Everyone’s trying to out-Ellis Ellis. So what does Ellis do? He tries to out-Ells himself. That’s the result of Imperial Bedrooms, a curious novel that comes over twenty five years after its prequel, Less Than Zero, the blandly beautiful, minimalist, nihilist novel that catapulted him to stardom. And it almost works.

But not quite. More than a sequel, Imperial Bedrooms attempts to be a summation of Ellis’ entire oeuvre, and yes, that includes the graphic rape and murder bit, too. So Imperial Bedrooms functions more or less as a parody. Whether it’s an intentional parody or not, that’s the question.

We’re greeted to a quote from the master, Raymond Chandler, as soon as we open the book. Ellis’ LA is less than noir, it’s just relentlessly bleak. It’s not black and white, it’s faded and bleached and dried out in the sun, much like Ellis’ characters themselves. Remember Rip, Clay’s drug dealer when he was 18? Well, now Rip’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.’ Don’t worry, though. The kids are still blandly nondescript and beautiful. But this is a novel about growing up.

Ellis is, in many ways, returning to the scene of the crime. Clay notes that one of their friends “wrote a book about us” and is pretty pissed off about it, twenty five years later. But Clay is also a filmmaker and a scriptwriter and still bears more than a passing resemblance to Ellis himself. And that’s where the conceit comes in — and by conceit, I mean it in both senses of the word.

Unlike Less than Zero, there’s some kind of plot. Clay falls in love with some actress who’s only sleeping with him to get a part in his movie and she’s also dating the guy who used to be his best friend and (look away now if you don’t want to hear any more spoilers) she’s also dating Rip. Quite why Clay falls for her so hard is never explained, although a past history is mentioned — in passing. And that’s the problem. Less than Zero worked because it didn’t really have a plot. Imperial Bedrooms has a paper-thin plot that’s sub-Ellis, sub-Chandler. It’s as convoluted as Glamorama, albeit condensed into 170 pages, making it at least a little easier to swallow.

Imperial Bedrooms isn’t a bad book. It’s an experiment. It’s a novel where Ellis looks back on his career and tries to make some sense out of his changing focus. The fact that the-too-cool-for-school Clay is revealed to be as deranged as Patrick Bateman may be jarring to some, but, as Clay himself points out, the clues were always there. We just weren’t looking for them.

Ellis started getting all postmodern on us with Lunar Park, where a character called Bret Easton Ellis attends a fancy dress party where he attends as himself. ‘You do a pretty good impression of yourself,’ he’s told. Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’ impression of himself carried out to its logical conclusion. It’s both brilliant and flawed and if you’ve read the original, it’s probably one of the must-read books of the year. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t stand alone and that should give you more of an impression about the strength of the writing and the characterization and the plot than anything else. When a book functions solely as a coda to an earlier book, it’s not much of a novel.

By all means, buy this book, read it, laugh one more time as Ellis paints the stark, rich world in which his characters live in in black and white. But don’t expect a successor to Less than Zero. This is just the final chapter, the final punchline, delivered by a man who’s getting older, twenty five years too late.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the Romantics were not renowned for their love poems (unlike Fenton). On stage, Fenton painted a realistic and rather bleak portrait of Coleridge: opium addict, manic depressive, tortured artist. Not an easy character to say the least, but then neither was Wordsworth.

Fenton stated that when considering the Romantics, people either ‘take sides with Wordsworth, or against.’ His consideration of the powerful coupling of Wordsworth and Coleridge provided an insight into the political inner workings of these great literary figures, such as Byron’s relationship with Coleridge (whom Wordsworth despised), and Wordsworth’s scourging comments about Coleridges’ quintessential poem, ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ – which was blamed for the unsuccessful edition of the ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ Similarly, Coleridge believed that Wordsworth’s ‘lucid power’ was largely inspired by his sister, Dorothy.

As with all historical figures, Fenton acknowledged the heavily vetted nature of any factual evidence that we may learn about Coleridge and his life. Yet he indulged the audience with a few choice anecdotes, including the unearthing of Wordsworth’s love letters to Mary that were found in a skip (the letters apparently revealed a great force of emotion under a frosty exterior), and that the ‘Khan’ of ‘Kubla Khan’ was in fact reported by Dorothy Wordsworth to be a can that they ‘had a bit of a laugh about’ as they kicked it around one day.

