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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. * The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." -- The New York Times
They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin.
Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.
Look for Bret Easton Ellis's new novel, The Shards !
Author Notes
Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California on March 7, 1964. He attended Bennington College. In 1985, at the age of 23, his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published. His other works include The Rules of Attraction (1987), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), Lunar Park (2005), and Imperial Bedrooms (2010). His most controversial book was American Psycho, a book for which he received an advance in the amount of $300,000 from Simon and Schuster, who then refused to publish the book while under attack from women's groups in regards to the content of the book. It was later made into a feature film.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Written when the author was 20, this first novel tells the story of Clay, a New Hampshire college student who returns home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation. Vignettes show Clay and his friends aimlessly traveling from party to party, doing drugs, having sex with one another. PW noted that Ellis ``brilliantly conveys this crowd's delirium as well as the lack of fulfillment they cannot remedy.'' (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
The satirical horror of Ellis's debut Less Than Zero gives the novel its seductive force TaB was introduced in 1963 as Coca-Cola's first diet drink. It used zero-calorie saccharin instead of sugar, an innovation that was intended to inspire people to indulge in carbonated sweetness without worrying about packing on the pounds. Finally, pleasure could be enjoyed without guilt, risk or penalty. Forget water - here was a soda to make life carefree. Drink TaB and you were released from mortal concern and responsibility, the ads suggested. More facetiously, commercials with skinny women sucking down TaB sold consumers the idea that drinking it would make you thin. TaB was less than zero, in this sense. I remember first seeing TaB in movies in the 80s, when the drink rose to popularity. And it appears in Less Than Zero by the 21-year-old Bret Easton Ellis, with some frequency. Appropriately, within the first several pages, we hear that Muriel, a minor character, has been admitted to hospital with anorexia. TaB's nothingness seems central to the meaningless luxuries and woes of the 80s youth generation: immunity and ineffectuality are the highest privileges of the young, beautiful and rich. Less Than Zero harnesses that ineffectuality with minimalism, compressing ennui into dread, and then into horror. Thus, it succeeds in making something out of nothing. The novel's premise is simple: Clay, an 18-year-old college freshman, returns home to Los Angeles for the winter break. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, picks him up from the airport and drives him home, where he is greeted by no one but a new housekeeper and the ripped poster of Elvis Costello on his bedroom wall. This is not LA at large, but a very specific gated land of multimillion-dollar homes, pool boys, private chefs, Lamborghinis, flawless skin, smog and diamonds, designer clothes, and narcissism so rampant it is considered the status quo. During his few weeks at home, Clay reconnects with old friends, parties, drives around, fools around with a guy and a few girls, remembers things, gets manipulated into loaning money to a friend who has to turn tricks to pay off a debt, the usual rich-kid hijinks. To say that the youths are badly behaved would be to insinuate that there are well-behaved adults chasing them with rulers. But the parents are absent, if not physically, then certainly psychically, and the attitudes of Clay's mother and father, who have broken up, are not too far from their children's - aloof, corrupted and disconnected. Everybody gossips, fucks, drives drunk. These are not the kids in the 90s teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 trying to manage social lives and please their parents with good grades. This is a higher stratum, one of derangement brought on by wealth earned in a culture where nothing is sacred. Entertainment and its exploitative industry always push consciousness into a void of indifference. Only the alchemical measures of human experience seem to relate: sex and drugs. So it is in Less Than Zero , where everybody's mom or dad is a film executive or a movie star, and their children are left to fend for themselves, with expensive cars and credit cards at their disposal. The emotional valence of Clay's delivery is stark, a voice floating along with the smog and cigarette smoke. As the reader, I align myself with him, but Ellis still gets me to wonder whether Clay is on the inside or the outside of the nothingness. Clay's is not a pragmatic soul, but has been silenced through the oppression of lovelessness in his upbringing and the culture in which his persona has developed. Teetering between two worlds - New Hampshire, where he is a student, and Los Angeles - he appears to have seen some light. Judgment cannot exist in a vacuum. For most of the novel, Clay harnesses the pacific patience of someone with nowhere better to be, no future, and no hope. But the velocity of his story - running at high speed with silent anxiety, zooming down the freeway doing 100mph on downers listening to KNAC-FM - gives the terse hollowness of the narration its driving force. How Ellis managed to give Clay's voice the tension and weirdness that make this book unstoppable is beyond me as a writer. It is the calm one feels in the seconds before a car crash, just as you see the truck approaching and it's too late to switch lanes. The impeccable timing, especially in scenes of dialogue, captures the banalities of Clay's life in a way that both disgusts me and breaks my heart. It is perhaps against the rules of the book, canned and sappy, to point out the utter lack of love in it, such is the cage around its heart. Italicised sections throughout the novel narrate more emotional times in Palm Springs before Clay's grandmother dies, and even then, the world is