Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero is an historical artifact. It's also an interesting book to read after Power of the Dog and The Cartel. From producer to consumer. Both books are songs to the futility of the War on Drugs.

Artistically, Less Than Zero is a gaping wound that existed in the 1980s. It's all about nihilistic people picking at scabs and making themselves bleed over and over. Ellis nails it.

This book is empty, alienating, and perfectly communicates the rich, vapid, etc lifestyle of greater-LA in the early 80s among the Gen-X children of other horrible people. It was important to remember not to judge the book by just how much I hated the characters and environment described, but based on the author’s skill in communicating the horror.

(As a (late) Gen X person from a far more middle class and east coast upbringing, most of this is actually fairly different than how I think of “my generation”; location and social class matters at least as much as time.)

I read "Less Than Zero" when it was first published in the UK simply because it takes its title from one of my favourite Elvis Costello songs, and then I was encouraged by reading that the protagonist has a poster of the cover of a favourite Costello album, "Trust". Then... what a catalogue of empty, shallow characters leading pointlessly empty and shallow lives. Surely this was "The Horror" whispered by Conrad's Kurtz.

More than once I closed the cover in disgust as Ellis seemed to wallow in this nihilistic celebration of vacuous, alienated, consumerist culture, only to see his judgement of what he was portraying: Less Than Zero. That kept me going to the end, though it's a journey I'm content with having made just the once. It is, for show more all that, an unflinching indictment of the vapid horror that neoliberalism, in all its rampant '80s glory, leads to. show less

A relentlessly nihilistic assault, Ellis' first novel is tough, even at times impossible, to get through. There's no hope here, none. No silver linings, no chances/shots at redemption, nothing. Just a mass circling of the drain of modern american excess and the rapid dissolving of everything or even anything that can be held dear. For a lesser writer this would just be grist for very hollow poetry and attempted literary therapy. But Ellis (despite a few cliche bits here and there) creates an incredible first novel. This is bleak. Never has a book been such a quick read but so agonizing at the same time. A part of me wishes Ellis explored this theme more in his future works...but another is kind of very glad that he didn't .

Meet Clay. He's bummed. No, "bummed" is too passionate a descriptive for Clay. Clay is emotionally neutral nonstop in this flatlining naught-plot narrative; he's pathologically emotively neutral to his empty core; he'd score a big fat zero on an Emoto-Meter, if such said device existed.

Living in Beverly Hills his whole life has gotten Clay feeling blah, blase. Never having had to work for anything at all at anytime in one's life might do that to a fella. Clay's eighteen, but unlike that classic Alice Cooper song, he's eighteen and doesn't like it, even no matter now much cocaine he consumes or Valium he pops (to bring himself down from the coke), he's simply not content being so young and good looking, with a Mediterranean mansion for show more a pad (albeit his parent's posh pad), and driving a Mercedes Benz to all the Sunset Strip hot spots nightly, because, ultimately, doin' the same 'ol-same 'ol's a real drag man. It's a hard life being Clay, being wealthy, educated, possessing every perk money can buy, and yet...yet...he's so bored. He's so bored it's depressing. Ennui, Dude; ennui. Who wouldn't be inevitably bored by -- as Ellis' much loved Eagles once sang -- "everything, all the time".

Malaise. Such malaise. Malaise of the sort made famous by that fictional Russian slacker, Oblomov, way back when; only Clay's emotional/spiritual malaise is much more pharmaceutically induced, I think, than Ivan Goncharov's classic character. One can't help feeling sorry for him, for Clay (ahem, 'scuse me), especially when he sees his psychiatrist and lies to him about his bizarre sexual fantasies, because nothing, nothing really matters, just like in that classic "Bohemian Rhapsody" song. Nothing really matters except for MTV with the sound turned off and dope and Elvis Costello posters and the brand name of every pricey piece of hipster attire -- as seen in GQ and Vogue -- imaginable, and of every high end boutique and trendy dive in town. Dupar's, Privilege, Jerry Magnin, La Scala, etc., et.al.

What's Clay's family life like? His mother drinks a lot of red wine, his father, at the moment estranged from his wife, listens to Bob Seger in his convertible (sad sad) and Clay's 15 year old sister, a Galaga fanatic, can get her "own cocaine," she protests to her older brother, since Clay had just accused her of stealing a gram out of his room. Clay's 13 year old sister, confronted by the reality that Galaga is too expensive for mother to purchase and that she already, after all, owns Atari, whines mournfully that "Atari's cheap!". Sweet girls. Lovely family.

Clay's girlfriend, Blair, we learn, has been cheating on Clay while he was away at college with his best friend, Julian, an aspiring male prostitute working to pay off his heroin debt to Rip, he & Clay's drug dealer. Clay doesn't really mind though, Blair and Julian hooking-up and gettin' free-kay, since he soon sleeps with Blair anyway fresh upon his return from college, and sleeps, as well, with many other beautiful young offspring (both male and female) of Beverly Hill's finest. Clay, Blair, and Julian, in fact, sleep with literally dozens of people during a relatively short (Christmas Break) duration of time, sleeping with so many people that sometimes Clay can't recollect if he's slept with so-and-so or another. Could Clay's memory loss be associated with the early onset of Alzheimer's, or perhaps a negative consequence of his excessive marijuana consumption? I'd posit the latter.