Sat in Bath’s majestic Guildhall, it felt as though Fenton was giving a sermon to the audience as he began to read his selection of Coleridge’s work. Unfortunately for some, Fenton decided against reading the ‘Ancient Mariner’ as it would have taken the length of the talk to do so. Fenton’s selection was in fact an eclectic mix including two semibiographical poems: the ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘This Lime-tree Bower my prison’. These are conversational poems which are pieces of evidence to learn about Coleridge’s life. In ‘Frost’ Coleridge reflects upon his uncomfortable childhood at boarding school as he cradles his son Hartley. Similarly, ‘This Lime-tree Bower my prison’ relates the experience of Coleridge missing a walk with his friends after his foot is scolded with boiling water and prevents him from walking.

Personally, the talk included a much awaited high point, as Fenton uttered the lines ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately-pleasure dome decree’ it was obvious to see that Coleridge’s quintessential poem ‘Kubla Khan’ was a favourite and a reminder of some of the more lucid work of Coleridge.

Fenton delivered this talk with fantastic insight, wit and an unbelievable amount of knowledge which illuminated some lesser known facts about Coleridge’s life and work. But of course you wouldn’t expect anything less and Fenton will no doubt appear again at the festival before too long.

Sophie Pollard

See TTI’s earlier report on Booker Prize nominated author Edward St Aubyn’s rare appearance at the festival here

But it was St Aubyn that I ventured to the festival for. Not only am I in awe of his beautiful, elliptical prose, I’ve always been fascinated by the desire for catharsis that’s evident in his writing. In ‘Some Hope,’ Patrick Melrose says that ‘if the talk cure is our modern religion then narrative fatigue must be its apotheosis’. St Aubyn admits that ‘in Some Hope, there was some closure.’ Yet he returns to the Melrose family in ‘Mother’s Milk’ for another slice of familial strife. Why?

Well, ‘Mother’s Milk’ didn’t start out as a Melrose novel, ‘but it was [always] a Melrose story,’ St Aubyn admits: he simply substituted ‘Patrick’ for ‘Mark’. When the novel was finished, he changed the name back. Gone, though, is the drug addled twenty-something of ‘Bad News,’ replaced with a bitter, cynical middle-aged Patrick who is ‘jealous and miserable’ of his wife’s relationship with their children. ‘Babies destroy sex and romance and monopolise their mother,’ St Aubyn explains. This signposts the shift away from the earlier focus of the Melrose stories on paternal relations to the maternal. ‘Mother’s Milk’ is still a book ‘about dependency’ though this time more explicitly dependence on the family, rather than on drugs – as well as being about the sins of the parents revisited upon the children. In disinheriting her offspring, Patrick’s mother ‘is compulsively doing to her children what she least liked having done to her,’ just as Patrick fears he is passing on his father’s disdain and contempt for the world on to his own children.

St Aubyn read from his book with the typical bored monotone the English upper classes are fated to speak in. Coupled with a taciturn demeanour that’s been mistaken for aloofness in the past, it’s easy to see why he has such a fearsome reputation, and why it’s easy to confuse him with Patrick Melrose. At 48, he could still pass for the 30 year old Patrick of ‘Some Hope’. But scratch beneath his waspish veneer and you’ll find he’s as insightful and sympathetic in real life as his prose would suggest. He understands his subjects intimately, but has gone far beyond the mere autobiography he was initially accused of.

He admits that ‘there is always a starting point [for his ideas] in reality, nonetheless it has to be hidden… there has to be something for [him] to discover’. Therein lies the key to understanding his writing. St Aubyn writes to better understand himself and in doing so, to better understand the human condition. He believes that even if he wrote ‘a novel on Mars in the twenty fifth century, it would be infused with [his] own sensibilities’. It is impossible to separate St Aubyn’s preoccupations from his characters. He takes his own experiences as ‘a starting point’ but doesn’t know where that point will lead him to. His writing is an exploration of the psyche and that, perhaps, is what makes it so addictive. The truth, the cut and thrust, the intellectual argument that St Aubyn makes in his books only becomes apparent to him as he writes them. His stories are mysteries of human nature that are only solved – or at least salved – as he writes, and as we read.

