I may haul myself off to Politics & Prose to listen to Bret Easton Ellis read from his new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to Less Than Zero.
Reading details are here.
Or, maybe this book description from the Politics & Prose website gives us the general gist of how those characters turned out: In this sequel to Less Than Zero, Ellis explores the lives of Clay, now a screenwriter; Trent, a producer, married to Clay’s old girlfriend; and Rip, who runs an escort service. All are hurtling out of control in the fast lane of Los Angeles, with its deals, drugs, and sex.
I guess I wasn’t assuming they’d all live happily ever after, but this sounds pretty bleak!
Official website—including an excerpt—is here.
I can’t quite decide if I should go or not; will this reading be worth braving rush hour traffic for?—
Pro: (from an interview with New York Magazine)
When he was outlining Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis was reading Raymond Chandler. “I was thinking about the Hollywood novel, and the Hollywood myth of exploitation. People using each other.” As he sees it, the issue with Clay “has to do with narcissism. I was very interested in the question of what happens when a narcissist hits the wall? And what happens when all the tricks he’d been using, or all the things that were fulfilling, were feeding his narcissism, weren’t working?”
Con: (from the same interview)
Ellis has always been seduced by money and fame, and that hasn’t changed. “Maybe it’s a weird strain of anti-intellectualism,” he says, but if given a choice he’d rather “hang out with Rob Pattinson than Richard Ford.”
Pro: I can get my hardcover of Less Than Zero signed.
Con: It's not a first edition.
Pro: I can weasel out of cooking dinner for Steve...decided. See you there.
