Book Review: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
In Beverly Hills, you can have anything your heart desires. You just can’t have it the way it used to be.
Having read it twice, this novel is one of my all-time favorites for several reasons. The biggest reason being Ellis’s signature writing style: extremely minimalist, describing graphic or dark content in an off-putting, understated fashion.
Ellis’s debut novel, this masterpiece of transgressive fiction was written throughout his high school and college years and published when Ellis was only 21 years old. The novel’s critical success propelled Ellis to fame at an early age. A young adult in the 1980s at the time of its publication, Ellis was subsequently considered a prominent voice in the up-and-coming “MTV Generation”. Bret Easton Ellis would later come into literary superstardom after the highly controversial publication of his most infamous book, American Psycho.
Drawing inspiration from Ellis’s own youth in southern California (but totally not autobiographical, he insists), Less Than Zero offers a glimpse into the bleak world of Hollywood’s trust fund kids during a decade of excess. The images used in this review are from the loosely adapted film Less Than Zero starring a young Robert Downey Jr.; despite the major differences from the book, I’ve heard it’s not a bad movie, but I still have yet to see it.
Told in first-person narration, Less Than Zero follows Clay, a freshman returning home to his wealthy family and friends in Los Angeles after his first semester away at a college on the east coast. The book’s opening passage offers a subtle metaphor as insight into what’s to come:
“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 she 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.
Between reuniting with old friends, avoiding his callous family, fruitless sessions with his self-absorbed therapist, and half-heartedly attempting to rekindle his relationship with his high school sweetheart, Clay spends his Christmas break trying to reconnect with his old best friend, Julian. Despite their strong friendship growing up, Clay and Julian gradually fell apart after graduation until finally losing touch with each other altogether while Clay was away at college. However, upon his return, Julian’s elusive behavior leaves Clay constantly just out of reach.
“But this road doesn’t go anywhere,” I told him.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“What does?” I asked, after a little while.
“Just that we’re on it, dude,” he said.”
During the novel, its apparent that Clay doesn’t care much for his recently divorced parents or two younger teenage sisters. In between chapters recounting his nights of wild partying are flashbacks in which Clay fondly remembers a family vacation; contrasted with Clay’s sentimental memories is the dark implication that Clay was the only member of the family who seemed to care that his grandma was dying of cancer at the time.
What the family lacks in emotional connection, they make up for in their immense wealth and material possessions. Having all grown up under Hollywood families, all of Clay’s social circle enjoys similar privilege. Clay and his friends are not hesitant to drop lump sums on booze, cocaine, and other drugs. In fact, most of Clay’s social life revolves around drug-fueled partying at mansion parties or swanky clubs, followed by hook-ups with both men and women.
Some of the friends we meet include Blair, Clay’s high school sweetheart who refuses to let their relationship die; there’s also Trent, another former classmate who’s now found success as a model; and finally there’s Rip, who forwent college, living off his trust fund and maintaining his lavish lifestyle selling cocaine. There’s several other minor characters in their friend group, most of whom are ultimately inconsequential, but they all follow the same mold: shallow, rich, vain, and completely amoral.
Amorality gradually gives way to callousness and ruthlessness. Clay remains a passive witness to the cruel narcissism of everyone around him. Each night of partying grows more barbaric. An old friend continually asks if anyone has any meth. A friend of Blair’s is hospitalized for anorexia. News of old acquaintances fatally overdosing is reduced to nonchalant passing comments during conversation. Another girl shoots heroin while the rest of the party jokes and takes Polaroid photos of her drooling, half-conscious body. Looking for Julian, Clay visits a house where very young boys come to party with older men. When Trent shows the party a pornographic snuff film, Clay and Blair are the only ones disgusted by the party-goers’ casual attitude to such graphic content. Clay and his friends step into the alley behind a club to observe a dead body. Surrounded by this chaos, Clay requires more and more cocaine to cope with the insanity of it all, eventually suffering chronic nosebleeds.
“Disappear Here.
The syringe fills with blood.
You’re a beautiful boy and that’s all that matters.
Wonder if he’s for sale.
People are afraid to merge. To merge.”
