Imperial Boredom

Every time I finish a Bret Easton Ellis novel, I find myself struck by an immediate literary angoisse. Why, I ask myself, did I not like that? It has everything I want in a novel, such as sex, drugs, ultraviolence, and depravity, and it has very few of the things I hate, such as lyrical evocations, penetrating insights, families, wistful epiphanies, or spiritual descriptions of landscapes that name-check plant species. I have this fantasy where he is able to enter and alter other author's fictional worlds--like, for instance, I imagine he landed On Chesil Beach when it was still a lousy New Yorker story. The girl wouldn't put out for her new hubby, so he killed her. The end. Fuck you, McEwan.

Unfortunately, Easton Ellis is terrible. He's like a guy who one time got invited to this Hollywood party, right, and he did some blow, and he believed everybody's bullshit. Fuck, he is that guy. Hollywood as an icon of American depravity is pretty much a self-created and self-sustaining myth anyway, as ridiculous as the shaved and cosseted fag-bombs of Jersey Shore imagining themselves tough, heterosexual, and virile. Hollywood is not dangerous; the, ahem, "entertainment industry" is not dangerous. It is a dull, boring, and increasingly irrelevant company town. It is not ruled by pimps, drug dealers, stars, agents, lawyers, producers, murderers, or any other species of interesting human being. It is ruled by accountants, who serve distant, corporate masters at Sony and Viacom and inside of Rupert Murdoch's dusty rectum. The whole thing is a dull machine, long since bought up and remade. People do not go on coke binges and kill hookers anymore. They go on coke binges and greenlight the screenplay to the reinvention of the reimagining of the reboot of Batman. Arnold Schwarzenegger really is the governor of California. 2010's highest-grossing picture in America is Toy Story 3. The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood.

You could say, and fairly, that Easton Ellis' Hollywood isn't the real Hollywood; isn't meant to be the real Hollywood; is a fantastical, almost allegorical, dangerous alternate fairyland like something out of a slightly underproduced del Toro flick, but Easton Ellis' capacity to transgress is limited by a frankly dull imagination. His carefully deployed misogyny barely registers because it is so plainly calculated, and compared to the loud torture-porn churned out--NOW IN 3D!!!--by the very movie town that he so thoroughly fails to apprehend, his violence is passé. There is, in Imperial Bedrooms, one scene of moderately explicit, scatalogical violence, but in this glorious annum of the human centipede, well, all that's left is to giggle like a little boy at the poopy.

In interviews, he has claimed Chandler as a model and an inspiration, but how can you write a pastiche, even if intended as homage, of a writer whose whole style walked the tightrope above self-parody. It's like writing a satire of Swift. It can't be done. The noirish elements--the tails, the surveillance, the anonymous texts in place of anonymous calls--keep hanging up the works, and the constant, pervasive ogling of cell phones and texting give off a slightly elderly scent. He's trying a little too hard. He is your mom, telling you that she is now on the Facebook.

All of this is a shame, because hiding within this novel, whose taut prose is just a girdle around a flabby gut, is a pretty good story about a liar coming to realize that he is a liar and starting to lose, as a result, his ability to lie. In the skilled hands of a better writer, it could be an amazing anti-epiphany; his moral awakening would be his curse. It's almost Greek. Instead, I don't know, he hooks up with some lady he used to hook up with. And her husband doesn't care, maybe. And someone got killed or something? Cocaine! Alcoholism!

Bret Easton Ellis, you're Oprah material.