Writer Jim Harrison is to letters what Woody Allen is to film. If that seems a stretch, consider: both are prolific, releasing a new work (or more) yearly. Both were born during the Depression, two years apart, both in December. Both mix drama and comedy into something that’s entertaining as well as thought provoking. Both are fixed on the complications resulting from relationships and sex. Both are obsessed with mortality. Both have tried their hand at writing from a woman’s point-of-view. Both are connected to specific locations, Harrison to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Allen to Manhattan’s Upper Westside (and more recently, Barcelona and Paris). Both are revered in France.

Okay, it’s still a stretch. The grizzled, one-eyed novelist and poet who wrote Legends of the Fall and some 30 other volumes of prose and poetry is more at home in the outdoors than the bespectacled urbanite who wrote and directed Interiors (no matter how much  of A Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy takes place outdoors) . And while Harrison’s characters, like Allen’s, often dwell on the fact that their days, as everyone’s, are numbered, they don’t all take it personally. They’re more stoical about it.

Take 65-year-old Detective Sunderson from Harrison latest novel The Great Leader. “He thought just because you’re older doesn’t mean that death is imminent every day. There’s generally a tip-off when it’s coming.” Tips, being the detective’s stock-and-trade, need to be acted on. And Sunderson’s been given more than a few.

If your hunch is that detective fiction is out of character for someone as literate as Harrison, you’d be half right.  Detective Sunderson doesn’t break from the manly Harrison mold. He’s burly, fond of brook trout, dogs and deer livers.  He has a frustration-inducing appreciation for female posteriors and is prone to use whiskey as a cure. Three years ago, his troubled lifestyle cost him “the world’s finest woman,” according to his niggling 85-year-old mother. It’s his down-home style of introspection, in light of his vices, that stands him apart from the usual sleuth.

Recently retired after a career policing familial abuse, small-time drug dealing, and bear poaching, our detective is hardboiled country-style. When asked why he continues to follow The Great Leader out of the hummocks of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Arizona and the Sand Hills of Nebraska, he claims he’s investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex. A more accurate answer: he’s pursuing himself.

If this doesn’t exactly sound like Manhattan Murder Mystery that’s because it isn’t.  There are plenty of dark moments and intimations of mortality in The Great Leader, though balanced by comic action and witty asides. Plot? Only the barest, vulture-picked bones. Along the way, Sunderson is threatened with a sodomy charge, has a run-in with a Mexican drug kingpin, eats prodigiously and suffers gout. It’s not a thriller and there’s not a lot of suspense. But if you’re fond of existential puzzles, then The Great Leader is your rib steak.

In this age-of-anxiety sense, The Great Leader is reminiscent of Paul Auster’s1985 mystery City of Glass, an existential detective yarn in which the unraveling thread of the central charter’s psyche is more knotty than the mystery he’s trying to solve. While Auster’s tale is surreal, Harrison’s is well-grounded. Auster says, “nothing is real, except chance.” Harrison counters, “there is no truth, only stories. “ As a detective, Sunderson‘s heard plenty.

The real mystery here is Sunderson himself. Even as he plots the downfall of the cult leader for his taste in 12-year-olds, he ogles his 16-year-old neighbor girl, an exhibitionist whose bedroom window is just 30 feet from his. That and the excitement he feels almost every time a woman bends over cause him to curse “the distracting nuisance” of the biological imperative, like “carrying around a backpack full of cow manure.”

Harrison is skilled at straight-talking life’s big issues and the book is full of homily. “Crime did pay but usually very little,” Sunderson observes. Or, when marveling at the rejuvenating powers of time spent in the wild, “A creek is more powerful than despair.”

Not all such insight seems worthy: “Men would say they were as horny as a toad but who among them knew if a toad was horny?” Sometimes, Harrison’s dialog seems unnaturally smart, as when a tough plainclothes cop, describing religion as a drug, says, “you know, the Marxian opiate of the people.”

But by and large, Sunderland’s social and political one-liners give a jolt on almost every page. He’s outspoken on religion, Republicans, the FBI, American history (especially when it came to Native Americans), 9-11 and justice (“When a guy with four DUIs runs over a kid and receives less time than a college kid with a half-pound of pot…”); all tempered by his unruly self-doubt: “…what were his conclusions worth? Hadn’t he been put out to pasture?”

