"Set in a Los Angeles in the early 1980s, Less Than Zero has become a timeless classic. The coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a city devoid of feeling or hope."
"Bret Easton Ellis delivers a riveting, tour-de-force sequel to Less Than Zero, one of the most singular novels of the last thirty years.
Returning to Los Angeles from New York, Clay, now a successful screenwriter, is casting his new movie. Soon he is running with his old circle of friends through LA's seedy side. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, is married to Trent, a bisexual philanderer and influential manager. Then there's Julian, a recovering addict, and Rip, a former dealer. Then when Clay meets a gorgeous young actress who will stop at nothing to be in his movie, his own dark past begins to shine through, and he has no choice but to dive into the recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal."
I have to say, I don't reckon it's too bad of a gig, writing those book jacket blurbs. You get the [vaguely anonymous] honor of being the one to summarize the plot while tossing in some of your own analysis, and you're allowed to use ten-dollar words like "proclivity" without sounding like a total douche. I used to think that blurbing fell to the authors of the books themselves, but now I realize that there's a whole league of nameless writerly demigods (emphasis on the 'demi') toiling away for little pay and even less respect (can you imagine how the BJ* crowd would have been fared in the turbulent social waters of Fran Leibowitz's "Writing High"?), selflessly dedicating their services out of nothing but the goodness of their hearts and the feverish love of the text and all text before it? Okay, so I'm not doing a very good job of selling it, but I'm guessing it could be worse (watch "Dirty Jobs", you'll see what I mean).
I got into Ellis because I was a punky smart-ass teenager who liked riding in cars and going to parties at my rich friends' houses and listening to Crystal Castles and acting tragic. This was when I was 17, and now that I'm 18 and have the benefit of perspective I'm allowed to analyze myself in this way. More specifically, I wanted to start with Less Than Zero because I was having all kinds of bicoastal identity issues and trying to make sense of the seven years I myself spent growing up as a confused lass in La-La-Land (in the early 2000s, but same difference, really). Also, I won't pretend that the whole bit about Ellis having published the goddamn thing while 21 and still in college didn't seriously arouse my interest. I'm a jealous sucker for a literary prodigy any day.
Here is what I think you have to concede about Less Than Zero: it packs a wallop. It's gritty. It's disturbing. At times, it's unexpectedly, intensely powerful, and even, I would argue, startlingly well-written. Here is what I expects its critics - and God knows they are a bountiful bunch - would say: it's a little ridiculous. A writing teacher I had in back in high school (you know, like, three weeks ago) once described his beef with Ellis as rooted in the writer's fundamental way of conglomerating already uncommon experiences into even more literally incredible characters and scenarios. Flipping back through LTZ, I can see that he has a point. Clay's experience go from bad to worse on the disturb-o-meter as he retreats further into the shady web of "nihilism" and "disaffection" that seems to define his experience, his dark entanglements reaching a fever pitch somewhere around P. 190 of 208 (we're talking First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, June 1998), when our noble protagonist walks in on his buddies alternately playing Atari and having their way with a roofied and rashed 12-year-old girl tied to a bed before heading back to rubberneck rumors of a dead body dumped behind a popular club. Okay, so maybe in retrospect the whole scenario here is a tad far-fetched, but the point is that you really don't notice how over-the-top it is when you've been with Ellis since page one. Having read a lot of mediocre-verging-on-shitty work produced by the under-40 set (an embarrassingly large portion I shudder to have to claim as my own), I have to say that pre-legal Ellis is indisputably masterful when it comes to pacing and tone. He may be a manipulative bastard, but that's part of what makes him kinda great. Furthermore, Ellis's treatment of the subject matter plays, perhaps unconsciously, right into the hands of two distinct audiences: the common man, ever-yearning for an escapist roller-coaster ride, and the Über-rich of whom he writes. Think about it: most Americans never even stray near enough to rub shoulders with the kind of lifestyle Ellis describes in his books. While it's easy enough for them to dismiss the whole thing as a sick fantasy of depravation, Ellis writes with such compelling coolness, ne'er lapsing into narrative hysteria, not even when the going gets particularly gory, that they can't help but want it to be true, at least a little bit, so they're inclined to believe in spite of themselves. What works for the rich is that it is true that little bit. My ol' writing teacher put it best when he said that "certain elements ring true for certain people, but nobody's life is completely like that", but what you have to understand is that he wouldn't even have spotted those "certain elements" if he didn't teach in a school catering primarily to the spawn of the top tax bracket, in one of the wealthiest geographical locales in the country. He's seen those elements first-hand - we all have, in our community - and that's what keeps us reading. Ellis had me from his choice of epigraph - a quote from the song "The Have-Nots", by the 80s band X - "This is the game that moves as you play." Spend some time as an adolescent trying to find your way on the Beverly Hills party circuit (or the Hamptons party circuit, for that matter) and you'll be hard-pressed to find a more fitting description of the experience.
