Imperial Bedrooms: Brett Easton Ellis

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.  - Frank Lloyd Wright 

Imperial Bedrooms is the follow up to Brett Easton Ellis's book, Less than Zero. The book picks up with the lives of the teenagers of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and now finds these same kids in their teetering middle age. What does it mean to get old in Los Angeles a mythic space where youth is rewarded and age is not!? The book looks at how the puppeteers, the writers, the producers, the directors can at times manipulate others as if they are puppets on strings.
The city appears at one time a garden of paradise, at another time a hallway in the hell hotel. The city lives on the word "Yet!" the mirage of it all. The city lives on fear of the finality of living in a fragile place. The city knows it could fall into the pacific if there is a large enough earthquake. Imperial Bedrooms explores the conflicting pictures of Los Angeles and the Southern California Dream. The book disturbed me, because it hits on the tragic film strips that run the city, and keeps it a place of dreams. The final note from the author is: "All of the pictures are fake." Page 162

Note: for those in love with the Brett Easton Ellis books of the eighties;  it would be more rewarding to read "The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan" or Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Eric El Camion Hates Imperial Bedrooms by Brett Easton Ellis

Imperial Bedrooms

By Bret Easton Ellis

(Knopf, Hardcover, 9780307266101, 192pp.)

Publication Date: June 15, 2010

Categories: Literary

Eric El Camino has hated me for loving Brett Easton Ellis novels. His feelings were a flame of burning desire. His rage burned like a bonfire set by an eddy on the beach.   He would put a chock hold on me and hang me in my locker, because he was the authority on what was good literature.  He was only thirteen but he knew better than all the other kids, and he was willing to use violence to prove it.


I consider Brett Easton Ellis one of the best writers of all time. He is one of my guilty pleasures.  There was a time when his books, even American Psycho, shaped how I interpreted the times I was part of. Ellis books are always dark, but inside that dark is a flickering light that gives hope, a promise of future glory. They are a true reinterpretation of the American Dream. Something happened to the American Dream between 1997 and 2010 (tragedy at Columbine, the twin Towers, space shuttles exploding on a return flight, the dot boom fiasco, the BP Oil Spill) taking the alluring world of Ellis and twisting it into a knot. An unyielding knot holding hope and joy locked into an affair with disillusion.


Today, I listened to the album that coincides with Ellis's new novel Imperial Bedrooms and think,

"Wow, I can't wait to read his new novel!"


I also think I will download the soundtrack and raise a toast to my innocence.