Sunderson eventually chases down a sort of religion of his own, one anchored in extended family and the natural world. Like Alvy Singer in Allen’s Annie Hall, he finds solace in his surroundings, a beauty and buzz of life that’s present no matter which landscape he’s in. It’s this revelation that helps him get his man. I won’t tell you which one.–Cabbage Rabbit

Albert Snyder’s murder in 1927 at the hands of his wife and her lover gave James M. Cain — and others –  ideas. As Literary Legend has it, the killing inspired Cain twice, once in Double Indemnity and again with The Postman Always Rings Twice . The actual incident was the perfect combination of sex and murder, and its telling in the papers overshadowed what was waiting on the economic horizon.

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion –the title pulled from a newspaper article of the time;  the chapters have equally Old Testament titles–is something of a tease. Hansen’s fictional period piece is big on “surge” and short on “guilt.” It’s as if the postman rang only once.

What we get instead is long on before and short on after. When the two finally dumb themselves into doing the deed (they’d already done dirty in many dirty ways), things move fast.

Hansen had benefit of memoirs from both of the condemned and is reported to have studied the incident throoughly.  While the juries, the attorneys and the public might have supplied endless material for  Hansen’s biopic, he instead concentrates on the accused’s lack of genuine guilt. The characters in both Postman and Identity, and their subsequent films, share the same base characteristics, all in different circumstances. Here, the not-so-star crossed lovers are oblivious in completely different ways.

The faux-steamy first section is where Hansen takes advantage of creative license. What he made up is damn good, presented flatly, judgmental in that it’s not.  And if the closing section, by comparison, seems to get bored with itself,  we should appreciate Hansen’s circling in quickly. It seemed like knowing how it was going to end suddenly made it less interesting even though we knew how it was going to end from the beginning. If this is the well from which much noir springs, it doesn’t give whatever cliche it’s attached to much support. And, as well,  it does. Are we all this self-absorbed? Hansen, with example, says in so many words that we like to think we’re not. Verdict? I couldn’t put it down.–Cabbage Rabbit

Craig Thompson of Blankets fame asks a silly question in the introduction to Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper:  “Does Art Enhance Our Lives Or Distract From It?” Then he makes what might be an unpopular decision between fantasy and reality comics. (And shouldn’t that be, “Our Life”?)

“The Superhero,” he says, ” is escapist. The DREAM. Clearly a distraction. But [reality] is its own abstraction–distilling life to its most mundane, suppressing the dream with CYNICISM.” He goes onto say the Brazilian brothers Moon and Ba (twins!) travel both. Daytripper takes a magical realism approach, its hero is oh-so-human. It follows a “miracle child” and son of a famous writer through parallel universes of the same life, but not the same death.   Added twists: the son, Bras, aspires to be a great writer like his father but is employed scribbling obituaries for the local paper. He stands in shadow. Lovers and a friend, sometimes only their memories, tie the episodes together.

Ba’s artwork is much more round and human in his brother’s story, more sharp-edged and angular in his work for Matt Fraction’s Casanova Luxuria, which appears more commercial. Casanova comes down on the fantasy side, fantasies of several types, the best of which is probably not the legions of sexy, female robots. Sure, the sex in Daytripper is good, too. The best parts of Cassanova (there is a collected Volume 2 out; haven’t read it) are when the characters are at their most human.  Contrast that with Daytripper‘s  magical mystery tour of (multiple) existence, all of it all too human. Fantasy and reality–one can’t seem to exist without the other.–Cabbage Rabbit

You’ve gotta believe that most all of what you read in David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King was written by David Foster Wallace. After all, the manuscript was trimmed from “a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe’s sacks” worth of paper  to 548 pages, as editor Michael Pietsch tells us. But then, we don’t know how much stitching Pietsch had to do. We know there was no “outline or other indication of what order David intended for these chapters.”   He tells us he edited “lightly,” and that he cut out”unintentional distractions and confusions…”. And I thought confusions were what Wallace was all about.

