Less Than Zero
By Bret Easton Ellis
Simon & Schuster, 208 pages, 1985.
Clay. Blair. Trent. Rip. Julian. These, to anyone who was a bit of a bookworm in the mid-1980s aren’t simply names, they’re people. Well, not real people exactly. But characters in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero.
Set in Los Angeles, the story follows Clay, who has returned from his east coast college life to visit over Christmas break. He meets up with his ex-girlfriend, Blair, and his messed-up, often drug-addled pals. He moves from shop-to-shop, party-to-party in a daze of meaninglessness. Everyone is rich. No one is happy. It’s all very shallow.
It’s also spectacularly entertaining. Re-reading the book recently I was struck by how Ellis’s spot-on voice of disaffected youth stands up and contrasts with the typical whine or long-windedness of so many of today’s youth-oriented books. The characters may be shallow, but they’re so well-drawn using such spare writing, Less Than Zero stands up almost 30 years on.
I read the book when it was first published. There was much fanfare at the time and Ellis (along with contemporaries Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, et al.) were media darlings, frequently being snapped for the hipster social pages in Details and posing for liquour ads. To me, a 15-year-old Canadian girl growing up in the suburbs, Clay’s life in Less Than Zero seemed empty and sad (but still delicious to read about, judge and feel superior to), but the life of a freewheeling New York novelist looked pretty good.
Ellis was the first writer I read who was even close to my own age and whom I read about as well. Revisiting Less Than Zero brought all that back — the teenage voyeurism and aspiration, the thrill that fiction can prompt and the imagination it inspires. Picking it up again, it’s almost as though I never put it down.