Clay, also, I'm sure the potential reader would be delighted knowing, engages in some rather explicit, uh, mutual masturbation with this girl he's met somewhere (who knows where? an uber-cool club presumably, read the book to find out where, I mean, no, don't read the book) and since slathered lotion was involved during the mutually and doubly self satisfying process -- a pleasurable process in which Clay had to slow his own stroking-motion down some so that the two undoubtedly ohhing-and-ahhing self-lovers could climax (beautiful) simultaneously -- we learn the experience wasn't without its drawbacks, as Clay laments, "it stings when I come".

Later on, Rip, the sporty drug dealer, throws a rip-roaring coke-fest extravaganza at his plush highrise Century Blvd. condo, and shows everybody, proudly, a "snuff" movie. Grainy images, but clear enough for all in attendance to witness a "big black dude" with "this huge member" sodomize a boy and girl, then the big black dude procures an ice-pick out of nowhere (yeah! entertaining stuff, er, snuff!, go Ellis go!) and surgically inserts it deep down their ear canals. Instant (except for the victimized children's autonomous body-spasms) entertaining death. Immediate gorey gratification. That'll shock the shit out of these nihilistic cokefiends, right? Uh, no. What was the name of that Jane's Addiction album at the close of the 80s -- "Nothing's Shocking"? Exactly. Rip might as well have given his party zombies more Valium rather than a snuff flick based on their minimalist emotings of moral outrage.

Yawn.
Shrug.
Don sunglasses.
Light a cigarette.
Exhale.
Snort another line.
Another.
Pause.
Talk about that new XTC album.
Watch the exhaled smoke disappear.

"Disappear here." Disappear here's a recurring motif in Less Than Zero (gee, wonder what that could possibly signify? Bash us over the head with the not-so-subtle symbolism Bret!).

Other obvious and less than artful motifs: Asphalt, freeways, palm trees, warm Santa Ana winds (courtesy of Joan Didion), "dead end streets" as bluntly crafted metaphors for dead end lives. Dude. You were only a teenager when you wrote this? Wow, I never would have guessed! Like, totally.

Less Than Zero, iconic mid '80s teenage melodrugdrama helped pave the way for such future iconic works of Americana like "Beverly Hills 90210" and MTVs "The Real World". Thanks, Bret!

Less Than Zero is Less Than Literature, but who cares? And there's great jokes about Jews and "Orientals" in the novel too! But I'd be lying, indeed I'd be, if I said I'm not still -- STILL -- mysteriously, perversely, shamefully, sweet-sickishly, attracted to Less Than Zero like I'm a fly jonesing for some good human decomp, and Less Than Zero's the rotting husk of a maggot-laden corpse oozing amoral stench and nihilistic stink and plethora of icky sticky creepy-crawlies spreading depravity and disease upon all like me foolishly buzzing 'round the fetid carcass. So swat me somebody swat me!

Happy Birthday Bret! :-D show less

Less Than Zero is a terribly chilling book about the woe-is-me white upper class college-aged kids, spending their time partying, snorting coke and whoring themselves out. And the way Bret Easton Ellis tells it, well, it's damn right poetic.

Clay returns home for Christmas break. After spending the last four months in New Hampshire, Los Angeles seems foreign to him. Even worse, the people he knew are less friends than they are strangers. Oblivious ex-girlfriend picks up where their relationship left off. His friends are degenerate junkies. And Clay, while no different himself, begins to see himself for the first time. And the thought depresses him.

The book holds every vice in this ugly world that is glamoured up. Clay friends find it no show more big deal gang raping a twelve-year-old girl. Pimp Finn finds nothing wrong with subduing Julian into prostituting himself in order to pay back a debt. In fact, Finn even uses heroin to keep him in line. In the world Ellis created, there is no right or wrong. There's just action without consequences.

The reader feels no sympathy for Clay or the people who make up his L.A. life. Even the flashbacks of Clay's childhood bring no connection to him. Bret Easton Ellis created a masterpiece of repugnant people that readers will enjoy hating for years go come. At least for me, anyway. show less

This review probably won't be very long. Basically, this is about the general malaise of obscenely rich kids in LA who have nothing better to do with their time than do lots of drugs. This means they make lots of bizarre and illogical decisions, and some of them seem very fuzzy on the idea that all human beings are entitled to bodily integrity and not being abducted, raped and/or murdered on camera. At least the narrator isn't so bereft of ethics that he enjoys watching that, but he doesn't go to any lengths whatsoever to try to stop it either. He says things sometimes about how caring is too hard, it just makes you get hurt, so he tries not to. I'm not sure if the book is nihilistic or a denunciation of nihilism or both.

To its credit, show more the book is hard to put down – it just kind of rattles along at a consistent pace until the end, and the segments it's divided into are mostly shorter than a page each so it's really easy to do the "just one more... just one more" thing. Plus, it's really short. That doesn't make it fun to read, though. show less