Pietsch says, “There were notes and false starts, lists of names, plot ideas, instructions to himself. All these materials were gorgeously alive and charged with observations; reading them was the closest timing to seeing his amazing mind at play upon the world.”  This may suggest that the editor did a lot of writing to bring it all together. It also gives us a way to discern, in its dull and stammering way, what is stitching to what is Wallace.

Does it matter what is Wallace and what is not? Of course it does. And our take is that most of it is, in its being “gorgeously alive” (well, maybe not “gorgeously”  but “grindingly” or “sadly”) and in its glimpse into Wallace’s  “amazing mind.”  What’s amazing about it is its willingness to pursue detail, to pose self-reflecting questions and see a number of answers, to find the most absurd circumstances and put them to sound use.

It matters because I can’t help wonder if the young man who is at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Il isn’t — it is! — David Foster Wallace and that as he explains his adolescence in terms of his job aspirations (what a turnaround!), he’s telling us about what that amazing mind went through. There are other characters of interest, drawn in Wallace’s too-revealing style, as if, again, he were writing about himself.  The  narrative is Pynchon-like  in its time-out-of-mind pacing. And there’s some paranoia  — big-brother type paranoia–  thrown in for good measure.  What’d you expect? It’s the IRS.

We’re not ready to make comparisons to Infinite Jest…may have to read it again (that was last summer’s project). And there’s one thing certain: it is unfinished. But this is definitely a David Foster Wallace novel, even some of it wasn’t written by him.–Cabbage Rabbbit

Philip Roth’s interview in the Financial Times ahead of his visit to London to pick up the Man Booker International literary prize is an exercise in avoidance. Roth avoids answering the tough questions by letting the interviewer get away without asking them. For an author who’s used alter ego to advantage,  Roth is presenting himself in a way we doubt is really him.  Way to play it!

If Roth’s claim that he no longer reads fiction is the article’s attempt at something resembling sensationalism  — “I read other things: history biography…I wised up”– the rest is something so predictable that I predict you’ll be bored. What is interesting is the journalist’s hand wringing about the author’s reputation and love of privacy. She can’t believe  he’s being nice. “As we talk, Roth is perfectly courteous, perfectly charming, perfectly defended.” Hers is a sterling example of procrastination and out-and-out avoidance with, no doubt, a bit of hero worship as well, despite that bit at the end about feminism.

She should have slapped the guy. Just kidding.

Even more interesting are the comments that follow The New York Times “Arts Beat” blog item on Roth. People hate the man! They hate fiction!. They hate people who hate fiction! Talk about Indignation! These are exactly the kind of feelings that Roth’s been able to inspire over the last 50 years. This is why we love him. And Zuckerman, too. –Cabbage Rabbit

Just what the nemesis is in Philip Roth’s latest novel,  if there’s to be only one, isn’t clear. Polio? Certainly. But maybe it’s God. Or even our superstition and ignorance. Or life, as in mortal,  itself.

Or maybe it’s just playground instructor Bucky Cantor’s proclivity to take things too seriously, particularly when it comes to what his grandfather preached: “to stand up for himself as a man and to stand for himself as a Jew.” All this standing, complicates Bucky’s life. He cannot, like his friends, serve in the big European war because of his poor vision, a fact used later as metaphor for what Bucky can and can’t see. Standing up like a man means knowing better than those who love you, and doing things they would not have you do. Failing this once is a hard lesson. Failing it twice isn’t allowed, even when it precludes a better decision.

Nemesis is Roth’s The Plague. The inexplicable existentialism of the disease’s spread challenges the easy notion of standing up no matter the circumstances. Like Camus, Roth keeps his narrator hidden for a good part of the book, giving the story an omniscient depth that seems to sink and surface as the story progresses. Like Camus, Roth has Bucky pose questions, not to, but about God.  As in Camus, God comes up terribly cruel or missing altogether.

Bucky’s sense of duty is a source of guilt. But it is also the source of his pride. When Italian teenagers invade the playground from their neighborhood where the disease has taken up residence, Bucky stands up to their threats and washes away their spit. His need to pass on his Grandfather’s advice to the boys on the playground makes him a hero to the boys and a champion in the neighborhood. When his love seeks to draw him away to the safety of the country he first refuses.

But not for long. His fear gets the better of him and he takes a job at an upstate summer camp away from the “equatorial” heat and disease of Newark.  The experience give him both a false sense of security and new reason for fear.  He’s bothered that his  girlfriend’s younger sisters cling to him and kiss him on the mouth.  When he and his beloved take a canoe and go to an island where they can be alone, storm clouds rumble in the distance. Despite this overplay, the moments of foreshadowing are chilling against the supposed blue-skies future.

Ethnic issues  — the Italian neighborhood that the disease first over runs while the Jewish neighborhood seems, as if by God, protected — are underplayed, serving as little more than setting to the action. Placed in a time when the Holocaust was reaching its horrific zenith in Europe, the  story seems designed to contrast human and natural suffering. But despite grandpa’s urging for Bucky to stand like a Jew, the comparisons are, like God, missing.

This is some of the genius of Roth’s story and keys to a short novel. He doesn’t need to connect the dots. The reader is entirely capable. Suggestion is more than enough to make the horrors of spreading death part of the tone, part of the setting.

In other ways, Roth seems to telegraph what’s coming. Bucky’s two buddies serving bravely in Europe? Don’t ask. His frequent declarations of happiness — that memory of eating a peach with his fiance’s father  –  suggest unhappiness looms. And don’t forget those thunder clouds advancing as the two make love.

Because of these clues, when the end comes Roth is largely able to skip over it and get right to the denouement. Now Grandpa’s advice works against Bucky. He can no longer stand like a man. His own strength and beauty gone, he relies on pride to carry him forward into a future he didn’t imagine. His narrator, during a chance encounter, hears the whole story. And he, like us, can’t quite figure it out.

Roth’s tale is at once a reminder of how our fears and superstitions color our most immediate reactions and important decisions. There’s hints that an ignorance of science,  in this case, how polio is transmitted, leads to misguided anger and judgment. The ethnic and racial prejudice of the time (not so unlike the prejudice of current time) clouds understanding. There are so many of these intervening factors in the book that it’s easy to believe its title should be plural if the series didn’t already carry that name.

Despite the obvious clues where all of it is leading, Nemesis is absorbing and propulsive reading, the kind of book you want to consume in a sitting (but it will take two). Much of this is due to Roth’s craft, the smoothly consumed rhythms and phrasing as natural as a jump-rope rhyme. It’s lesson isn’t so much not to get comfortable because life has something else in store for us but, instead,  not to be so forthright and resolute because, again, life has something else in store for us.–Cabbage Rabbit

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a ghetto variation of the Faust myth. An aged man makes a deal with the devil so that he may settle with the past. Ptolemy Grey is 91 and living in an unkempt  South-Central Los Angeles apartment. He sleeps under the kitchen table, his toilet won’t flush and there’s a room populated by mice and roaches he won’t even enter. Being 91, Ptolemy has a lot to forget and his memory gives him trouble. He often can’t remember things. Often, he remembers at inopportune times.

Ptolemy is stoic about his condition. A nephew calls every few weeks to take him out to cash his pension check and buy groceries. Otherwise he’s alone, except for occasional visits from a drug-addicted woman who doesn’t mind beating up on him to get some money. When his nephew is killed in a drive-by, another less-compassionate relative stands in.

His life changes before his mind. At his nephew’s funeral, he meets Robyn, a 17-year old orphan who’s been taken in by Ptolemy’s extended family. Robyn cleans up the mess in his life and Ptolemy falls in love. “If you were twenty years older and I fifty less…” is a common refrain.

Ptolemy, forgetful as he is, is haunted by the past. Memories — often arriving as metaphor– flare up at odd moments. His life is consumed by incidents of regret; a fire in which he was helpless to save a friend, a down-home mentor, still whispering in his ear, who was hung, a beloved wife that died in his arms. The past is also treasure, the spoils of a “righteous crime” against racial injustice, hidden under his own floorboards.

With the best intentions, Robyn brings Ptolemy to a doctor who has an extreme treatment for dementia. “The Devil,” Ptolemy calls him. The Devil’s medicine ignites Ptolemy’s memory and brings fire to his veins. Without much life left, Ptolemy makes it his mission to do what he can do about those regrets as well as discover the reason for his nephew’s death.

