Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage Books
Pages: 208
Rating 5/5 Stars
Less Than Zero is one of those books that
I don’t know how to rate because its worth can’t be measured in simple terms of
‘good’ or ‘bad.’ It’s one that I don’t know how to recommend to friends because
I can’t tell them that they’ll enjoy it, but I still think it should be read. What
I can say without equivocation is that it is effective.
Immensely effective.
Less Than Zero is the second book by Bret
Easton Ellis that I’ve read and while American Psycho was a
thought provoking and often shocking experience, I think Less Than
Zero is the better of the two and to really explain what Ellis does
so well with the latter, I’m going to have to compare it to the former.
From reviews I’ve read of American
Psycho, the message and meaning of the book was lost on some because
of the extreme violence perpetrated by the main character. I’d argue that they
were idiots for expecting anything different from a book with the word ‘psycho’
in the title, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact remains that Ellis’s
commentary on the completely shallow and soul-sucking world of Wall Street/the
quest for the ‘American Dream’ in the 80s fell on deaf ears of those who
couldn’t handle the visceral images he described. I would fault him for
embracing the shock value so hardcore that it muddied his message if I didn’t
think that that was at least half of the point.
In
Less Than Zero, however, Ellis uses a
different tactic to get his point across and in so doing demonstrates his
talent as a writer. Where American Psycho was frenetic and
dense with the inner monologue of the main character, Less Than
Zero is sparse and detached. It’s a quick read at just 208 pages,
some consisting of nothing but back and forth dialogue with minimal
description.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
The main character of Less Than Zero is
Clay, a Beverly Hills rich kid who can’t relate to anything or anyone. It’s not
that he doesn’t fit into his world, it’s that he’s lost the ability to be
affected by it, to feel anything. Ellis presents us with a
litany of causes – drugs, money, absentee parents, the glossy, flashy, shallow
world in which he exists – but no one thing is the culprit for Clay’s
state-of-being.
It’s just the way it is.
Ellis gives us the impression that Clay wishes things were
different. Flashbacks to a previous summer in Palm Springs are sprinkled throughout
the narrative and the reader is left to assume that Clay wants to go back to
those supposedly better times, but those times don’t seem much better . Or
maybe those flashbacks are really about showing the reader where Clay’s
detachment and disaffectedness began.
That’s the brilliance of the book – you can take it to mean
either or both at the same time.
One of the things I appreciated the most about Less
Than Zero is that it’s not an anti-drug manifesto. While all of the
characters are generally strung out on something – one in particular is in way
over his head – Ellis doesn’t take the easy way out and claim that the drugs
alone caused the problem. Clay does too much cocaine, but there are plenty of
times where he doesn’t do any simply because he doesn’t want to. Drug use is a reaction
to the problem, not a symptom or cause of it.
Ellis’s use of words in
Less Than Zero
is just as evocative as it is in American Psycho. I felt the
desolation and detachment that Clay felt. I felt his numbness. Ellis ignores
traditional rules of grammar to great effect in his use of run ons and sentence
fragments. Clay’s life becomes a series of events that don’t affect him, they
just happen around him. He has brief moments of being scared or angry, he
describes a breakdown he has in his therapists office and again at his former
elementary school, he musters up a sense of indignation over the gang rape of
an underage girl that his friends – acquaintances, really, as he doesn’t feel
enough for any of them to really call them friends – orchestrate and he has a
sense of true horror and dread over the lengths his childhood friend Julian is
willing to go to feed his drug habit, but he doesn’t do
anything about it.
He just…continues on.
I didn’t get the impression that he doesn’t want to. He
does. I think that Clay really, really wants something to
feel different and to matter, but he doesn’t know what and he doesn’t know how
to find it and even if he did, he knows that in the end it won’t matter. It can
be lost and losing things is painful. One of the best passages in the book
comes near the end between Clay and his ex-girlfriend Blair.
“What do you care about? What makes you happy?”
“Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing,” I tell
her.
“Did you ever care about me, Clay?”
I don’t say anything, look back at the menu.
“Did you ever care about me?” she asks again.
“I don’t want to care. If I care about things, it’ll just be
worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if I don’t
care.”
The book culminates in a really horrifying day that begins
with a quest to get money back from his friend Julian. Clay witnesses the worst
of his world – Julian being pimped out to the highest bidder to cover his drug
habit, the discovery of a dead body in the alley that his friends would rather
mock and study in horrified fascination than call the cops about, and the gang
rape of a twelve year old girl that disgusts completely disgusts him. Clay has
countless opportunities to take himself out of the situation, but he doesn’t
because – as he puts it – he wants to see the worst. He wants to know if the
world can really be that dark.
It can.
What’s most striking about that day is the fact that the
book doesn’t end there. It covers a few more days of Clay’s Christmas vacation
from college and he continues to see all of the people who committed the worst
atrocities on that day and they interact as if nothing has changed.
I could go on forever, pulling examples of what I found so
fascinating about this book, but this review is already really long. I’ll leave
you with what is said on the back of my copy of the book.
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s,
Less Than Zero has become a timeless classic. The coolly
mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have
experienced sex, drugs and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped
by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a city devoid of feeling
or hope.
That is not hyperbole. That is exactly what this book is. Less
Than Zero is an experience. It’s not a book you read to escape or
relax, it’s a book that you read because you want to be moved. To be affected.
In all of the ways the main character can’t.
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