Back to the Future

In Imperial Bedrooms, 1980s-lit-brat novelist Bret Easton Ellis reinvents his alter ego

Len Lagrua

You may picture author Bret Easton Ellis sitting at his desk in a well-cut suit, snickering as he plinks away at the keyboard, tossing adjectives like darts spearing the very people who wait patiently to see what he does next. You may think of him as fiction's prince of darkness, disturbing chronicler of the youthful, drug-addled, and ethically impaired, a figure bordering on evil. Or perhaps a pop icon, the Andy Warhol of belles lettres, or the very person you one day want to be. Pretty much everyone has an idea of who or what Bret Ellis is, and in the end, most of it isn't true—but does Bret Ellis want you to know that?

I met Bret 20-some years ago at a book party on New York's Upper East Side. We were each going through phases of extreme shyness—call it late adolescence. This was not long after Ellis published Less Than Zero at the ripe old age of 21, while he was still a student at Bennington College. The novel's main character, Clay, a student at a small New England liberal-arts school, goes home to Los Angeles to revisit his old life—sex, drugs, parties, cars—all the while questioning what he's doing and suffering the nihilistic aching loneliness of being in a city without a soul. Clay's trajectory catapulted Ellis to cult-hero status, and the mythology surrounding him and the thin line between fact and fiction began to grow. His subsequent behavior—sometimes fueled by drink and drugs—won him the coveted role of bratty younger brother to the previous generation of literary bad boys.

But here's what most people don't know about Bret Ellis, i.e., the Big Secret: He's incredibly nice, loyal, and compassionate, with a vicious sense of humor—deeply normal in a world that's mostly not.

Our friendship is that of fellow travelers whose work is often controversial. Ellis' third novel, American Psycho, narrated by serial killer Patrick Bateman, was so extreme in its violence and sexuality that before it even appeared, negative reaction forced it to be withdrawn from publication, only to come out several months later as a Vintage paperback. American Psycho, once so reviled, has come to be much admired and was adapted by Ellis into a well-regarded film starring Christian Bale—the complex, multilayered figure of Bateman seen in retrospect as emblematic of the cocaine-encrusted go-go years of the late 1980s on Wall Street.

Less Than Zero opens, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." That's resonant as both a literal observation and a comment on modern life—we are afraid to get too close. Less Than Zero is now as good as or better than it was 25 years ago. It has been in print for more than half of Ellis' life. He's got second-generation fans. And now he has written a sequel of sorts, Imperial Bedrooms, in which he revisits his doppelgänger, Clay, now (of course) a screenwriter living in Los Angeles. It puts a noirish, Chandler-esque spin on twenty-first-century L.A.—there's someone following Clay, sending anonymous messages. It's about being haunted by something that in the end could be some kind of reflection of yourself.

These days, I see Bret once or twice a year. We usually meet for dinner at the Chateau Marmont—a place that, like Ellis, is still as prescient and current as it was all those years ago.

A.M. Homes: I'm always wondering exactly what it is you're doing. I did a little digging, and it looks like not only are you writing novels, but you're really part of the world of film and television at this point.
Bret Easton Ellis: To a degree—but not. I write pilots. Nothing gets filmed. I write scripts. None of them get made. But that's what I'm doing out here. Because it's fun.

AH: What do you like about it?
BE: I was at the Chateau Marmont on a Saturday night. A reporter I've known for years was in town. Then a director joined us, and for some reason, I knew everyone there that night, and people were coming over to the table. A lot of them were actors and 12-year-old record executives, and the reporter says, "This is so different from your life five years ago, when I visited you in New York. Is this really what you want to do? Is this really who you want to hang out with?" And I said, "I'd rather hang out with a 12-year-old record executive than Richard Ford or Toni Morrison." The whole idea of literary New York, I'm allergic to it now. I left it a long time ago.

This Is A Developing Story

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