St Aubyn’s reputation as a perceptive, intelligent author is well deserved. He is also utterly unpretentious. It remains to be seen if the completion of ‘Mother’s Milk’ has finally imbued him with the kind of ‘narrative fatigue’ that his alter-ego, Patrick Melrose, once sought. I can’t help but suspect if he reaches that narrative fatigue, he’ll stop writing. But for now, it seems like this supposedly reticent author still has a lot to say.

Richard Allday

More from the Bath Literature Festival to come later in the week… same time, same bat channel. Stay tuned.

TTI: So, your starter for ten points, and it’s an easy one: tell us about your new book! It’s been three years since your last novel was published, quite a gap for an author who’s managed to average a book a year for most of his career. Do you see your latest novel as a progression of the themes of your earlier books, or have you taken time out to make a clean break with your past work?

MT: OK, my new novel is called Privacy. It’s about a fifty-something child psychotherapist who is invited to Sweden to investigate a phenomenon called ‘apatiska barn.’ This is a true syndrome where two hundred refugee children in the last ten years have entered comas after coming to Sweden. No one knows what causes it—some people say traffic exhaustion, others the normal trials of starting in a new country, the climate, etc. But the experience of investigating this phenomenon brings to the surface all the emotional problems the psychiatrist has been experiencing, primarily his difficult relationship with his depressed daughter and his interest in one of his teenage patients whose father is in prison for assisting the suicide of a teenage student. It’s a very dark book and deals with subjects (suicide, depression, sadomasochism, sexual extremity) that seem to make people very uneasy. It doesn’t really connect with my previous novels at all, but it is a continuation of some of the themes I have addressed in short stories over the years. If all goes to plan, I’d like to follow up the novel with a book of short stories called Paying My Friends For Sex, which is a companion piece to Privacy in a way.

TTI: It seems that you’ve developed a penchant for creating quirky, slightly oddball characters, from romance obsessed film buffs to lonely foreign language teachers. Would you say you’re striving for greater realism in your stories, and creating characters who have more depth than the average character in a novel?

MT: People often attack realist fiction as being boring, or unimaginative, or even suggest that ‘realist fiction’ as a concept doesn’t even make sense. But for me, very few novels or films feel realistic, and I want to find a way of addressing that in my fiction. For me, the challenge of writing novels is to find a way to depict characters and situations that a reader will feel is realistic, but then push it into dramatic areas, without the reader ever feeling that I’ve manipulated them. I find real life endlessly strange, and the most autobiographical scenes I write are always the ones that readers don’t believe actually happened.

TTI: Many of your characters seem to be defective in some way — The extent to which Steve Ellis goes to to secure his love for Cherry is perhaps the most obvious example, but even in Eight Minutes Idle, Dan, the seemingly ordinary narrator, has a conviction for GBH and manages to starve a perfectly innocent cat to death… yet we’re usually invited to symapthise with your characters, particularly when we get inside their heads. Is ‘damage’ a key ingredient in the motivations for your characters, and does it make a difference to how we view them?

MT: I don’t think my characters are damaged, but certainly lots of readers have found the behaviour of some of my characters disturbing. The two you mention, Dan and Steve, are the ones that most people have problems with, and the reactions to both seem to split into two: some people get cross because they’ve identified with someone whose capable of murder (whether of an animal in Eight Minutes Idle, or a person in Cherry), whereas other people just hate them from the beginning. It’s funny, though, even Gerald in Child Star, who is a relatively kind person, was attacked by critics for not having enough sex. I’m interested in how people judge fictional characters. Most novels are like American films are supposed to be: you immediately know who the good guy is, who the villain is, etc. Or there’s a twist where you’re led to like someone who turns out to be evil. But almost all of my characters are capable of both good and evil. When I wrote my children’s books, I tried to carry this idea into genre fiction. In each novel, it becomes harder and harder to know who to trust. And in Eight Minutes Idle, it was strange because some readers were more upset that Dan betrayed his friend Teri than anything else in the book, whether it was killing a cat or being convicted of GBH. I think I must be a bit of a sociopath because sometimes I’m genuinely astonished by readers’ reactions. For example, a reader said to me that the final scene of Pictures of You was the most shocking thing he’d read because the narrator abandons a person with broken arms in a car accident, while for me that was a perfectly reasonable response to the awful experiences he’d been put through in the rest of the book as a result of that person’s previous behaviour.