The Rabbit’s often broken down Mosley’s novels into “detective”  (Easy Rawlins series) and “serious” genres (The Man In My Basement, The Right Mistake).  This book is a bit of both and something entirely different as well. The care that Mosley takes to create the fragile, vulnerable Ptolemy Grey is an insightful look into our own aging (and the miserable conditions we condemn them to as social programs are withdrawn). Mosley  grants glances into Ptolemy’s crippled consciousness and the distinct change it makes under the doctor’s medication. The mysteries resolved here are done with soul-searching and a little sleuthing. That Ptolemy unravels the cloth of his nephew’s “random” killing give the book a taste of Mosely’s mystery skills. The Last Days is equally touching and engaging, balanced with humor and full of personal revelation. It’s framing lessons, as Mosley so often states them, are centered on the black experience but universal in their message. The question here is not so much who can refuse the devil when he comes calling, but who can refuse love?–Cabbage Rabbit

Can a book be about so many things that it leaves readers wondering what the book is really about? That’s what novelist Malena Watrous suggests in her New York Times review of Paul Auster’s Sunset Park. Auster’s book frames classic themes — brother-against-brother, father-and-son alienation, Lolita-like attraction, fading beauty and failing endeavor — inside contemporary circumstances and a rich collection of characters.

The story is framed by the foreclosure crisis. Miles Heller, 28, works in “home preservation.” He is part of a crew that goes into abandoned South Florida real estate and clean it up so that the owners–the banks–can resell it as quickly as possible. Miles brings his camera and documents the wreckage left behind by the displaced families. The images he takes read like a litany: “…sofas, silk lingerie, caulking guns, thumbtacks, plastic action figures, tubes of lipstick, rifles, discolored mattresses , knives and forks, poker chips, a stamp collection, and a dead canary lying at the bottom of its cage.”

Miles also has a girlfriend, a bookish, 17-year-old orphan who leaves her older sisters to live with him. She does not want children, not yet, and denies his member (but nothing else) “the mommy hole.” The alternative? “The funny hole.” (Watrous, without mentioning the “funny hole,” suggests that the couple’s sexual limitations make their relationship not “fully real.” Does prudishness affect her judgment?)

In a somewhat ironic touch, Pilar, the girlfriend, suggests that The Great Gatsby was better for its narration from Nick Carraway rather than if Fitzgerald had used an omniscient narrator. Sunset Park‘s omniscient narrator looks into Miles’ mind and finds him wondering what made this young woman so different than the rest of her family. When circumstances involving Pilar’s older sisters force Miles to flee Florida, he accepts an old friend’s offer to move in to an abandoned Brooklyn house with a clan of squatters.

There, we meet Alice Bergstrom who is writing a thesis on the relationships between American men and women as mirrored in books and movies from 1945 to 1947. Another housemate, Ellen Brice, is living out the guilt of sex she had with a sixteen-year-old boy she was nanny for eight years back. Bing, the group’s rabble-roused leader, despises America’s throwaway culture and runs The Hospital for Broken Things, a mechanical metaphor for the broken lives that surround him. Then there is Miles’ father Morris, a publisher on the brink of losing his business and his current wife, and desperately seeking to reunite with his lost son.  Miles’ step-mother, an aging actress, is looking to re-establish her career, this time on Broadway.

Watrous finds  such wealth a distraction while concentrating on the book’s Lolita aspect and a certain contrary optimism that defines each of the skeins that Auster knits together. She argues with the way Auster tells his story; revolving third-person omniscience that includes little dialogue. She suggests Auster’s goal was “to write a conventionally satisfying novel while bucking many of the conventions of how to write fiction.”

May we respectfully disagree? Auster isn’t avoiding convention. He’s writing around it, his talk-deficient narrative with its psychological omniscience moves quickly across emotional territory but covers little time. It’s involving because it’s involved. Emotional because of its optimistic contrariness.

As for Watrous, you might  suspect she was writing under the influence of envy, if writers ever did such a thing. But let’s just say she doesn’t find Auster’s style to her liking.  The Rabbit likes Auster’s approach because it accelerates the narrative. The present musing speeds back and forth through time. Past events and thinking are revealed, future events anticipated. Allowing various persons to be the focus broadens the story and serves as a sort of fact-check on personal belief.

