"Imperial Bedrooms," Bret Easton Ellis' sixth novel, is being billed as "a sequel of sorts" to "Less Than Zero" (1985), his blockbuster debut about life in the fast lane that catapulted him to fame before he had even graduated from college.
Ellis' publisher promises that "Bedrooms" will demonstrate "just how much Ellis has matured as a writer" in the intervening quarter century. What "Bedrooms" actually does is confirm, yet again, that Ellis picked the wrong career when he decided to become a novelist rather than a journalist.
"Less Than Zero" has no plot and flat characters, reflecting a world of privilege and depravity in which truth and meaning are negotiable because they never leave the surface.
In deadpan prose and sharp dialogue, "Zero" catches every wrinkle and fold in the skin of this nightmarish world, where casual sex and plentiful drugs grease the skids from desire to boredom and then cruelty -- even as the narrator pines for the younger, better California in which his now-lost self had once felt at home.
The best passages in "Zero" remind me of Joan Didion's "The White Album," which chronicles an earlier turning point in California's history with the same mix of keen observation and narrative restraint.
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The best passages in "Bedrooms" rarely even remind me of "Zero," which is a much better book because it doesn't worry so much about whether it qualifies as a novel.
After opening with an awkward metafictional framing device, "Bedrooms" begins much as "Zero" did: with Clay getting off a plane in Los Angeles, just before Christmas. More than 20 years older and now a screenwriter, he is in town to help cast a film based on a script he wrote.
The central figures from the brat pack in "Zero" are all still around, struggling to find their role in "a mosaic of youth, a place you don't really belong anymore."
Once Ellis reintroduces these characters and puts them on their feet, he doesn't know what to do with them and therefore can't make them move -- or make them moving.
As a result, we're treated to yet another iteration of the same increasingly tired story Ellis has been telling from the beginning, featuring over-exposed views of a dystopian Los Angeles.
What does it all mean? That would require walking in Didion's footsteps and asking some hard questions. Instead, Ellis takes the lazy way out, making his bid for relevance by serving watered-down Chandler: a tacked-on piece of noir in which the femme fatale spawns mayhem and murder.
If only she or her story could also spawn interest.
"Bedrooms" gives us glimpses of the younger Ellis' talent. The dialogue can be crisp and funny. He retains his keen eye for detail, particularly when describing fashion and appearance. And he can still evoke an air of lurking menace, in which paranoia feeds on itself.
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But while Ellis can write, he seems unable to generate substance from style by telling a story as well as setting a scene.
