‘Less Than Zero’ by Bret Easton Ellis
This was not my first time reading Less Than Zero. I believe it may have been my second or perhaps my third, either way, it never loses its disturbing lo-fi magic, nor does it ever get tired or tedious. I may be somewhat biased, for Bret Easton Ellis is my favourite living writer, but those new to his work should take heed - Less Than Zero is the best place to start, both tonally and chronologically.
The 195-page novel, named after a song by Elvis Costello, was published in 1985 when Ellis was just twenty-one years old and still a student at Bennington College in Vermont. The novel's reception was one of equal parts shock and adulation: shock at the depiction of mid-1980s Los Angeles as a bloody, sweltering wasteland, and adulation due to how dextrously a college student was able to write about such dark subject matter. With the release of Less Than Zero Bret Easton Ellis made millions and became infamous both within the literary world and beyond - events relayed by Ellis (somewhat exaggeratedly, one assumes) in Lunar Park, his hallucinatory memoir published in 2005.
Less Than Zero is really a remarkable novel; it emotes without being overwrought, it shocks without being crass, and it somehow communicates morals without being self-righteous. The characters, most of whom have flat monosyllabic names - Blair, Rip, Spin, Trent - exist in a world of apathy and absentee parents, and Clay, the protagonist, is at the centre of it all and yet somehow detached at the same time. The story is set over a decidedly un-festive Christmas vacation when Clay comes home from New Hampshire where he attends the fictional Camden College. This imagined institution provides the setting for Ellis' second novel, 1987's The Rules of Attraction. This is another reason I love Bret Easton Ellis - his books are all linked in one way or another.
Clay's Christmas vacation begins unremarkably. His room looks exactly as it did when he left it, his parents are as indifferent as ever, and the days fly by in the standard blur of parties, cocaine, and assorted prescription drugs. The shindigs in Less Than Zero are not what you might expect - there is no dancing on tables or raiding of parents' liquor cabinets. No sir, the parents in question are closeted big shot fathers and their catatonic ex-wives, and the parties are usually theirs. No-one seems to enjoy these parties, least of all the narrator himself.
The plot thickens somewhat when Ellis introduces a bittersweet backstory that involves Clay remembering his late grandmother and the good times they shared in Palm Springs before she died of pancreatic cancer. He reminisces about the time he and his sometime girlfriend Blair went to Pajaro Dunes in Monterey and walked in the surf. Soon the dark secrets of the world around him are revealed: he discovers that his old friend Julian is being whored out to out-of-town businessmen in order to pay off his drug-related debts; he goes to parties where sadistic snuff films are shown on big screens; he and Blair hit and kill a coyote while cruising a treacherous stretch of Mulholland Drive. The novel's final passage is stark but beautiful, probably one of my favourite endings to any work.
So why do I love this book so much, and what possessed me to read it again? I suppose the latter question is more easy to answer: I lent my original copy of Less Than Zero to a former boyfriend back in the spring, and in spite of several diplomatic requests for the book to be returned it was not forthcoming. I decided to cut my losses and buy a replacement copy, and in doing so I gave myself a good excuse to give it another read. I love this book primarily because of its simplicity. What Ellis has included is often as crucial as what he has chosen to leave out. The lucidity of his writing makes the work of other writers seem staid and wordy by comparison. If you have not yet read Less Than Zero, now is the time.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in December 2011.