Less Than Zero (1985)

The defense I see most often of Ellis is: "You just don't get the joke." And could there be a more annoying defense? How can you even respond to that? It's meaningless.

And it's not a joke. It's satire; that's totally different.

I spent tonight arguing about Ellis with some very smart contrarians, and here's what they said: Ellis has captured the soulless Me First Generation, and their failure to connect with life, in a really effective way. He refuses his rival David Foster Wallace's edict that literature has to solve something; he insists, with merciless implacability, on simply showing it to you. No solutions, no conclusions.

They're right, and that's not valueless. Ellis has achieved something. I actually know these people - not Ellis' caricatures of them, but the real people - and I see what he's describing.

The only problem is here's the first sentence of this book: "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." This is a metaphor, I happen to know because I was an English major, and it's fucking stupid. And it's his big theme! This! People are afraid to merge! Like he's discovered some grand truth! He'll return to it like fifty times!

So. It's not a useless book. It's a decent satire of shallow pop culture sociopathy. Like Wallace, Ellis is concerned with connection: he wants us to engage with life. (To "merge," even!) Unlike Wallace, he refuses to make helpful suggestions; if you're irritated by Wallace's desperately wide-eyed sincerity, Ellis might speak to you.

But for fuck's sake, it is all awfully tedious. ( )

Impressive and thought-provoking for a first novel written by a 20-year old. It feels a little contrived or over-done at times, but is a good book. Definitely worth reading. ( )

I couldn't get the movie version out of my head and I think that affected how I felt about the novel. There are many differences, things that happen in the novel that didn't make it into the movie and vice versa. The novel seemed flat compared to the movie - it didn't get close enough to any of the characters for me to feel attached to them. In some ways, this seemed more fitting. Certainly the novel lives up to its title. The net emotional effect was "less than zero." The audio version from Audible came with a fifteen-minute interview with the author, which was interesting. He said (approximately) that many readers seemed to view the novel as a way to live vicariously through and see into the lives of these rich teenagers, when what he meant to write was something more critical about their place in society and the effects of their lives on others and themselves. I fell somewhere in between. ( )

25 years ago Less Than Zero was published by a 21 year old Bret Easton Ellis with reviews like "Oh, this is just nihilism. These people don't exist! There's nobody that rich and stupid and narcissistic!" (The New Yorker, June 1985). Reading it now, we all probably know self-destructive people like these. Less than Zero has developed a cult following and feels like you are reading a diary of a lost and unsure rich 18 year-old who come back to the destructive neighbourhood of his past. Though out the book you are unsure if Clay will even grow or learn from all this and it almost feels like he doesn’t. ( )

This book ranks a solid 3.5 stars, but I bumped it up due to the conversation about determining if he truly loved his ex-girlfriend at the end. It just helped show so much more of where Clay was coming from.

Other than that, the book can be summarized as "Everybody does everybody. And drugs." ( )