Imperial Bedrooms - Literary Devices and Themes

Literary Devices and Themes

Imperial Bedrooms opens with an acknowledgement of the Less Than Zero novel and film both as actual items within the fictional history of Imperial Bedrooms' Clay; he describes "The movie was based on a book by someone we knew…. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't happened." The Los Angeles Times describes this as a "nifty little trick", because it allows Ellis to establish the newer book "as the primary narrative, one that trumps Ellis as author and the real world." The San Francisco Chronicle calls it a "neat trick of authorial self-abnegation". Another reviewer describes it as Ellis at "his most ambitious", a "Philip Rothian, doppelgänger gambit", making his new narrator "the real Clay" and the other an imposter. This allows Ellis to skilfully, "with writerly jujitsu", acknowledge Robert Downey Jr.'s popular performance as Julian in the moralistic 1987 film, in which he died; Ellis appreciates the adaptation as a "milestone in a lot of ways". The device also allows the novelist to insert self-critique; The Sunday Times reviewer notes that Imperial Bedrooms finds its characters "still a little sore at their depiction as inarticulate zombies". John Crace, in his "digested read" of Imperial Bedrooms, insinuates through parody that "the author" of the metafictional Less Than Zero is also meant to be Ellis, describing him in Clay's voice as "too immersed in the passivity of writing and too pleased with his own style to bother with many commas to admit it so he wrote me into the story as the man who was too frightened to love." With regard to the opening narrative conceit, Ellis queries "Is it complication ... or is it clarification?", opining that it certainly is the latter for Clay. Though Ellis never names himself in the book, he concedes to Lawson that although "I don't name the author", one can "guess is who the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms is referring to." Ellis told Vice that he hadn't explicitly considered when writing the novel whether Clay was referring to him or not. Eileen Battersby comments, "Just as he did in Lunar Park (2005), Ellis uses self-consciousness as a device." According to Vice, this conceit of self-consciousness means that "Imperial Bedrooms is no mere sequel. It's more a culmination of all of Ellis's work", containing "the scatological violence of American Psycho" and "the otherworldly terror of Lunar Park". Ellis himself raises the "sequel" question, commenting "... I don't think it is . Well, I mean, it is and it isn't. It's narrated by him, sure. But I guess I could maybe have switched the names around and it could stand alone."

Asked about the motif and "casual approach to" bisexual characters in his novels, continued in Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis stated he "really know", and that he wished he could provide "an answer – depicting as extremely conscious of those choices". He believes it to be an "interesting aspect of work". Details notes how Ellis' own sexuality, frequently described as bisexual, has been notoriously hard to pin down. Reviewers have long tried to probe Ellis on autobiographical themes in his work. He reiterates to Vice that he is not Clay. Ellis says that other contemporary authors (naming Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem as examples) don't get asked if their novels are autobiographical. (However, Ellis tells one interview, that he "cannot fully" say that "I'm not Clay" because of their emotional "connections".) Vice attributes this streak to Ellis' age when Less Than Zero came out, which led to him being seen as a voice-of-the-generation. Ellis feels that the autobiographical truths of his novels lie in their writing processes, which to him are like emotional "exorcisms". Crace's abovementioned parody suggests that Less Than Zero Clay was originally a flattering portrayal of Ellis. Ellis discusses lightly the kinds of self-insertion present in the book. While Clay is clearly (parodically) working on the film adaptation of The Informers, he is at the same time fully aware that he has been a character in Less Than Zero, and that ostensibly, Ellis is 'the author' whom Clay knew. However, there are clear differences to the characters, as well. For example, Ellis had to omit lines from the book he felt Clay would never have thought of, on subjects he would never have noticed. Ellis himself feels he is adapting to middle-age very well; Clay, however, isn't.

Imperial Bedrooms also breaches several new territories. When compared to Less Than Zero, its "huge shift" is a technological one. The novel picks up on many aspects of the early 21st century culture, such as Internet viral videos which depict executions. The novel reflects how technology changes the nature of interpersonal relationships. Additionally, Clay is text-stalked throughout the book; Ellis himself had been "text-stalked" before in real life. Ellis feels this was an unconscious exploration of the dynamics brought on by the new technology. The author also predicts that "fans of Less Than Zero" may "feel betrayed"; Imperial Bedrooms' thrust is its "narrative... of exploitation". One reviewer describes the novel's "central theme" as "Hollywood is an industry town running on exploitation", and criticizes this theme for being unoriginal in 2010. An Irish Times review notes positively however that Ellis' "vision of society is bleak; his dark studies of the human animal as shocking as ever." The new setting poses questions, such as "Is Hollywood intended as a variation of ancient Rome? Is the movie industry a coliseum?" Another review found that the celebrity setting, as visited before in his novel Glamorama (1998), allows Ellis to make a number of observations about contemporary pop culture via Clay, such as when he asserts "that exposure can ensure fame". Ellis comments how in Less Than Zero, Clay's passivity worked to protect him from the "bleak moral landscape he was a part of", which he views as Clay's major flaw. Ellis developed this into the more unabashedly 'guilty' Clay of the new novel. Ellis says that "a portrait of narcissism was the big nut that I had. Of entitlement. This imperial idea." The difference he notes between this "portrait of a narcissist" and his earlier ones, such as American Psycho and Lunar Park, come in the form of its more moral bent: "This time", Ellis comments, "the narcissist reaches a dead end." To one reviewer, Clay's world at its most exaggerated, in the scenes of torture, reach Huxleyan heights of dystopian fantasy, comparing Imperial Bedrooms to Brave New World (1932), "where the "command economy" now manifests as rampant, late-capitalist consumerism, where ambien is the new soma and humans are zombies: one character's face is "unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it's a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized."