It's been twenty five years since we first met Clay, the bored, frustrated, and hedonistic nineteen year-old college kid with too much time and money on his hands to do anything faintly moral with. LTZ is an unmistakeable cult classic, and defines an era in its minimalist, stark style. It is the literary embodiment of the affluent, drug-enthused, Contax T2-waving photographers we came to see in the nineties (Ryan McGinley and the late Dash Snow, to name but two), and successfully transmuted The Great Gatsby into the Modern Age (instead of the all-seeing eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, we have the rather blatant and figuratively ever-present slogan 'DISAPPEAR HERE' looking down on Clay from a bill board, and rather than Jay Gatsby we watch Clay's sisters mock-death, face down in a swimming pool near to the novel's closure).
Moving on to Imperial Bedrooms we see the same said bunch reach the depths of middle-age, and believe it or not, they haven't really changed. Clay can't emotionally attach himself to anyone and still can't work out quite how he feels about Blair, Rip's equally immoral in his vocational pursuit and Julian is still as wet and reliant as ever, constantly a product of those he involves himself with (both these novels' antithesis to Clay). Yet we have a new addition, the talentless but beautiful Rain Turner that all male-characters seem to fall for, who Clay promises a role to in order to get her in to bed (by the way he's a screenwriter now, a professional interest far from even remotely hinted at in the first novel, which seems more in place so that the author can apply his own experiences to Clay).
The book begins with a semi post-modernistic approach reminiscent of Lunar Park, where the protagonist separates himself from the author, which seems partly in place to simply recap the events of LTZ and partly to slander the 1987 Kanievska film adaption starring Robert Downey Jr. Then as the narrative continues, we are faced - similarly to LTZ - with the prospect of Clay coming home to Los Angeles, however this time it is to help with the casting of his new film - and we quickly learn that all the characters that we have come to know seem to be wrapped up in the film industry in one form or another. Upon return, the narrative seeks to pull Clay from his preferred solitude with the old-fashioned ploy of the unknown follower: he is being watched by a dark blue jeep and receiving texts from an unidentified number. While this element heightens the intensity of the novels' thriller conventions and naturally quickens the pace, it at times stops being the dry, faceless static narrative of of its predecessor (the first novels' most disturbing element being that scenes of the most immoral and violent quality are created in the same drab tone of the dull party scenes) and falls into something that seems reminiscent of the likes of a Michael Mann film - especially following the addition of another follower, the Mercedes after the Jeep. As a result, the novels high points are no longer the alone time we have with Clay, scenes which were of the most enjoyable in LTZ, in the time spent glaring at the Elvis Costello poster.
In terms of popular culture reference, we have certainly lost the cool and cutting-edge picture of this generation in their youth. We still have a Costello title for the book's name, but the similarity ends there. While it is nice to see the old faces in light of the new tide of iPhones, Lost and Myspace, you get the feeling we've lost the voice that defined a generation somewhere here as it gets rewritten. There's something a little strained in the continual reliance on social media, and references to chart-fillers such as The Fray and Bat for Lashes seem frail in comparison to the eighties underground club-scene we were acquainted with in LTZ. Granted, this might be wholly intentional, but you can't help thinking that a weak holding-onto of 'cool' that all of these characters undego was always inevitable as they age, and that we should never have seen it; that despite the evil and violence of this group when they were in their teens, and regardless of the fact that they will have always inevitably grown up, we should have let them 'disappear there' from the moment the first book ended, that 'these images [that] stayed with [...Clay] after [he] left' should have stayed with us too, but we should have left them to stand eternally, rather than letting them age when they're revisited in context to the Google generation.
The book's conclusion (another meeting with Blair), cyclically brings us back to where we began, and proves that Clay, and, subsequently everyone else, are wholly incapable of ever changing. One question worth taking away from this novel though, is that if not one single character can undergo some kind of development, did we really need it to be proved to us again a second time round?