Interview

It isn’t difficult to see why Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero—by a then unknown 21-year-old Bennington College student with a name that sounded like it was copied from a cotillion guest list—created so much shock, anxiety, and nihilistic glee within the literary and cultural community. The first sentence of the book reads like a travel warning of destruction ahead: “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. . . . ” The reason that Less Than Zero is so unforgettable is that few books in recent decades have managed to so utterly ransack all accepted notions and conceits—of youth, of the West Coast mentality, of what it means not so much to get to the land of the rich and famous but to actually be there, having already arrived.

Less Than Zero turned Ellis into an instant literary sensation, and for a while the author lived in New York City as one of the princes of a cool new beautiful MTV-generation literati. But in the intervening 25 years, Ellis has refused to ride the shock waves of his auspicious debut. He continued to press the limits of fiction and its moral order until the reckless, disaffected, anesthetized lifestyles of a bunch of rich 18-year-old Hollywood kids seemed almost like a warm-up for the horrors to come: The Rules of Attraction (1987), American Psycho (1991), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), and Lunar Park (2005). It is still to this day difficult to talk about the social impact of these books—most critics are loath to comment on how to situate them in American fiction. But the novels gave Ellis the two-pronged reputation as a demon of the literary community and a shaman of radical, disenfranchised youth. If something akin to a cultural fatwa has been placed on Ellis’s head by the mainstream intellectual community, he has also become a saintly figure for those interested in reading against the grain.

Sentimentality has no place in Ellis’s worlds—so much so that it is a wonder when any character thinks in the past tense at all. But now, 25 years after Less Than Zero launched his career, Ellis has made another shocking departure by going back to where he started. In June, Ellis releases Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his debut, which drops in on Clay, Blair, Julian, and other Less Than Zero denizens who, now in their forties, are haunting and haunted by the post-glamour, post-shock, post-moral, post-purpose Hollywood scene. Clay is now a screenwriter. Upon returning to Los Angeles from New York to work on a film, he slowly falls back into old ways—parties, drugs, sex—as the plot teems with more-graphic Ellisian tropes like murder, ghosts, dismemberment, and paranoia. For anyone assuming that the author has created something of an upbeat 90210 reunion, the opening pages clarify the difference between Hollywood’s favorite export and the actual on-the-ground circumstance: “The movie was begging for our sympathy,” says Clay, referring to the 1987 film version of Less Than Zero, “whereas the book didn’t give a shit.” Ellis, like Clay, also moved from New York back to his native Los Angeles a few years ago. Imperial Bedrooms exhibits some of the tension of that fracture, as well as Ellis’s own frustrated work on the unexceptional film version of his short-story collection, The Informers.

Now, at age 46, Ellis has made a home for himself in L.A. and a second career as a screenwriter. (He’s currently working on a script for Gus Van Sant about the tragic double suicide of artist Jeremy Blake and his longtime girlfriend, the writer and filmmaker Theresa Duncan.) At a certain point in this interview, Ellis accuses me of taking a very nostalgic tone toward his work—particularly when I ask if the Less Than Zero characters could ever have become happy, functioning adults—and only after we got off the phone did it occur to me that he is right. I was still holding on to the belief that a reader should be in love with the main character, that a novel’s arc is somehow always directed toward reconciliation, or even that characters are individuals distinguishable from their surroundings. Part of the power of Ellis’s work lies in the fact that his readers can no longer rely on these romantic, humanistic notions. Clay, Blair, and Julian aren’t there, and you don’t have to love them or hope they survive. This quality makes Ellis very uncomfortable to read but actually very engaging to talk to. I called him in Palm Springs, where he likes to spend a few days each week hiding out from the madness of his native city.

Photo: Bret Easton Ellis in Los Angeles, April 2010. Blazer and sweater: Ralph Lauren Purple Label. Sunglasses:  (throughout): Ellis's own.