Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis: A Review-A-Long

Last week, Bret Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his stunning 1985 debut Less Than Zero, arrived with no small degree of anticipation. Ellis has been a controversial writer ever since Less than Zero, and the mesmerizing mixture of shock and yawn that characterized that book does reappear in Imperial Bedrooms, but with far less effect. Imperial Bedrooms has not to this point been warmly and, rather than just throw another log onto the fire, we thought we’d do another little review-a-long, this time with Janet Maslin. (Bold text is from her review in the New York Times; italicized text is my response).

Let’s do this:

Whatever its genesis, what this vacant new book does best is demonstrate that there are more ways to be bored and boring in Los Angeles in 2010 than there were in 1985.

Maslin’s dead on here. We get extended descriptions of text-message conversations, marathon YouTube viewing sessions, and repeat visits to high-end retailers and restaurants. There’s a whole lot of nothing masquerading as something here. This was executed to scathing effect in Less than Zero because it was a fresh, contemporary critique by a contemporary. Imperial Bedrooms doesn’t say anything new, and, like the characters in it, masks banality, and eventually malice, with a veneer of techno-sophistication.

As “Imperial Bedrooms” begins, [Clay] is whinging that “someone we knew” wrote an unflattering book about Clay and his friends, and that the book was made into a movie[…]“Imperial Bedrooms” barely has time to set up this hall-of-mirrors conceit before abandoning it.

The ill-considered inclusion of a fiction-world version of Less than Zero feels like an idea born out of drunken bull-session. (“Wouldn’t it be cool if the characters in the new book were also characters in a book? That would be cra-zy.”) Perhaps to his credit, Ellis abandons the thread in the first few pages, but this only adds to the slap-dash feel of the novel. One of Less than Zero’s accomplishments was its remarkable pacing; it was a slow build, a transfixing crescendo from innocence to depravity. No such restraint exists in Imperial Bedrooms, as Ellis seems unable to maintain his prior focus.

It’s typical of Mr. Ellis to write a very long descriptive sentence about the soft beiges and recessed lighting and white-tiled balcony of the place while making only passing, casual reference to the party boy’s death. It’s also very like him to make the apartment a backdrop for casual cruelty.

“Casual cruelty” captures a feature of both novels beautifully, though Maslin seems to be dismissing it as some sort of ethical mis-step. Whatever the faults of Imperial Bedrooms, it does continue the moral flattening begun in Less than Zero. In a world where surface and sensation reign, pain and pleasure are equals, as are aesthetics and atrocities.  Representing cruelty casually gives the reader the sensation of amorality that seems to both fascinate and repel the reader and Clay himself. 

 […]there’s an element of real malaise in “Imperial Bedrooms.” The anomie and plot-derived menace may be contrived, but there’s a dread that feels genuine — and not because the book actually includes the line, “Sadness: it’s everywhere.” It’s the sense that options have narrowed for Mr. Ellis, whose most polarizing (“American Psycho”) or wild-eyed books (“Lunar Park”) have turned out to be his most vital ones.

By the end of the novel, I was thinking along these lines as well. Less than Zero’s ethical nullity pre-empted the need for any further exposition of it; once you’ve showed us the void, what else is there to do? This has been a literary puzzle, from Hamlet’s “there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” to Joyce’s empty chalice, for some time. While Hamlet and Joyce turned to art to create meaning, to fill the abyss, Ellis seems stuck on gazing into the blackness--as Maslin suggests—a terrifyingly bleak beige. 

Book Blogging and the Gender Gap, Redux

A couple of things related to a previous post about gender and  book-blogging caught our attention recently, so we thought we'd take a moment to consider what, if any, help they might be.

First, Ed Champion, in breaking down Michiko Kakutani's apparent distaste for fiction, provided a list of the most negative (mainstream) book reviewers working today. That discussion is interesting in itself, but what we noticed was the gender-spread, or rather, the relative lack of one; of the sixteen reviewers listed, ten are men.

Along the same lines, we came across  More Intelligent Life's 2008 list of best book reviewers. Of the ten reviewers mentioned, eight are men. It also seems worth noting that one of the female reviewers was Jessica Crispin of Bookslut, who works primarily online. (The other, not surprisingly, is Kakutani).

We noted these the gender paradigms of these lists but were having a hard time relating it to the dominance of women in book blogging circles until Girl from the Ghetto made a remark in a discussion the Ape started on the Book Blog Ning: "Niche bloggers aka male (and all other kinds) bloggers don't fit into the existing molds. I believe until someone breaks the book blogging mold, it is going to stay exactly the same."

Though her astute remark was about book blogging, it came to us that we might consider the make-up of book bloggers as being itself a reaction to the male-dominated mainstream book reviewing establishment. Here's what we wrote in respose: "I mean, can it be a coincidence that the most books most discussed online (YA/romance/chick lit/scifi/paranormal) are precisely the kinds of books that would have a damn near impossible time being included in the NY Times, The Washington Post, etc? This might help explain why so few men blog about books--male-oriented book discussion already HAS a venue."

Does it seem reasonable to think that as mainstream reviewing is more and more an online practice that the gender disparity among book bloggers will change? Or has the die for book blogging largely been cast?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson: A Kakutani Review-a-long

So, the final chapter in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy arrived last week and the Ape has made it through to the end. As is our habit, we took a look at some mainstream reviews after finishing the novel and found a surprising, to us at least, amount of praise for this frustrated and frustrating coda. 

Perhaps least expected was the warmth with which Michiko Kakutani received The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (especially considering that she hates more than half of the fiction she reviews). So rather than offer another review, we thought we'd read along with Kakutani's. She begins: 

Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s fierce pixie of a heroine, is one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while — a gamin, Audrey Hepburn look-alike but with tattoos and piercings, the take-no-prisoners attitude of Lara Croft and the cool, unsentimental intellect of Mr. Spock.

No problem here--Salander is clearly the spinning, molten core of the trilogy. Like all great characters, we miss her when she's off-stage. This is problem one with Hornet's Nest; Salander spends nearly all of it in the hospital, writing a brief autobiography for her eventual trial and dispatching her hacker comrades to infiltrate the hard-drives of her enemies. As boring as Salander's computer hacking was in the first two novels, at least there she did it herself. Here, she just tells other people to do it. 

It is a problem, though, Larsson created for himself. As we noted in an earlier post, by the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander is so, as Kakutani writes, "incandescently proficient," that she must be sequestered for there to be any doubt about her fate. (This is something you see in other stories with characters who are simply too powerful to be interesting. Professor X exemplifies the narrative conundrum; it seemed like baldy was in a coma, drugged, captured, or in an alternate spectral plane in every major X-Men series. Dude was just too powerful for the stories to work with him around.)

So rather than follow the character we've signed on for, we have to follow around a series of cops, journalists, and bureaucrats for the preponderance of the story, which makes the following evaluation from Kakutani all the more head-scratching: "It’s also a thoroughly gripping read that shows off the maturation of the author’s storytelling talents."

To our mind, Hornet's Nest is the most confused and inert of the three. It seems that Kakutani has a soft-spot for the novel despite the absence of Salander, whom she acknowledges is the trilogy's engine: "The novels’ central appeal, however, remains Salander herself: a heroine who takes on a legal system and evil, cartoony villains with equal ferocity and resourcefulness."

Somehow, she also manages to ignore the book's heavy-handed social critique ("these novels actually don’t have any didactic thesis to convey"), even though each section of the novel is preceded by an historical vignette about warrior-women and that the moral of the story is neatly and clearly articulated by a main character: "When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it." 

And while it's certainly possible to enjoy the novel despite the moralizing, suggesting that there isn't a larger issue at stake seems a misreading. In fact, the disjointed ending that Kakutani herself notes is a direct result of Larsson's twin narratives: Salander's personal story of liberation, which culminates with a grizzly, caricatured battle with her half-brother, and the journalistic critique of Swedish law enforcement and constitutional oversight, which is really the main "drama" of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. 

Kakutani seems to collpase these narratives--"the real showdown in this harrowing novel is between Salander and a ruthless government cabal"--when in fact there really is no such showdown. Salander's interaction with the "cabal" is carried out almost entirely by intermediaries. Indeed, her persistent refusal to talk with anyone but her lawyer is itself a major plot element. 

In our final analysis, we find the second and third installments an order of magnitude weaker than the tight, propulsive The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where Kakutani finds that Larsson has brought things to a close "with dexterity, ardor and a stoked imagination." 

We wish we could agree.