both an enfant terrible and the voice of his generation. Written in a stark, minimalist style that calmly and blandly relays a story of disaffection and degradation in Los Angeles, the book seems to me to be the ultimate statement on privileged 80s teenhood.
The Rules of Attraction (1987) abandoned Less Than Zero’s spare writing, replacing it with dense, stream-of-consciousness prose in a novel of shifting narration. The disaffectedness was still fully intact, but here it was richer and headier. This book is also the perfect lampoon of the pretension and partying and ridiculousness that happens at liberal-arts colleges.
Then came American Psycho (1991). This hyperdetailed and occasionally incredibly violent and pornographic novel of amped-up yuppie masculinity was maybe the most controversial piece of fiction of the later 20th century. But as satire, it’s up there with Jonathan Swift. And while it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeingAmerican Psycho as an offensive, gleeful misogynistic fantasy, it’s really not that at all. It’s an indictment of the attitudes of its main character, and the fact that Ellis chose to write it in the first person, free of omniscient editorializing, was a brave and rewarding risk.
Glamorama (1998) is Ellis’s longest and most complex novel. It’s about, in part, supermodels becoming terrorists. It’s enough about that, in fact, that Ellis settled out of court for an undisclosed sum with the makers of the models-as-terrorists Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander.
Lunar Park (2005) is Ellis’s strangest novel and also one of his best. The main character is named Bret Easton Ellis. This character has written books with titles like Less Than Zero and American Psycho. But rather than a roman à clef, which the first little bit of the book leads a reader to expect, Lunar Park is really a horror novel that’s on par with anything by Stephen King. The book features mysterious emails from dead people, fictional characters (American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and, perhaps, Less Than Zero’s Clay) come to life, ghosts, and a possessed, bloodthirsty children’s toy. Did I mention it’s great?
Next month, Ellis’s new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, will be released. It is, as you may have heard, a sequel of sorts to Less Than Zero. Its narrator is Clay, and most of the main characters from the original book (Julian, Blair, Rip, Trent) reappear. But Imperial Bedrooms is no mere sequel. It’s more a culmination of all of Ellis’s work up to now. Does it continue the story of the passive, clueless Clay in scary, shimmery Los Angeles? Yes. But it also detours into the scatological violence of American Psycho and the otherworldly terror of Lunar Park.As a follow-up to Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms is more of a nauseated reaction than a loving continuation. And boy, does Ellis deliver here. Imperial Bedrooms is darker than Less Than Zero and more full of dread and horror. I’ve read it three times through now, and though I know I love it, I still can’t figure out exactly what I think of it. But I’m certain that it’s important and I’m certain that you should read it.