When dialogue does appear, always without quotation marks, it underscores character. When the notice eventually comes that the squatters will have to vacate, Bing’s radicalism ignites. But it isn’t hot enough to burn away his delusions. “They’ve given us notice, and now they’ll forget about us for a while. In a month or so, they’ll be back with another piece of paper, which we’ll tear up and throw on the floor again. And another time, and another time after that, and maybe even another time after that. The city marshals won’t do anything to us.”  The statement defines Bing’s entire life.

Sunset Park is a book about healing wounds and repairing lives (much attention is paid to William Wyler’s 1946 film The Best Years of  Our Lives which follows the troubles of three men returning to their women after World War II). It’s also a book about living in the moment, something Miles and Morris decide to do along the way, something Bing has always been committed to. Set against the backdrop of lost and abandoned homes, it’s a complicated piece of genius that frames timeless themes among contemporary situations. Too optimistic, as Watrous claims? Maybe she didn’t read to the end.–Cabbage Rabbit

Tom Rachman knows the newspaper business, knows it as it was and as it is. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, he’s worked as an editor for the International Herald Tribune in Paris and has been a foreign correspondent in Rome for the Associated Press. What we can’t tell from his resume, but can from his excellent first novel, is that he knows the circumstances and desperation of life in its various classes and ages.

The Imperfectionist is a cleverly interwoven series of vignettes about various people who at various times have held various positions of importance at an international paper based in Rome. Italicized sections of no more than two or three pages linking sections divide these vignettes following the brief history of the paper as it and its principals flow and ebb.  You might think of it as stories inside a story.

The longer stories follow individuals through the frustrations of their work and personal lives. A washed-up stringer in Paris struggles against his fate. An obituary writer, upset at his position in the paper and challenged at home, sets up a self-assured rival and hurdles over him.  An obsessive copy editor pursues an old lover and keeps her job despite herself. The editor-in-chief discovers her husband is having an affair and starts one with an old lover who is an official in Berlusconi’s circle only to discover that the shortcomings that doomed their relationship the first time around are still existent. A newcomer to journalism is comically manipulated by an old hand. A fired copy editor gets sweet revenge on the person who fired him in bed. Titles right out of the headlines define each of these made-for-reality TV situations.

The interweaving comes as the stories’ characters professional lives intermingle. The man the obsessive copy editor chases is the man having an affair with the editor-in chief. No one wants to be the Puzzle-Wuzzle editor and everyone denies it though it’s the feature along with the obits and culture section, that allows the paper to survive. Bean counting becomes more and more important to the paper even as individual actions have more consequences.

The most knotting is strung from the laces of Cyrus Ott and the paper’s co-founder Leo Marsh and Betty Lieb. One can not help but think of the Los Angeles Times and the Chandler family as the paper passes through generations,  from interested and competent to uncaring hands. It seems founded on a lark and finally lost in the importance of profit. As times change, the management refuses to start an online edition and  cost-cutting measures that have doomed newspapers the world over are committed for the best and worst of reasons. But the story of Cyrus and Betty and Leo is center to everything, adding a hint of mystery to its proceedings. Exactly why did this paper exist? As with many ventures in which capital is a second consideration, the answer is familiar. It was done for love.

Rachman’s understanding of the business translates into the circumstances that control his characters’ lives. The effect of deadlines on performance, both at work and at home, weigh on the writers. Copy editors don’t just correct proofs, they “deface” them.  The editor-in-chief announces at a media conference that, “news will survive, and quality coverage will earn a premium” (it’s 2004). “Actually, I can probably tell you we won’t be publishing in the same way [in fifty years], that we’ll be innovating the, just as we are now.” She claims that “radical changes are under way” and that the paper’s circulation is increasing. Of course, none of it is true.

Like any good journalist, Rachman has a way of making his sentences count. He describes one spouse in a tight, single phrase. “Nigel, an attorney at rest since they left D.C. more than two years earlier, thrives on this life: reading nonsense on the Internet, buying high-end groceries, decrying the Bush administration at dinner, wearing his role of househusband as the badge of progressive politics.” His characters, in their complaints, don’t seem to realize their privilege of living, and living well, in Rome.