flat, devoid of tenderness. The past is smoke in the desert. It might haunt you, but it has no bearing on the purposelessness of your current existence. Clay has two sisters, but they, too, are part of the system of drudgery and vanity. His dad takes Clay to dinners and treats him more like an underling or a frivolous employee than a beloved son. His mother is almost invisible in her blondness. She and Clay seem to have an understanding that superficial communication avoids the painful territories of alienation and misery. As it renders the progeny of cold Hollywood elites as hot-bodied consumers and posers in a pantomime version of their greedy, aloof parents - snorting coke, doing lunch, getting drinks at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills hotel - Less Than Zero satirises a world that feels emblematic of the ills of 1985, but also intensely personal. The lens of the narrator feels close to the author's. Perhaps that is my projection as a reader, one I make to explain how a voice so unaffected in its delivery could make my heart crash: I so badly want this world to be tethered to something real, to be the scratches on the prison walls, and for those marks to be rich with meaning. Expert satire functions this way; despite the straight read, we still identify and comprehend. It is not just a criticism of the world, but a full experience of it. With a little digging, I learn that Ellis's parents split in 1982. One must wonder how autobiographical the novel really is. Not that it would change its impact, but the intimate knowledge of such a niche sphere of life raises the question. I can only imagine the alienation this literary prodigy felt in a world that commodified art as entertainment designed to make us slaves of fashion and attitudes, to work hard to buy the right cars, date the right people, imbibe non-nutritive soft drinks, zone out in front of the TV. Only a bright young person can look at the contemporary world and see where it's going, unhinged from the static of the past. One political reading is to say the book functions as a condemnation of the evils of media. Los Angeles is a factory of illusion. It manufactures illusions, and creates an illusion around that making. Hollywood, which looks like shimmering magic from afar, is a complex system of egomaniacal executives responsible for feeding the masses narrative media, those box office hits we celebrate as the expressions of our cultural identity. Having grown up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, Ellis would perhaps have experienced this culture first-hand. Less Than Zero was published in 1985, the same year TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by Hezbollah, the US version of the Nintendo Entertainment System came out and the Unabomber killed his first victim. Life-insurance companies began screening for HIV. The CD-Rom was introduced. Ronald Reagan, a former actor deeply entrenched in corrupt Hollywood politics, was US president. The economic collapse of the middle class was romanticised in Hollywood for great profit, selling the trappings of suffering back to the people living the real deal with no exit strategy but their own eyes and ears fixed to their screens and radios. And to think, these were more innocent times! Decades later, with Trump in office, it seems that when there is an entertainer in the White House, our culture descends into indecency - we lose track of what we mean by "humanity". Someone who is used to swallowing blindly whatever is served will never understand subtlety - this is why Less Than Zero was so controversial The concept comes up only in the context of pain and death. Meanwhile, the division between art and entertainment becomes wonderfully clear. Entertainment is fodder for the masses, something to keep them busy and shopping while the world dies. Hollywood capitalises on misery by canning culture and feeding it to us spoonful by spoonful. Art, by contrast, is critical of the system of brainwashing, dehumanising, consumerism and greed. The difference between sincerity and satire is in the eye of the beholder. Someone with critical thinking can detect satire. Someone who is used to swallowing blindly whatever is served will never understand subtlety. I think this is why Less Than Zero was so controversial. The end of the book is the product of so much indifference. There is a dead kid in an alley who Clay's friends make into a spectacle, a 12-year-old sex slave drugged and tied to a bed. Clay, initially running on the fumes of his habituated high-school patterns, begins to see his way out of the fog by the end of the novel. It's the shock of the dead kid or the 12-year-old, or it's his self-disgust as a participant in passivity. The ambiguity is precise. Subtlety is necessary to satire, but is not prized in the US. We value outgoingness, aplomb, direct attacks and celebrations. We favour straight arrows over innuendo. This is a weakness. Satire is the most difficult mode in literature because it functions with a delicate, invisible layer of self-awareness - which readers often lack. An insensitive reader of Less Than Zero might think, "Well, that was disturbing," and point to the moments of vivid exploitation as "inappropriate" and "wrong". Such a reading does not appreciate the incredible timing, restraint, and synchronicity in the writing, nor the fact that these "inappropriate" scenes are actually a direct reflection of reality. We often refuse to acknowledge the ugliness in ourselves and in our world, out of shame or vanity. The generative experience of reading this book is that of staring at a portrait of the human world - LA is its costume - for long enough to see through the facade. The underbelly is always dark, but that darkness isn't what's so interesting. It's what the darkness is obscuring - a blank place unmarred by romanticism and sentimentalism, the hard truth. It is invisible because it is true. One must detach from the mundane activities of life to see this blankness, this freedom. This is the beauty of Less Than Zero . The quiet transparency of existential terror is precisely what blew my mind. I am not horrified by a 12-year-old girl drugged and tied to a bed while getting gang-raped. I'm horrified by the silence around it. If this book is an existential satire, its premise is that the world is hell disguised as paradise.
