Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms

In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel, Less Than Zero; a story about a group of uppity, vacuous teenage characters back home in L.A. for their Christmas break. I first read it nearly three years ago, and I was very taken in by it. I'm intrigued by any story that attempts to get its message across indirectly.

Well, it's now 2010, and Ellis is releasing his newest book, Imperial Bedrooms, which is the story of the same characters, only now they are in midlife. I've been waiting for the publisher's galley copy, and it finally arrived this week. However, I couldn't just jump right into the book; I had to re-read LTZ. It's funny how one's perception of a book changes over time. That being said, my enjoyment of the book waned.

I feel very little sympathy for these characters. They know that they're trapped--at times--by their own wills, but none of them make any effort to escape their own personal hell. The only thing they can bring themselves to do is fuck an assortment of people--it doesn't matter if it's a guy or girl--consume copious amounts of drugs, and move from one place to another with increasing apathy. Nothing makes these people happy. They know it. They fully embrace it.

The climactic moment comes when Clay, the protagonist, and the only one who shows any sign of redemption, goes over to a friend's apartment, and witnesses his friends rape a 12 year old girl. "Why?" he asks. "Why not?" is the response. It's extremely disturbing, on many levels, but not nearly as the things that happen in Ellis' magnum opus, American Psycho. (If you have a weak stomach, I do not recommend reading AP.)

The question now becomes: what happened to the characters? Well...

First off, the book cover is terrible. Look at it. What. The. Fuck? It bears no relevance, at all, to the story. Okay, I got that much out of the way. How was the story? It was crap. Ellis took a mediocre idea and recycled it with elements from all of his other novels. In the first few sentences, he writes himself into the book. Now we're dealing with two narrators: Ellis and Clay. Maybe it's just me, but for the entirety of the novel, I couldn't refrain from replacing the fictional character (Clay) with the author (Ellis).

Most of the usual characters return (Rip, Trent, Blair, and Julian) this time around, but the story focuses mostly on Clay. The premise is that he is a successful screenwriter, and he travels to L.A. to assist in casting auditions for the movie he wrote; along the way he runs into his old friends; mystery and drama ensue.

It's 25 years later, and none of them have gotten any better. Clay enjoys manipulating young women by offering them parts in movies in return for sex; Julian is no longer being pimped out, but rather, pimping out young men; Blair and Trent are now married, but superficially so.

The plot is as thin as a thread: someone has gone missing, and Clay keeps being followed and sent mysterious text messages from a blocked number, and maybe someone wants someone else out of the picture, and a girl wants to be in a movie, but at the cost of her boyfriend, and blah, blah, blah. Although I read the whole thing--all 168 pages of it--I stopped caring nearly halfway into it. If you've read Less Than Zero, Glamorama, and Lunar Park, then you've already read Imperial Bedrooms, and you can probably go ahead and pass.

(Infinite) Book Review

I’m sitting at my desk, writing this review with my worn-out copy of “Infinite Jest” lying center-left of my vision; I do this with the hope that by merely seeing this mammoth, in size and scope, piece of post-modern literature, it will recall in my mind all of the things I learned, loved, and hated about it. We’ll see if I am right, in the end.

Had there been no such thing as the Infinite Summer, I probably would never have finished, let alone picked up, this beast of a novel. The ‘program’ is quite simple: you begin reading I.J. on June 21st and you finish it on or before September 21st. That’s three months and 1,076 pages worth of exercising your mind. I did it. Now it’s time for the Ice Cream Social I was promised by my coworker who is also reading I.J.

Any attempt to explain what happens is rather futile, as one thing always needs an explanation, almost as if it was an endnote—there were 388 of them. Nonetheless, the story is loosely focused around a disturbingly fucked-up family at a tennis academy (Enfield Tennis Academy, or E.T.A.) and an even more disturbingly fucked-up cast of characters at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (sic). The setting is an almost (what I would call) post-apocalyptic North America. Canada, America, and Mexico merged to become the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) There are no longer numerical calendar years, but rather, corporate sponsored years, such as: the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic). A lounge singer has become the President. New England is now a wasteland, and was emperialized to Canada—it is called the “Great Concavity” or the “Great Convexity”, depending on which side is referencing the land area. The street parking laws change every night at midnight, resulting in car owners scrambling to their cars to park them on the other side of the street. It’s an overall absurd mess, and Wallace details it perfectly, albeit exhaustively.

One thing that DFW foresaw (perfectly) was in his description of the rise and immediate fall of an emerging/evolving technology. The telephone was seen as a way that people could easily distract themselves without the caller on the other end ever finding out. So people created, in essence, video-phones. This made people focus and pay attention, but they soon discovered that they did not look the way they wanted to on the phone. So the technology was updated to ‘enhance’ the caller’s visual aesthetic. This evolved into a beautified still image that resembled the likes of a supermodel rather than the actual caller. This elicited a return to the traditional non-visual telephone. Do we not see that very thing happening today? Look at most photos online; are they not (almost always) staged and unnatural?

Finally, the worst part of the book was that at some point R. Limbaugh (never explicitly mentioned as ‘Rush’) was the president. The best part of the book comes on page 929: “The door’s got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the assassination.” People have written their Ph.D dissertations on this novel, so there's not much else I can say to its credit that has not already been exhaustively explored. Time for bigger...err...smaller and better things.

Book Review

Published in 1987 (when I was a mere three years old) was David Foster Wallace's first novel, "The Broom of the System". It's a story about...well, nothing, in fact. Okay, that's not true. It's rich with stories inside the main narrative, absurd character names, paradoxes of life, and the overall underestimated importance of connections. It's a very accessible read, no doubt less time-consuming than his magnum opus, "Infinite Jest". The story is essentially the telling of Lenore Beadsman's life, and how everything around her is just one shit-storm after another. Her job sucks, her boyfriend is incredibly jealous, her grandmother is missing (somewhere out in the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D.), and her cockatiel becomes a Christian TV network superstar.

Wallace hits home the ideas understood by the complexities of life, such as how paradoxical they can all be. Here are three of my favorite passages from the book:

"They found out that what they needed to get their feelings of being themselves was from themselves..."

"...the severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection..."

"Attachment to things, to places, to other living beings requires in my view expenditures of energy and attention far in excess of the value of the things thus brought into the relation of the attachment."

Regarding the second quotation: one of the secondary reasons why I do not date. Regarding the third quotation: it just goes to show that one never gets what they give; one gets less than that. But the overall value placed on the very thing for which you strive must be equal to the effort you put into obtaining it, no? There is definitely more to the story than I was able to pick up on, but that's okay. I enjoyed it for what it was worth. Although, the ending left me utterly confused. Wallace may have some heavy theological undertones present in the text, but you wouldn't think so until the last page. A good read all-around.