At end, Rachman follows all of his characters into the future, tying up this collection of short tales in a way that makes the story whole. In a sense, it’s reassuring that their lives go on as the thing that brought them together dies. There’s an image tied to its closing, a brutal, revengeful act that underscores the imperfections of the book’s title. Like the very best journalists, Rachman finds a symbol of his telling to close his story. In it, we find sympathy where none had previously existed. –Cabbage Rabbit

This Rabbit has never quite gotten Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero to equate. We read the book when it came out in 1985. We liked it for its take on the disillusioned youth of wealthy Los Angeles. We’d been around enough to know that rich kids always have the best drugs. While these spoiled brats weren’t part of any scene we knew, we knew they existed. And we couldn’t help identify with all the name dropping of locations and situations. After all, we lived in L.A., too.

Most of our confusion came a couple years later when the movie was released. We couldn’t keep the two straight. In the movie, drugs were a plague, in the book a symptom. Julian, an unlikable character in the book, gains a bit of sympathy as played by Robert Downey Jr. in the movie  (“a talented, sad-faced clown” according to Imperial Bedrooms). In the movie he dies. In the book, he only wishes he would.

So 25 years later, with the sequel Imperial Bedrooms, our confusion is complete. It’s 20 some years past and Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, tells us they had made a movie about the book about his life. “In the book, everything about me had happened. The book was something I couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.”

Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, but not the blond screenwriter who went on to marry Blair, the girl in the book that Clay did and didn’t love, returns from New York in the sequel and is immediately plunged into a middle-aged version of his disaffected youth. Some of the old friends are there — Blair, Julian, Rip Millar, the once and future drug dealer, Trent, who has married Blair but who is still probably getting some on the side (both sides, like Blair’s father–remember? — who has since died of AIDS) — and much of the old evil. It was hard to like any of the characters in the original book, what with the snuff films and gang rape of 12-year-olds.  In the movie, Clay is a crusader of sorts and shows a bit of moral compass. In the book, he’s cold and distant. In the sequel, he is as self-serving, evil and corrupt as anyone else.

Ellis takes his two-sided characters and plunges them into intrigue, paranoia and an overall promise of no-good. Though it’s not about struggling lower class types who’ll do anything to get ahead (excluding, of course, the aspiring actresses), the book still carries the scent of noir. It’s a mystery with lots of paranoia, much easy sex and a sense of impending doom. Existential questions come in the form of , “Why am I being followed?”  or “Am I losing my mind?” or “Has someone been in my refrigerator?” In this way, Imperial Bedrooms is a much more entertaining book than its predecessor. There’s a murky plot to try and second-guess, there are femme fatales and some not so fatale as well as the feeling that no one can be trusted.  And yes, there’s plenty of drugs and alcohol and late night rendezvous. Murder raises its head right from the beginning.

Imperial Bedrooms does have something in common with the original and that’s its take on women. Women weren’t just desirable  second-class citizens in the first book. They were meat. The same is true here but with one hitch. Why does Clay lust after the mysterious Rain, what makes her become an object of hope and desire? There’s no explanation. Even her uncommonly good looks aren’t so uncommon among the uncommonly good looking. What Clay sees in her is something of a last chance even though he’s a guy who likes to take chances. Despite his attachment, she’s still an object. He never leads her to the bedroom. He “pushes” her there.

Like its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms is one-sided in its take on class. The Hollywood rich may be evil but they’re visible, unlike everyone else. The few doormen and limousine drivers here have sold their souls to someone who can afford to pay them. The only Mexicans are drug thugs. The broad mass of Los Angeles’ population doesn’t exist.  Any truly great Los Angeles novel will be focused on everyone. The rich will be the ones who move through the city invisibly, even if they are pulling the strings. The shock of Ellis’ first book was just how young these debauched privileged children were — some of middle-school age –  and how little their parents cared. It’s not so surprising that their paid-for self-absorption is still there at 40.  There’s little in the way of moral lesson to be learned in these bedrooms (yes, we’re still quoting Elvis Costello). We already know that they’re all no good. “History repeats the old conceits….”  The song Ellis’ title are pulled from — “Less Than Zero”– was inspired, Costello says, by a British fascist who “was unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s.” Sounds like Ellis’ characters at any point in either book (but not the movie). At end, we read it for the name-dropping and to see who’s left standing. Oh, and who was in the refrigerator.–Cabbage Rabbit