Kirkus Review
The over-familiar emptiness and super-decadence of L.A.--witnessed, this time around, by a very young semi-outsider. Clay is 18, home for Christmas break from college in New Hampshire. And he quickly finds himself in the swim of life such as it is in his circle: movie-industry parents, ubiquitous cocaine, Valium, MTV, bisexuality, anorexia, Mercedes cars--and a daily round of numbing, inconsequential acts. (""I don't think anyone is up yet and I notice that my mother's door is closed, probably locked. I walk outside and dive into the pool and do twenty quick laps and then get out, towel myself off dry as I walk into the kitchen. Take an orange from the refrigerator and peel it as I walk upstairs. I eat the orange before I get into the shower and realize that I don't have time for the weights. Then I go into the room and turn on MTV really loud and cut myself another line and then drive to meet my father for lunch."") After these vacant days, the nights are devoted to partying: the in-group gatherings sometimes involve the screening of snuff films; on one occasion an actual murder-mutilation occurs. So, though Clay does do some running with a crowd that is into male prostitution (to support drug-habits), he eventually backs away from all the sub-zero sleaziness. Throughout, first-novelist Ellis and narrator Clay register everything here with utter coolness: there is no inflection, no viewpoint; you're supposed to simply sponge up all the horror. Unfortunately, however, the effect is one of overkill--like a Soviet propaganda film about the murderous effects of too much wealth. And you never experience revulsion, only eventual boredom. In sum: a flat Cook's tour of kiddie-depravity in Lotusland--with a pounding beat, no zing, and only some marginal voyeur-interest for the insatiably curious. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered the 1egs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which had looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue T-shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge rather than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blair's car. All it comes down to is that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge. Blair drives off the freeway and comes to a red light. A heavy gust of wind rocks the car for a moment and Blair smiles and says something about maybe putting the top up and turns to a different radio station. Coming to my house, Blair has to stop the car since there are these five workmen lifting the remains of palm trees that have fallen during the winds and placing the leaves and pieces of dead bark in a big red truck, and Blair smiles again. She stops at my house and the gate's open and I get out of the car, surprised to feel how dry and hot it is. I stand there for a pretty long time and Blair, after helping me lift the suitcases out of the trunk, grins at me and asks, "What's wrong?" and I say, "Nothing," and Blair says, "You look pale," and I shrug and we say goodbye and she gets into her car and drives away. Nobody's home. The air conditioner is on and the house smells like pine. There's a note on the kitchen table that tells me that my mother and sisters are out, Christmas shopping. From where I'm standing I can see the dog lying by the pool, breathing heavily, asleep, its fur ruffled by the wind. I walk upstairs, past the new maid, who smiles at me and seems to understand who I am, and past my sisters' rooms, which still both look the same, only with different GQ cutouts pasted on the wall, and enter my room and see that it hasn't changed. The walls are still white; the records are still in place; the television hasn't been moved; the venetian blinds are still open, just as I had left them. It looks like my mother and the new maid, or maybe the old maid, cleaned out my closet while I was gone. There's a pile of comic books on my desk with a note on top of them that reads, "Do you still want these?"; also a message that Julian called and a card that says "Fuck Christmas" on it. I open it and it says "Let's Fuck Christmas Together" on the inside, an invitation to Blair's Christmas party. I put the card down and notice that it's beginning to get really cold in my room. I take my shoes off and lie on the bed and feel my brow to see if I have a fever. I think I do. And with my hand on my forehead I look up with caution at the poster encased in glass that hangs on the wall above my bed, but it hasn't changed either. It's the promotional poster for an old Elvis Costello record. Elvis looks past me, with this wry, ironic smile on his lips, staring out the window. The word "Trust" hovering over his head, and his sunglasses, one lens red, the other blue, pushed down past the ridge of his nose so that you can see his eyes, which are slightly off center. The eyes don't look at me, though. They only look at whoever's standing by the window, but I'm too tired to get up and stand by the window. I pick up the phone and call Julian, amazed that I actually can remember his number, but there's no answer. I sit up, and through the venetian blinds I can see the palm trees shaking wildly, actually bending, in the hot winds, and then I stare back at the poster and then turn away and then look back again at the smile and the mocking eyes, the red and blue glasses, and I can still hear people are afraid to merge and I try to get over the sentence, blank it out. I turn on MTV and tell myself I could get over it and go to sleep if I had some Valium and then I think about Muriel and feel a little sick as the videos begin to flash by. Excerpted from Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
