The coldblooded novelist cum provocateur tells Andrew P. Street why narcissists never grow up

In 1985, at the not-so-tender age of 21, Bret Easton Ellis became an instant literary superstar with the release of his debut novel, Less Than Zero, a book that captured the coldly cynical, bored-to-death ethos of his own lost, privileged generation. Now, 25 years and several movie adaptations later, Ellis revisits the world of his debut novel in his seventh book, Imperial Bedrooms. The characters are still twisted, the scene remains bleak – just don’t call it a sequel.

Are you sick to death about talking about [Less Than Zero/Imperial Bedrooms protagonist] Clay yet?
[Sighs] No, I’ve got my prepared answers down. I know the drill. It’s always a variation on the same answer, basically, because that answer is the truth. So ask away...

Did the idea of coming back to the character come up when you were looking back during the writing of [2005’s heavily fictionalised autobiography] Lunar Park? I mean, your characters tend to wander through the background of subsequent books...
Yeah, that’s true – but in this specific case it came from re-reading Less Than Zero while I was working on Lunar Park, because I wanted to re-familiarise myself with the work of the author I was writing about, which was Bret Easton Ellis. I had not read Less Than Zero since it was published and when I finished it this voice in my head started asking me questions about Clay: like “well, where is he? What is he doing? Is he married? Where would he be living, if he lived in LA?” And once I started answering these things more regularly, that moved me to sit down and start an outline.

So it started with Clay’s voice?
That’s really how I’ve always worked: the narrator kinda decides what the novel is, and the story kinda emerges out of that. I wasn’t interested in writing a sequel to Less than Zero, but I wanted to write about Clay. So I guess, in a way... well, I’m not looking at it as a sequel, but of course people are – and of course my publisher is because KACHING! KACHING! [Laughs]

Despite the quarter-century between the two books, Clay doesn’t seem to have grown or matured at all from the emotionally detached figure of Less Than Zero.
Oh, I disagree. He’s hungry, and he has appetites. He likes to fuck with people, and he is a romantic, and also a masochist, and all these things seem to be very different to the 19-year-old that we meet in Less Than Zero. I think the novel’s very different too, because he’s focused in this one. In Less Than Zero he’s not a fully formed person yet and he’s just drifting passively along, which is how I saw him then. But now he’s older and he wants things.

But even so, it’s a very adolescent, reactive desire. There’s nothing deeper in his lust for [the ambitious starlet] Rain, for example: he’s not even clear as to what his own motivations for wanting her are...
Control, it’s control...

...which is rather like Clay in the first book, where he’s buoyed along by events rather than taking control of his own destiny.
Well, put it that way, I agree. But he is also more active in a sinister way: he’s a raging narcissist who puts himself in the middle of this story, in a way, when he’s not a part of whatever the mystery is. He puts himself in the middle of something where he doesn’t even belong and because of that, as narcissists tend to do, he fucks everything up. That interested me.

Imperial Bedrooms also has a similar amount of pop-culture references. Was that something you had to particularly research this time around?
Nnnnnnnooooo. Every book that I’ve written has been narrated by someone that’s approximately my age, and because of that their focus tends to be my focus, in terms of pop-cultural matters. Certainly there are less bands mentioned in Imperial Bedrooms than there were in Less than Zero, but I think it’s a different kind of pop-cultural milieu that Clay is experiencing because he’s a much
older man. He knows The National, for example, like most 40-something white guys with some proximity to pop culture would.

That said, [1994’s] The Informers is a 1984 period piece...
Yes, but the stories were basically written when I was in college and then re-worked over the years. I guess that’s the one time that I went off the line – but those were short stories, they weren’t novels. I don’t think I could have sustained any of those for more than 15 or 20 pages if they had been narrated by, say, an older woman, or a younger woman, or an older man.

Is that just a matter of class, gender and age? I mean, you don’t particularly sound like Clay, or [American Psycho’s protagonist] Patrick Bateman...
[Sarcastic] Well, that’s because they’re novels. They’re made-up stories with made up characters in them; they’re not about me. Isn’t it strange?

But that would be equally true if you were writing from the perspective of an old woman.
Yeah, true. [Laughs] Actually, I had a friend complain recently that I sounded like an old woman, so I don’t know.

Imperial Bedrooms (published by Knopf) is out now.