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| I was a bit surprised he didn't ask me out |
Of course, you probably never could love a Bret Easton Ellis book, but you can enjoy his writing. You can admire the way he captures an idea. You can admire the way he uses the simplest prose to paint a picture of horrific proportions, and at the same time, to just convey the everyday.
So you love it, but you don’t love it in the way you love Jane Austen as a teenager or, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Boyd in Any Human Heart.
Imperial Bedrooms feels to me too much like a justification of the book itself.
The first pages of the book are spent painstakingly trying to disassociate the author from Clay. It feels very much like Bret Easton Ellis’ attempt to disavow Less Than Zero as an autobiography.
And why is he so interested in doing that? Not because he’d rather be Patrick Bateman. Here is my theory: He’s just returned to LA, the city his books so defile. He’s lonely, he’s bored. He re-reads Less Than Zero and he does not want to believe – cannot believe – that he was ever Clay. If he’s to be happy in LA he can never have been Clay. So, in Imperial Bedrooms, he turns Clay into a monster as if to prove that Clay is not himself; as if to say: “See! I told you I wasn’t Clay – look how he turned out!”
I confess: I am a fairly new recruit to the fan club of B.E.E. His books always seemed too horrific to me, too uncomfortable, too willing to shock with violence and sex and drugs; and, anyway, aren’t violence and sex and drugs the oldest tricks in the book if you want to shock?
Reading Less Than Zero recently, I saw something else. I heard the words. I read the minutiae. I was hooked. Then I went to a reading of his in London. And I was in love.
So I love him, but I don’t love his latest book. It feels forced, false, flat, which may – or may not – contribute to the outstanding use of language on some of the pages. The banality, passivity and absolute apathy of the language, tone and narration make the masterpiece.
Take this passage, for example:
The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed – his face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself – and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner’s office counted one hundred fifty-nine wounds from three different knives, many of them overlapping. His body was discovered by a group of kids who went to CalArts and were cruising through the streets off of Hillhurst in a convertible BMW looking for a parking space. When they saw the body they thought the “thing” lying by a trash bin was – and I’m quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder – “a flag”. I had to stop when I hit upon that word and start reading the article again from the beginning. The students who found Julian thought this because Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit (it had belonged to him but it wasn’t something he was wearing the night he was abducted) and their immediate reaction seemed halfway logical since the jacket and pants were streaked with red. (Julian had been stripped before he was killed and then re-dressed.) But if they thought it was a “flag” my immediate question was: then where was the blue? If the body resembled a flag, I kept wondering, then where was the blue? And then I realized: it was his head. The students thought it was a flag because Julian had lost so much blood that his crumpled face was a blue so dark it was almost black.The kids went to CalArts. They were driving a convertible BMW. They were looking for a parking space near Hillhurst. Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit that did belong to him but he wasn’t wearing it when he was abducted. These details, these everyday observations, make the prose both easier to read and harder to swallow. As I said, they make the masterpiece.
Yes, I can say masterpiece and also say I think the work is a slightly boring, indulgent piece of narcissism. Maybe I can say it because I am a new fan. A new devotee so willing to be pleased and yet so let down – like a young woman awaiting her first time with a guy she's lusted over for years only to end up thinking, “Is that it?”
Or maybe I think it’s boring and narcissistic because I am a narcissist and it all just seems so…. run of the mill. So what if Clay’s a narcissist? Not all narcissists have to be demonic. B.E.E’s just trying to prove a point about how damaging narcissism can be. Doesn’t Clay say all writers are narcissists?
Am I really a narcissist?
The story is so horrifying in parts that it totally desensitises me. Hooking up with my 25-year-old neighbour starts to seem like just as big a deal as hiring two prostitutes to beat each other up and watch them eat their own faeces.
And there I go, making it about me again.
Am I a narcissist? Am I a narcissist just like the Clay we are all made to hate in Imperial Bedrooms?
“Not everything’s about you.”
Maybe I don’t like it because in its pages I see a mirror reflecting my own horrific qualities? I’m not talking about the sick sex stuff. I’m talking about Clay’s complete inability to believe that there are things bigger than him, that don’t involve him in any way and that he can’t control.
What stops me from loving (or owning up to loving?) a B.E.E book is that all the things that lead to the terrible state of shock are the things you can’t believe (the things you would never do), the things that you don’t want to believe about yourself.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is this: As much as you revile Bret Easton Ellis' protagonists, you cannot help but relate to them. And that is the work of a genius.
Which brings me to the inscription in the front of the book.
“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
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