Less Than Zero

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

What can I say about this book that wasn’t said while I was still in diapers? Probably nothing, but I’ll still give you my opinion.

Less Than Zero usually gets compared to Catcher in the Rye, but the book I always think of while reading it is Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. In both books, the characters wander around like ghosts, imbibing various chemicals (alcohol in Hemingway and drugs in Ellis) to either give themselves the illusion that they’re still alive or to numb the pain of being alive (I still haven’t decided which). There is such a sense of despair to both books that after reading them I always feel empty.

Even though I find no joy in its pages, I still find myself re-reading Less Than Zero at least once a year. show more Perhaps out of a desire for catharsis? Anyway, I highly recommend. For added pleasure, try reading it over Christmas. show less

The classic elements of the Bret Easton Ellis oeuvre are all here, present and correct: the short, snappy prose; the drugs; the name-dropping; the absence of humanity; the absence of characters you would ever want to meet in real life. Having recently read a bit of Bukowski, I'd say that there's a continuum at play here - going from 'Post Office' to 'Less Than Zero', it's like reading first the father and then the son. 'Less Than Zero' is still Ellis at his formative stage, and it lacks the plot-panache of, say, 'The Rules of Attraction,' but it's a quick read and very disturbing towards the end. You really do feel like you're being sucked down into a black hole of human antipathy.

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

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I came of age in the first half of the 1980s, which means that I was heavily influenced in my youth by things like punk music and performance art, right there at the time in everyone's life when their brain is still relatively empty but especially hungry for input, making the arts more influential to us at that point than at maybe any other time in life. And definitely one of the authors back then I was enamored with was Bret Easton Ellis, whose first two novels (1985's Less Than Zero and 1987's The Rules of Attraction) were veritable anthems to show more me and my art-school undergraduate friends; and so when it was announced earlier this year that Ellis' newest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, would be a direct sequel to Less Than Zero on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, you better believe that I excitedly put it on reserve at my local library so that I wouldn't have to wait long for it, and added Less Than Zero to that reserve as well, since it had been literally decades since I had read it last. And that turned out to be a very good idea, something I encourage you to do as well if you're going to read the newer title; because it not only provided a refresher course on the events of the first book, which you will absolutely need in order to fully enjoy the sequel, but reminded me all over again of why my friends and I found it so culturally disruptive in the first place, and why the work of people like him and his contemporaries Jay McInerney and Eric Bogosian spoke so passionately to us to begin with.

Both are set in Los Angeles, respective to their times, and are both told through the eyes of our passive everyman hero Clay, who is widely assumed in the first book to be a stand-in for Ellis himself, but with the Clay in the second book mentioning Ellis by name and claiming that he was simply another hanger-on in their scene, and who distorted a whole series of truths in the original to make for a better story; and indeed, this is an early sign of exactly how Ellis has changed as a writer in the last quarter-century, in that with each new title he has grown more and more metafictional, and more and more interested in blurring the line between fiction and real life, an idea that existed in only a rough, unpolished form in his early work. Because to be sure, whether you love it or hate it, the '85 Less Than Zero is clearly a case of style over substance, with a storyline so insubstantial that it barely exists -- teenage children of Hollywood film executives party their way to oblivion, basically, completely unmoved emotionally by any of the monstrous ways they treat each other, their lives utterly defined by fashion labels, mountains of cocaine and unspoken bisexuality -- with it not being until later novels that Ellis grew out of this fog of flashy, empty Postmodernism, and started applying better and better metaphorical points to his work. (And in fact, in what's easily a career highlight, this new novel opens with a brilliant chapter in which the Less Than Zero characters discuss their reaction to seeing the very real 1987 Less Than Zero movie, a notorious flop starring such "Brat Packers" as Andrew McCarthy, James Spader and Robert Downey Jr., with an infamously mauled screenplay that turns the entire thing into a hysteria-filled Reagan-Era anti-drug screed, one that literally kills off one of the major characters as punishment for him having too much fun.)

So why did my friends and I react so intensely to this back then, given that it was essentially the literary equivalent of MTV? Well, that might be your answer right there; that when I look back on it with unbiased eyes, I realize that the youth of the early '80s were clamoring for an alternative to the funky, earthy, always deep and always morally convoluted counterculturalism that had defined the arts since the early '70s, the same compulsion back then that brought about the moral absolutes of Reaganism and the crisp style of preppie fashion that occurred in the same years. It's easy now to see all this as signs of the disaster the last 30 years of American history has been, but back then this yearning for style over substance was seen as a relatively original and benign idea, in many ways simply a response to the "culture of malaise" that Jimmy Carter and his supporters had created in this country by the late '70s, in which there were no more good guys or bad guys but rather this murky gray muddle in the middle, and where every aspect of our lives was expected to be endlessly discussed to death in the shag-carpeted offices of therapists and family counselors. No wonder my friends and I were screaming so loudly those days for empty, pretty things, despite not really understanding why until decades later, and no wonder that we were simultaneously attracted in those years to such seemingly clashing concepts as, say, DIY hardcore music and capitalist consumerism as lifestyle.

This is possibly the most interesting thing about Imperial Bedrooms, then; that after a first half of exploring the long-term fallout of these '80s characters, now middle-aged and most of them involved in Hollywood just like their parents were, the story quickly turns into a straightforward contemporary noir with light supernatural touches (or at least a heavily creepy vibe that pervades the entire thing), with a plot that much more tries to make an actual point than the '85 original did. And like I said, this is simply a reflection of where Ellis' entire career has gone in the last 25 years; because for those who don't know, the second half of Ellis' oeuvre is marked by book after book featuring creepy vibes, violent details and supernatural subtones. (1994's The Informers, for example, is about contemporary vampires; 1991's infamous American Psycho is about a serial killer; and then there's my favorite Ellis novel of them all, 1998's Glamorama, which is perhaps about a New York club promoter who stumbles across a nefarious ring of supermodels who moonlight as bomb-planting terrorists, or might possibly be about a man having a mental breakdown without realizing it right in front of our eyes, with us not entirely sure which is the case until the very last chapter.)

And indeed, Imperial Bedrooms features all of these types of elements too, an increasingly gruesome story that eventually enfolds an underground call-girl ring, mysterious torture-filled deaths in the Mexican desert, and a main character who ends up being not nearly what he seems at first. And that can be a little frustrating, to tell you the truth, which is why it's not getting a higher score today, because by its end the book can often feel not like a sequel at all, but rather a completely unrelated tale that just happens to steal the names of the Less Than Zero characters. But on the other hand, maybe this is the perfect way for a sequel by Bret Easton Ellis to feel, since it so exactly mirrors Ellis' own role in literary history -- one of the last big writers of the Postmodernist Era, expressly by taking the hallmarks of Postmodernism and pushing them to cartoonish extremes, but who has reinvented himself in our post-9/11 "Age of Sincerity" into a writer with a lot more to say, and who in good 2000s style uses the trappings of genre fiction in an inventive new way in order to bring his message to the masses. It has its problems for sure, and I suspect won't appeal nearly as much to those who aren't already long-term fans of Ellis like I am; but for those like me whose adult lives have mostly been defined so far by the snotty irony and empty pop-culture of Postmodernism, and now find themselves wondering just how to feel about the world in our new Obamian Age of emo and authenticity, a lively and instructive reading experience awaits you with these two books. It's for all of you that Imperial Bedrooms is specifically recommended today.

Out of 10: 8.6 show less

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' show more 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. show less