My suspicion is that Ellis probably gets a lot of flak nowadays because our culture is literally permeated with stuff like LTZ, but what you have to remember is that Ellis is the paradigm inadvertently responsible for all that stuff's coming into being in the first place. I mean, you can trace it as far back as you like (following the angsty-wandering-adolescent thread back to Salinger, or even Twain), but the Brat Pack gets its own Wikipedia page because it introduced a significant overhaul in the literary world. A bifurcation, if you will. You need only learn that Clay's ex-girlfriend is named Blair to realize that Gossip Girl owes a helluva lot to Bret Easton Ellis. And James Franco might be cute, but just because he can write a book about kids up to no good in the Southland doesn't necessarily make him better than any other practitioner of Ellis fan-fiction (yeah, I went there). Calling LTZ trite is like calling that Buffy episode where everybody turns into their Halloween costumes overdone (WHERE DO YOU THINK THAT TROPE ORIGINATED, PEOPLE?); proclaiming Palo Alto a groundbreaking work is like praising Midnight in Paris for its originality (yeah, I went there).
So. I finished Less Than Zero and lent it to the friend of mine whose life most closely resembles those detailed in it (sans all the kiddie rape), only to have her come at me with Imperial Bedrooms several months later. I don't know how I missed the fact that Ellis's latest work was this 2010 sequel, but I have to say, I was a little uneasy about cracking it. LTZ had been, for me, such a powerful portrait of a place and time and group of people that I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to revisit that group of people, and that place, in a different time altogether. I didn't really want it to change my perception of this particular branch of the Ellis-verse, but I ultimately decided that foregoing it would be a treasonous renunciation of canon and therefore actually essentially a big F U to the Ellis-verse. I generally steer right clear of series (serieses?) and so I never know what to expect when I'm handed a sequel. Naturally, Ellis went and mindfucked me right there on Page 1.
Most brilliant conceit for a sequel ever: the first-person narrator in the first book isn't who you thought he was. Hell, the first book isn't what you thought it was. For those of you not following the text at home, basically the idea is that one of Clay's friends - presumably someone we met in LTZ (or thought we met) - is supposed to have appropriated his identity for the purposes of penning LTZ, which - get this - exists (and actually makes an appearance as a tangible object towards the end [in IB's own fever-pitch scene, this one involving a brutally perverted weekend spent in Palm Beach with a boy and girl prostitute]) in the IB universe. It's at once so bizarre that it takes you a minute to get your head around it and so simple that you can't believe no author has thought of it until now. This set-up also allows Ellis to incorporate the 1987 Robert Downey Jr. film version of LTZ into the canon, accounting for discrepancies in its events in one fell swoop by telling us what we should have realized long ago - it's was a movie, based off a work of fiction, based off of true events. See what I mean about the beautiful simplicity of it all? I don't care what the post-modernists have to say - meta-narration is clearly alive and thriving within the work of Bret Easton Ellis.
Whereas LTZ was a disturbing portrait of adolescent activity and generational ennui, IB might fall into the categories of thriller, character study, and - perhaps above all - cautionary tale. Again, it's at times a little much to swallow, but the uncertainties inherent in the idea of first-book's-events-as-fiction raise questions about ownership, authorship, and truth that actually help to smooth over some of the unbelievability issues. Furthermore, the concept expertly accounts for the quarter-century-wide gulf in writing styles between the then- and now-Ellises - it implies that the works were written by two different people, and, in a way, they were. Although Ellis has clearly matured in a lot of ways, the sequel lacks the raw, biting teenage honesty that characterized its predecessor. Ellis is clearly confined by the temporal constraints of the thriller genre, and so his pacing, while still impressive, feels pretty consistently forced. Still, the sensitivity and perceptiveness of the old Ellis shine through in places, and particularly in IP's last paragraph:
"There are many things Blair doesn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that only she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away - I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people."
Beautiful, right? Catch the way he referenced the X song again? That, my friends, is pretty fucking laudable.
I'm off to go put these puppies back on the bookshelf. Have fun, and remember - "la cocaina no es buena para tu salud."
Jussayin', is all.
-- LK!
*book jacket, sickos!
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