Imperial Bedrooms discussion
So the book whose impending release gave me a reason to live in 2010 (no, seriously) is finally out and there would seem to be quite a few things to say about it. I'd like to throw out some thoughts about its thematic and stylistic relationship to Lunar Park as well as its place in Ellis' bibliography as a whole, but for now he's a short, initial reaction I posted elsewhere:
on the surface there's not much to say about Imperial Bedrooms that hasn't already been said about Bret Easton Ellis' other books. the novel's thesis, if it has one, seemingly can be summed up pretty simply as: "vacuous soul-sucked kids grow up to be vacuous, soul-sucking, dangerous adults." there's something pointedly, distinctly disturbing about Imperial Bedrooms, and the novel is, in many ways, like Lunar Park: Redux--it is self-referential in the extreme and showcases Bret Easton Ellis' talent for narrative storytelling. but the novel fails to break new formalistic ground the way American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park all breathlessly, daringly did. it's shadowy, frightening, speedy, and compulsively entertaining, but a huge part of what has made Ellis' writing so unique and thrilling for the past couple decades has been the way he stretches and contorts postmodern literary conventions, going places with postmodernism that literally no one else has gone. that tendency to forge new literary terrain, which pronounced Ellis' previous three novels as unparalleled works of genius, is disappointingly absent in Imperial Bedrooms. once more Ellis gives us an unflinching look at the abyss, but it's hard to shake the feeling that we've already been here.
Mark all spoiler comments with spoiler warnings, natch.
Let's get cracking on dissecting this thing.
This is an initial reaction as I have yet to finish the book. All around though this year has been packed with thrilling releases of books and music, and Imperial Bedrooms belongs amongst them - no matter it's shortcomings.
Ellis uses noir conventions here like he used horror conventions in Lunar Park, only that book had a formal justification for its cliches whereas this one feels like its pushing them in earnest and therefore falling limp.
As my girlfriend and I are HUGE BEE fans, we are also bad BEE fans. We have yet to see, pick up, or even skim through Imperial Bedrooms. This I attritube to weak paying jobs in a weak economy. Lame excuse, I know, but when the bills add up, some things have to be put on the back burner.
Anyway, I am looking forward to reading Imperial Bedrooms, and I must agree with skygrotto, Rules is my all time favorite book with American Psycho coming in a close second. I am tempted, though, to re-read Less Than Zero, as to get reacquainted with the characters. So, I will ask, since the two have read it, or at least some of it, would it be wise to re-read Zero, or can Imperial Bedrooms stand on it's own?
~There are always greener pastures to be pissed on~
So I've been rereading parts of it, mulling the book over in my head, as per usual when I finish an Ellis novel, and I think I've come up with something that might be worth talking about. Here we go. Let me know what you guys think of this:
oh, here's a nasty little one. ellis is back and he's fucking pissed. with Imperial Bedrooms, he's taken the concept of the "novel" beyond its breaking point as discovered and revealed in Glamorama and put into practice in Lunar Park. what's left, then, is what New York Magazine (essential to understanding Imperial Bedrooms by its sheer existence as a media outlet for Bret Easton Ellis: The Character) says Ellis calls "Post-Empire." apparently he "dates this period [of Empire] from 1945 until 2005." okay, so what are we left with now? well, an entire world predicated on solipsism, for one--it wasn't until Bret Easton Ellis published Lunar Park in 2005 that we entered the epoch of "post-Empire." what this really means is that bret easton ellis is just playing bret easton ellis, and the heart of the novel is a massive criticism of, well, Western Civilization.
but, duh. when HASN'T that been the target of his criticism? let's try to narrow this down a little.
