Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

The month is July, and that means that the book under discussion is Imperial Bedrooms,

Brett Easton Ellis's sequel to Less Than Zero.

My name is Troy Patterson.

I'm a critic writing about television and such here.

And today I am joined by Stephen Metcalf, Slate's Critic at Large.

Stephen.

Troy, thank you.

And our third is Slate editor Michael Agar.

Hello.

So we've got two books under discussion here, both the new book, Imperial Bedrooms, and the classic, we'll call it. We'll start out by calling it a classic and then decide if we're going to demote it in the course of this discussion, less than zero. Steve, you were just perhaps bemoaning during soundcheck that you're perhaps struggling in the middle of writing a

Brettson Ellis piece? That's right, Troy. I'm supposed to write something about the new book

in relation to the old book, and I'm writing a book about the 1980s, and so this would apparently

be directly in my wheelhouse, hit it out of the park, knock out 1800 words, and go hit the

links at 3 p.m.

And I find myself struggling over it.

The truth is, there isn't an easy way in which I apprehend these books as debased and awful.

I certainly don't see them as clearly meritorious or literary.

I'm having all the troubles I think one has with Brett Easton Ellis,

that Brett Easton Ellis himself has with Brett Easton Ellis, which is this, you know, it's very

hard to fix his place in the literary firmament. It's very hard to pin down exactly what the

purpose of these books is and what's being accomplished by them. I think the origins partially are in

...