TTI: Of course, every novel has to be viewed in the context of the time in which it was written, certainly from a critical point of view. It’s rarely possible to separate the concerns of the times from the concerns of the characters in the book. What do you feel your concerns are at the moment, and how have they filtered down into your writing?

MT: It’s interesting, I’ve always argued how important it is for contemporary fiction to be connected to the era in which it’s written, but sometimes the era can change on you while you’re writing a book. The most dramatic case of this for me was 9/11. My novel Pictures of You came out on the 12th September, 2001 and the world had changed irreversibly. So that novel became immediately redundant, even though it’s my favourite of my books.

It makes sense that your concerns as a writer will evolve over time. When the New Puritan manifesto was published, it was never intended to be the sort of statement that would nail anyone’s trousers to the mast in terms of writing in a certain way forever.

TTI: How do you feel your own writing style has developed over the years? Does practice make perfect, or do you feel its that you’re reinventing yourself with each new book?

Well, you’re absolutely right about the New Puritans: the whole point was that it was a one-off experiment. I usually feel my books come in pairs, and then I reinvent myself. So Eight Minutes Idle was a development of the themes and style of Tourist, Pictures of You was an attempt to rewrite Dreaming of Strangers in a darker vein, and Cherry was a response to the criticisms of Child Star. Privacy is the beginning of a new cycle. But I don’t think practice makes perfect, I think sometimes you’re in a good phase and sometimes you’re not.

TTI: We’ve also exchanged words with Charles Thomson of the Stuckist movement in this issue of the magazine. The Stuckists created not one but several manifestos to suit their needs. Have you ever considered laying out your ideas in a manifesto again, or has that idea now served its purpose? Is it important to make bold statements in contemporary British fiction to get the attention of the publishing industry, particularly when so much of its resources are diverted to ‘big name’ authors like Martin Amis or fashionable novels like Malkani’s Londonstani ?

MT: I’m not sure I could go through something like the New Puritans again. I think one manifesto is fine, but if you keep coming up with them it can seem like you’re just publicity-seeking and you can become more well-known for coming up with manifestos than doing your work. I don’t really care about the successes or failures of other people’s books any more. It used to seem obscene to me that critics could go on saying Martin Amis was one of Britain’s greatest authors when he was producing novels like Yellow Dog, but now I think, who cares? It does irritate me that it’s getting harder and harder for quieter novelists to continue their careers, but I can’t get worked up about people paying lots of money for debuts. Londonstani’s a perfectly good book, in its own way.

TTI: Finally, is it important to state your aims — or at least make them highly visible — for every book you write, or are you happy to let the reader make up his own mind? Have you always striven for clarity in your work or is it always going to be the case that you can’t herd cats – or, for that matter, lead your readers?

MT: I always strive for clarity in my book, but only of prose. I like to keep my aims secret. Most of my novels have come into being for completely perverse reasons. I like to experiment with plot and narrative and character, but it’s important for me that the reader is hooked by a straightforward style. But I’ve no interest in trying to make the reader like my characters, or my books, for that matter.

Interview by Richard Allday

Creative or not, many of these novels will also follow a formula, in much the same way as a crime reader would expect to find out ‘whodunnit’ at the end, or a romance reader might expect a teary-eyed reunion on the closing pages. Of course, some literary novels deliberately subvert formula – Martin Amis’ London Fields, for example, can be read as a brilliant parody of the ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery – but many literary novels will still follow an essentially formulaic plot, in which conflicts are set up in the opening scenes only to be resolved throughout the course of the novel, creating conventional character arcs as the story progresses – a journey to be followed by the reader.