Imperial Bedrooms takes the new Ellis' fear of a wold where an ubiquitous media defines reality and applies it to the old Ellis' short, snappy, minimalist stories about vapid, drugged out youth who spiral into hedonistic self-destruction because no one is there to give a shit about them. What emerges is a book heavily predicated on the concept of playing your designated role in this manufactured society--the first sentence of the book is "They had made a movie about us."--where everything is on stage and in public view and you can get away with, hey, maybe torturing a person to death because that's just the character he was destined, by the manufacturers of reality, to play.
when your life is a movie--movies are a major motif in Imperial Bedrooms--it becomes a lot easier to do things for your own self-gain. Ellis, as usual, isn't just standing back and finger-waggling at the horror of the fabric of our society; he turns the blade inward as well. the existence of Imperial Bedrooms as a commodity, a "novel," particularly a neo-noir novel, means that even our satirists are destined to be "sad faced clowns", singing and dancing while we lap up the gleaming, nihilistic horror of it all. this is no "This Is Not An Exit"--this is a book that can't, shouldn't exist. Elliis is showing us a world where even signs--such as a dead body that looks like an American flag--are no longer trustworthy, where the authorial voice is condemned to its own solipsistic hell.
Yes, bret easton ellis is back and he's out for blood. This one's implications are sinister beyond all hope.
Was anyone at the reading/signing in New York tonight? I was the guy who told Bret, "you changed my life."
You can see the maturity as a writer from LTZ to Bedrooms. I liked the noirish bent the story takes. It would have been nice to read the desert bedroom scene as written before the editors gutted it.
The editors really gutted it? After all the shit he's gotten away with in the past?
Exactly.
I'm well over halfway through right now. I wish I had enough free time lately to just sit down and finish it. I can't hate on it. Bret Easton Ellis is my favorite writer. I'm really liking this book so far.
I just ordered my copy a couple of days ago, shipping from the states is ridiculously expensive, waiting for it to arrive. Interesting comments though, I'll check back when I've finished it.
Still waiting for it's UK release, but got my copy pre-ordered. What is the deal with delaying international releases though??
I'm still finishing "Lunar Park" which strangly I've found the hardest one to finish, when his others I have read and re-read multiple times with "Rules of Attraction" still my favourite.
What more could he have put in that scene... It was pretty bad. Again - it makes you wonder what they took out.
I finished the book. I just think I'm such an Ellis fan that the guy can do no wrong. I really like this book a lot. Was it my favorite? No. Will I reread it? Definitely.
am 70 pages into and think it is good. better than lunar park. lunar park had some good premises but it was like BEE was being too apologetic about AP.
BEE's first six books profoundly affected me. No other writer or writing has evoked feelings from me the way these novels did. I loved Imperial Bedrooms but didn't connect to it the same way. I'm not sure if the difference is in me or the book...it has been five years since his last writing.
When asked in an interview about what was cut from the bedroom scene, Ellis refused to comment what exactly was cut.
He did say that he was going through the novel with an editor line-by-line going "stet, stet, stet..." to everything the editor wanted to cut. When it got to the bedroom scene the editor really took out the red pen. They compromised: Ellis would trade a line in the bedroom scene for a another line of text. This kept going on until the bedroom scene was gutted because Ellis thought the cuts (from other scenes) he could not live with. Basically, it was line-for-line bartering.
I'll look for the interview,
Just finished it. I vacillated between hating it for its trashy superficiality and loving it for its emotional brutality. I also had a hard time with the justification for revisiting these characters (besides the marketing factor), until I had the realization with about five pages left that it's all about Clay's arc. In the end, its most salable attribute is probably that, of BEE's work thus far, it lends itself the most favorably to--yes, yes--cinematic adaptation.
Tangentially, do you guys think something bad happened to Ellis in the 90s? Something...stalkerish? His last three books have been extremely paranoid. (But that may just have grown out of his standing as a twice-hit literary lightning rod.)
Found it. A huge interview in Vice: http://www.viceland.com/int/v17n5/htdocs/bret-easton-ellis-426.php?page=...
The interviewer is in bold.
Have you ever watched The Kids in the Hall? You’re like that character that Dave Foley played, the sarcastic-sounding guy who wasn’t really sarcastic. But you’re serious? It was exciting when you realized that Clay was getting dark?
Yeah. I remember the moment when I was working on the outline and I saw that this was where it was going. I remember where I was sitting. I remember doing an outline of that sequence—and it ended up being a sequence that my editor had a lot of problems with. I really have a hands-off thing going on at Knopf. They’ve been cool about letting me publish what I want to publish, more or less. But we fought over that scene.
Is Gary Fisketjon still your editor?
Yeah. He’s very much a trees editor with me, and not a forest editor. He’s a real stickler for grammar. We kind of tussle over grammar and syntax.
