Being Bret Easton Ellis

Being Bret Easton Ellis must be a difficult thing. You have to carefully balance being the misunderstood satirist with the whole 'voice of a generation' schtick on two heavily-styled shoulders.

The must-have ticket for this year's London Literature Festival is to see Bret Easton Ellis in conversation with Suzi Feay about his new book Imperial Bedrooms, with an audience Q&A to follow. The last time he was in the UK was for the crazed Lunar Park so appearances on these shores are few and far-between. This is why the Queen Elizabeth Hall is entirely sold out, with people sat in the aisles, for an author no less. Sat near the front, I gaze back and up into the rafters, aisles and aisles of potential Patrick Batemans, potential Clays and potential Blairs, all enraptured with this short, slightly nervy man.

He arrives promptly, a blazer over what appears to be his gym outfit and sits next to Suzi Feay who immediately grills him on his tweeted response to the death of JD Salinger: 'Yeah!! Thank God he's finally dead. I've been waiting for this day for-f***ing-ever. Party tonight!!' He dodges an explanation for his celebration of the passing of one of American's greats but the intention is clear: take a lot of what he says with a pinch of salt. The responses to other questions from Feay are met with a mixture of insight and throwaway gags. It is immediately clear that you can't really ask him anything new about his work that hasn't been asked endlessly before. A lot is said about the 16-20 year old Easton Ellis who worked on Less Than Zero and how different he was back then, and after revisiting old characters for Lunar Park, he found himself driving around LA and wondering whatever did happen to Clay. Having recently moved back to LA himself, Easton Ellis saw this as a beginning of a book. This book became Imperial Bedrooms.

Easton Ellis does admit to not having that many ideas or that many characters in his head, which is why the return to LA story becomes that of Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, and Imperial Bedrooms starts off as an update of that story and those characters, told in Easton Ellis' trademark satirist's eye for depravity and emptiness, before turning into an uncomfortable noir-ish ghost story. Imperial Bedrooms is seen off with an impressive reading of a drunken night-out scene from the middle, where Clay contemplates a young actress' explicit attempts to get his attention so she can be in his next movie. The lights come on and questions come from the audience.

I say Imperial Bedrooms is 'seen off' because everyone wants to ask Easton Ellis a question about American Psycho. Imperial Bedrooms not mentioned again this evening.

The questions range from the shallow: 'Do you have a business card and can you describe it to me?' (which gets the 'You're a funny guy' dismissal) to the profound: 'Critics have compared you to Jean Baudrillard. What do you think of the comparison?' (which gets the 'You're a funny guy' dismissal). Easton Ellis soon tires of answering questions conventionally and instead embarks on a long appreciative treatise on the first three seasons of MTV reality show, The Hills before, he tells his biggest London-based fans, 'Lauren Conrad left. It really went downhill.' He comes alive talking about the show and gets nervous laughs from an audience not knowing whether he's being serious or not. The beauty with Easton Ellis is it doesn't matter. Does the reality make his writing any less boring? Interestingly, this is also the response he puts down a question about misogyny in his writing with. Does the reality of his misogyny make his writing any less boring?

We're left with a final insightful question where a nervous girl compares him to bands who have been performing since they were young, meaning that touring is all they know. Seeing as he has been famous since his early twenties and writing Less Than Zero since he was 16, does he find his work too self-referential or can he relate to or even write about the everyman? The question is lost in a sea of humour and moments later Bret Easton Ellis takes his leave, to do a book-signing that amounts to a road-block, and we find ourselves fully entertained but in the process having not penetrated anymore the tough surface of who Bret Easton Ellis actually is.