There are probably more formulae than you can think of: last year’s much hyped Londonstani, for example, stakes a claim of providing social commentary on London’s multicultural society, but is at heart a ‘growing up in the ghetto’ novel cross-pollinated with ideas taken from classic books about endemic violence in society such as A Clockwork Orange or J.G. Ballard’s High Rise. The use of a modern day urban patois adds to the book’s surface uniqueness, but the idea itself is a direct descendant of the Nadsat dialect in Clockwork Orange, replacing the Cyrillic dialect with text-message speak, peppered by the occasional ‘innit’ so Malkani can prove he’s down with the kids.

But there’s nothing wrong with using a tried and tested formula, as formulae serve as a method of categorizing the literary novel, as, from a critical standpoint, it gives us a frame of reference. Nonetheless, it seems as though there is a very specific and identifiable type of formulaic novel which slides in and out of vogue in accordance with the material economy of the time: during episodes of economic boom and conspicuous consumption, we tend to see a great deal of novqels in which characters with money pursue great excesses – drink, drugs, wild parties, sexual relationships and so on – in search of an epiphany. The consumption-driven 1980s were perhaps the apex of this type of novel.

However, novels purporting to comment on the excesses of the times have re-surfaced in practically every decade, as long as there were good times to be had. Such novels were, of course, notably absent from 1929-1945. But it’s no coincidence that McInerney’s seminal tale of ‘80s excess, Bright Lights, Big City, has just been reprinted, or that novels like Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, another commentary on excess in the ‘greed is good’ 1980s should be in vogue during the latter half of this decade: a time when house prices are booming, spending on credit continues to rise, and the nation’s youth continue, inexplicably, to party like it’s 1988 as the hedonistic, drug-fuelled ‘New Rave’ movement reaches its thundering crescendo: indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking that 2007 is a perfect facsimile of the drug-fuelled excesses of two decades ago.

Less Than Zero might not be as autobiographical as McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City – a novel by a cocaine-snorting fact checker for the New Yorker, written about a cocaine-snorting fact checker at an anonymous New York magazine – but clearly, autobiography plays a significant role in both books. Though McInerney has struggled throughout his career to shrug off the persona he created in the 1980s, other authors have embraced the journalistic, documentary nature of their fiction. Thompson was more than happy to live up to the celebrity created by his ‘Raoul Duke’ persona and even if his later journalistic work was critically mauled, his unique melding of autobiography and fiction to create what Tom Wolfe praised as ‘Celine-like fantasies’ give the reader a better sense of being a part of the story as it unfolds.

Many such writers can be considered purveyors of documentary fiction, capturing an era or a movement in spirit, if not in actual events: in a 1924 letter to his publisher, Fitzgerald boasted that ‘I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27.’ Similarly, recent Booker nominee Edward St Aubyn has stated that his Patrick Melrose Trilogy about a young, alienated party-hopping upper-class heroin addict is largely autobiographical. It could therefore be argued that most books which follow the ‘money + boredom + excess = epiphany’ formula are examples of writers working from an ‘insider’ perspective to create works of fiction which they regard as socially relevant, that is to say, that being written by those who have actually experience the times in which they are set, they feel able to pass some sort of comment on those times. The epiphany with which the formula ends is the central device through which this commentary is passed. As an explanatory device, the epiphany invites the reader to share the author’s insight vicariously through the story’s narrator.

We are told early on in The Patrick Melrose Trilogy that ennui is ‘…more than just French for our old friend boredom. It’s boredom plus money, or boredom plus arrogance. It’s I-find-everything-boring, therefore I’m fascinating. But it doesn’t seem to occur to people that you can’t have a world picture and then not be part of it,’ yet it is only towards the end of the trilogy, after all the central characters have been broken on the wheel of the stifling, claustrophobic world of the upper classes that epiphany arrives. After being broken by his drug addiction in the second book, Melrose finally comes to terms with his existence and learns to laugh at the people he is surrounded by, even becoming cautiously optimistic about his own future. The epiphany comes late, after Melrose has lost all of his money. It may even come in the final paragraph, as he walks away from an absurd party with ‘a strange feeling of elation.’