And that scene with Clay and the prostitutes in the desert…
It was more gruesome in my final draft. There were some details in it that Gary wanted completely omitted, and I’d think, “Really?” Before, we’d never had any problems, but over this sequence we really did.
Did he also edit American Psycho?
Well, what happened with American Psycho is that, you know—
Its first publishing house rejected it, and then it came to the house where Gary Fisketjon works.
That’s when Gary became my editor. He’d been my friend for like six years prior to inheriting American Psycho. We knew each other really well socially. We would hang out a lot. So you know, having that relationship, and also having a social relationship with Sonny Mehta who was then head of Knopf, kind of made going there a no-brainer. But I don’t think Gary was a fan of that book.
American Psycho?
Yeah. I don’t think he was a really a fan of mine at all, but he was a good friend, and that’s totally fine. That happens all the time. I don’t think he’s liked any of my books except for Lunar Park. But he’s a great editor. He’s amazing from the moment the manuscript gets to him until it’s out in paperback. He really follows everything and is so hands-on. But I was kind of disappointed in Gary’s reaction about this scene in Imperial Bedrooms. I was disappointed in the fact that we had to haggle over two or three sentences.
Can you give me an idea of what was cut from the scene?
It was basically me saying: “You let me keep this, and I will change the grammar on page 47.” And he said, “That’s not enough. You’ve got to change the grammar on pages 58 and 87.” And I said, “If I do that, can I keep a couple more of these details?” And it finally got down to: “OK.”
It’s not like he was unprepared for this stuff, having edited American Psycho.
Well, he did a second pass on American Psycho. I thought that book was finished when I turned it in to Simon & Schuster, before they rejected it. Done. I didn’t want it touched. But it got to Gary, and he touched it a little bit. I was kind of in a daze, and the editing was really hurried. He flew to LA and we sat in a hotel room, and basically he would edit and turn the pages over and I was just like, “Stet, stet, stet.” And it grew heated. I don’t think he understood the book, or he did but he didn’t like it, and the editing process was really dismaying. There’s still stuff in there that he did that I can’t read. Like little clarifications. I don’t know. Why am I going on about Gary Fisketjon?
It all started when I asked about the scene where Clay tortures the two teen prostitutes in the desert. I love that there’s a copy of Less Than Zero in the house where that scene takes place, too. And then it’s also interesting that this is the scene over which you’ve had your most serious battle with your editor. I think it’s pretty much essential at that point in the book.
It was exciting to go there, and it was scary to go there, and it was kind of liberating to go there. All of these things just felt really good about it.
good interview.
It is really depressing in a way that any book and especially his books can be censored like that. I mean he wrote american psycho, if you are publishing the guy who wrote that why try to censor him now.
I thought Lunar park was his worst book, he seemed too sympathetic or have emotions or whatever I am trying to say.
I just finished imperial bedrooms and I think it is pretty good. I was kind of scared he was going to go down hill after lunar park.
I actually read some reviews on amazon and people complained that all the characters had no morals and they didn't like any of the characters. Have people read any of bret's books all his characters are like that. I would say all of his books are satire.
And maybe I am too high right now, but did anyone think Rain Turner was an allegory for his books?
BEE was on french tv tonight and I'm amazed (and relieved Ali Badou (a french reviewer) has at least ended the "American Psycho" debate saying "it's the Book about New York in the 80s". BEE was so simple and so wealthy(unlikely the last time I met him for "Lunar Park", explaining the birth of "Imperail bedrooms", which the best of him (but isn't it the same each book he writes, waiting for the next one). I just love that book for everything it is.
I entered the book part way and found the events in the story as having too many similarities to formulaic drama shows on television. The characters don't pop the way previous BEE's characters have popped. My absolute adoration for BEE and his work should be noted - Rules of Attraction is a top personal favorite, and American Psycho stands as a must-read in 20th century literature. The first element I did enjoy was the mostly short to-the-point paragraph nature of the novel's presentation. BEE has fallen short here. The actress Rain is hardly as snapping as one would imagine, and the revelations about her don't present twists that strike a surprising note, they are rather bland.
This is an initial reaction as I have yet to finish the book. All around though this year has been packed with thrilling releases of books and music, and Imperial Bedrooms belongs amongst them - no matter it's shortcomings.