All the while, Clay grows increasingly confused about Julian. Playing phone-tag, yet never reaching him, it seems Julian may be avoiding Clay. At one point, Julian agrees to meet with Clay, but never shows. Whenever Clay asks his other friends about Julian, he’s given a series of vague, cryptic responses which seem to suggest no one else has seen much of Julian lately either. In the bathroom at a chic club, Clay sees graffiti stating that Julian is dead.
The two only reunite when Julian actively seeks out Clay, needing his urgent help. Finally, they meet up and Julian asks Clay for a large sum of money. Claiming he needs the money to pay for an abortion, Clay sees right through the lie and agrees to lend Julian the money on the condition he tells him the truth. Again, Julian swears that it’s for an abortion, showing just how fractured their friendship has become.
When Julian invites Clay to meet up in order to pay him back, they go together to see a man named Finn. Suddenly, things start to come together for Clay. Listening to Julian and Finn talk, Clay’s deepest suspicions are confirmed. After accruing a large debt due to his cocaine habit, a desperate Julian was forced to turn to Finn for help. Backed into a corner with no one for help, Finn manipulated Julian into turning tricks as a prostitute for him in order to pay off his debt. Charismatic in a sleazy sort of way, Finn is physically and sexually abusive toward Julian, and their ambivalent dynamic is actually a fairly realistic portrayal of the toxic love-hate relationship between pimps and prostitutes.
Always the passive observer, Clay’s morbid curiosity prevents him from leaving the situation. On the verge of tears, Julian begs Finn to pay back Clay and also to let him off the hook, having now fully repaid his debt. Finn seems more willing to pay Clay back than to let Julian out from under his thumb. Finn makes a proposition: one last job for Julian and then afterwards Clay will get his money and Julian will be in the clear. However, the only catch is that both Clay and Julian have to go see this client — he’s requested to have someone else present to watch while he has sex with Julian. Clay simply agrees, wanting to see if the worst is actually possible.
They meet the client at his hotel and Clay suffers through several agonizing hours, slumped in a chair, forced to watch his childhood best friend reduced to a drug addicted sex slave having sex with older men out of pure desperation. Afterwards, they go to meet Finn at a house party where Finn is eager to introduce Julian to everyone, going back on his promise that the debt would be forgiven. Clay walks in on a horrific sight: a hysterical, terrified Julian manhandled by Finn, then forcibly injected with heroin, rendering him docile and compliant with Finn’s demands.
Upon seeing this, Clay leaves and heads to his dealer, Rip’s, house. Unfortunately, he’s stumbled into an even more gruesome scenario: Rip shows Clay and Trent a 12 year old girl he’s been keeping drugged and tied down to his bed. Shockingly, Trent is aroused. Repulsed, Clay storms out.
“But you don’t need anything. You have everything,’ I tell him.
Rip looks at me. ‘No I don’t.’
‘What?’
‘No I don’t.’
There’s a pause and then I ask, ‘Oh, shit, Rip, What don’t you have?’
‘I don’t have anything to lose.”
In a final date with Blair before returning to school, Clay is forced to admit that he doesn’t love her anymore and maybe never did at all. He tells her, “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.”
By the end of his winter vacation, Clay has grown totally alienated to everyone and everything around him. His disillusionment extends beyond his friends and family, personified onto the entire city itself. Readers are left feeling just as empty and disturbed as Clay.
“The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.”
Less Than Zero explores the dark side of wealth and luxury. All the characters are rich beyond comprehension, having everything they could ever want, which drives them sheer excess and increasing depravities. While Clay doesn’t shoot heroin or watch snuff pornography, he’s desensitization is expressed in a different way: rather than needing to engage in a deranged brand of recreation, his numbness results in his willful (albeit, passive) participation in the destruction of his childhood best friend. After all is said and done, Clay is so removed from it all, that the only thing he wants is to go back to school and get as far away from everyone in Los Angeles as possible.
I highly recommend this book, repeating that it is one of my favorites. It’s relatively short, and both of my times reading it I finished it in around three hours. If you love the 80s, you’ll definitely enjoy Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.