Yet as Martin Amis (the character, as well as the writer) says near the height of John Self’s excesses in Money, ‘the author is not above sadistic impulses,’ indicating that unpleasant or even violent acts penned by the author’s hand are part of the narrative technique of the moralist. Perhaps this is most evident in Ellis’ American Psycho, where Amis’ brand of moralistic sadism is taken to the extreme via the eponymous serial killer of the book. Criticized as amoral and nihilistic when it first appeared, Ellis defended his work as ‘profoundly moralistic,’ indicating that the feelings of disgust and revulsion created by the acts in the book are linked to a wider moral judgement about the monetary excesses and conspicuous consumption which characterized the America of the 1980s.

However, Ellis delights in playing the role of the trickster. At the end of American Psycho, we are invited by the narrator to conclude that ‘there is no catharsis,’ causing us to question whether this statement can be considered an epiphany when, in fact, nothing changes. Can the epiphany the reader reaches with the narrator be as nihilistic as ‘nothing will change? Ellis provides us with a clever subversion of a classical formula. Most authors are content to follow the pattern of tragedy set out by the Greeks in which anagnorisis – a moment of understanding – is followed by catharsis, whereas the endings of Ellis’ novels instead invite the reader to share in the narrators’ kenosis, a state of ‘profound spiritual emptiness’ which forms the the polar opposite of catharsis, where some sort of revelation is supposed to occur.

Ellis illustrates the casual nihilism of a postmodern age: his constant references to throwaway pop-culture and his aimless, motiveless leading characters reflect an era in which meaning, in the words of Jean Beaudrillard, ‘has been subsumed by appearances.’ The ‘unending desert’ of the narrator of American Psycho is Baudrillard’s oft-quoted ‘desert of the real’ – the abandonment of meaning. Or, as Patrick Bateman says in American Psycho, ‘surface, surface, surface. This was the world as I saw it: colossal and jagged.’

The iconoclasm of Ellis towards prevailing social norms is evident from his desire to subvert convention and shock the reader. Ellis is not only one of the greatest moralists of our time, but also one of our greatest satirists: his work is a direct criticism of the absurdity of struggling towards catharsis in an age where the world of meaning has been subsumed by the world of appearances, where culture has been replaced by sub-culture. If the reader is invited towards any sort of epiphany in Ellis’ novels, it is that there can indeed be ‘no catharsis.’

This is not to question the validity of other ‘cathartic’ novels as social commentary. Earlier novels such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can be seen as mourning the decline of a society-wide meta-narrative, in Thompson’s case the fracturing and ultimate failure of the hippie ‘counter-culture.’ The Patrick Melrose Trilogy largely works as a cathartic novel even though it is set in the same era as Ellis’ works because it focuses on a segment of society, the British upper class, which is so set in the past that it fails to recognize its time has already been and gone. Indeed, St Aubyn positively invites us to laugh at the anachronistic absurdity of the people depicted within his novels.

Nonetheless, that a formula can be subverted successfully, as it is by Ellis and St Aubyn, offers definitive proof of its existence. The question therefore is perhaps not so much whether novels corresponding to the ‘money + boredom + excess = epiphany’ pattern are formulaic – this seems certain – but rather what form the formula will take on next. The next generation of writers whose duty it is to document our time of excess cannot be far away. However, the other preoccupations of society at present must undoubtedly factor into any twenty-first century revision of the formula.

If the ‘20s were preoccupied with hedonism, the ‘60s with the drug culture, and the ‘80s with the raw power of money, the central themes running through this decade have already been set by the nihilistic agenda of ‘generation X’ writers like Bret Easton Ellis. In a society which has become increasingly self-referential, which has plundered past trends, fashionably reviving a different decade with each passing season, what can be said of culture – to paraphrase Thompson – in this most foul year of our Lord, AD 2007? The decade termed the ‘noughties’ by the mainstream media is in fact characterized by a total absence of this salacious intrigue: this decade is rather characterized by what it is: the ‘00s, the zeroes, a zero generation to follow the generation Xers, a generation where the nihilism of books such as Less than Zero, once so subversive, have been accepted as a part of mainstream culture.

Are we living through a new ‘lost generation?’ After catharsis, after kenosis, after nihilism, perhaps we should wonder how the next generation of writers will adapt the ‘money + boredom + excess = epiphany’ formula so as to remain socially relevant? When even nihilism is casual, has such a formula finally become obsolete, or will the next generation of writers be forced to evolve into subverters of subversion, and become postmodern pranksters in their own right?

Richard Allday