Just re-read Less Than Zero and it made me even madder about Imperial Bedrooms.
If Ellis had fully committed to IB as a sequel, told Clay's vile story in the present tense and used flashback scenes to explain why he ended up like he did, I would have been seated. I would have been absolutely devastated about the choices my boy decided to make, but it's such a deplorable transformation it couldn't help but be interesting.
And if it hadn't been a sequel, just a disgusting story (mostly) about things that happen in Hollywood every day, I think that would have suited Ellis' style really well, especially if the story was built out with new characters.
But as it stands, "Clay" from Imperial Bedrooms bears so little resemblance to "the character that's based on him" it just frustrates me.
Clay was never a bad kid*. I thought maybe I'd missed a moment of true, violent depravity from him the first time around, but he genuinely does absolutely nothing in the most literal sense of the word. He's just severely, severely mentally unwell. He doesn't watch the coyote die because he gets a sick thrill out of it, he wants to feel disgusted or upset or scared or anything but nothing. And when he finds two things he thinks would cause him to feel genuine disgust he steps away, because the thing he wants more than anything in the world, to feel something, still isn't worth that. And when he finds something terrible he thinks he can stomach, turns out he can't.
*Dgmw, he lets some disgusting things happen when he could've intervened and he continues to be friends with some disgusting people and what he did to Blair was cruel, but 1. He's a fictional character, and as a fictional character his entire function is to be completely passive and 2. He's 18 and extremely unwell, he should've done something but there's only so much he could've done.
It's also so, so important that Clay chooses to leave. Although he comments that school isn't much different from LA, it's clear he's more grounded there. It's far more likely that Clay changed while at college, rather than the entirety of LA and his old friendship group changed that much in four months. Rules of Attraction doesn't exactly corroborate that, but I feel Clay was meant to be more of a reference, a caricature, in that book. Free my boy! He doesn't want to disappear here, he wants to be a tangible person!
This isn't particularly coherent, I just love my beautiful son. Be nicer to Blair and her friends, Clay, all of yours suck.
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