Suite(s) impériale(s)

Read because I love Less than Zero, this is the sequel and, to my regret, I still care about the characters. This book doesn't. It flails around, creating fake drama where it doesn't belong in absence of actually being about anything. Feels like half-an-effort of a famous author who no longer feels like he has to try.

Sequel to Less than Zero which reads as more of a novella than a novel - I read it on a (short) train journey and felt that it does come across as a coda to the earlier novel. Interestingly of course, Bret Easton Ellis plays with narrative viewpoint and how much of it is real - the narrator is in on the making of a film of the earlier novel (which at once places you outside the structure). Everybody has more than one name, people mistake people for someone else - this is all very 'American Psycho'. Add in a dash of 'Glamorama' - the one-two between vapid surface descriptions to ultraviolence and back again - and only at the end does his narrator achieve some indication of self-awareness which in a way gives the game away in a way that I don't think his other novels do.

While this books works on its own, it is really recommended reading Less than Zero to get the most out of Imperial Bedrooms. This book is set 25 years later, Clay has seemed to have moved on but when he finds himself back in Hollywood, he is sucked back into this world. My problem with Less than Zero as probably the fact that I read it 25 years too late; so it felt dated and I was probably too old to get the most out of it. Imperial Bedrooms seemed to be a better book, I’m not sure it’s the fact that Bret Easton Ellis has improved as a writer, or that it didn’t feel dated. Ellis has a very unique style of writing, very descriptive making the characters feel very shallow in a well thought out way. He uses this tactic in American Psycho a lot and it made me feel like I was going psycho; so this book just ended up been an entertaining and interesting book to read.