Less Than Zero [Paperback]

"Less Than Zero" is probably not going to appear on the Oprah book club selection anytime soon, but that doesn't mean it's not any good. Just the opposite. This is one edgy, fresh and disturbing novel by one of America's great author's.

Bret Easton Ellis released his "Lunar Park" as a sort of testament to his estranged father and he was bashed pretty badly for it. So one has to wonder what was on his mind when he wrote this novel. The story is basically this: Enter Clay, a college student home from New Hampshire on Christmas break. He's back on LA and starts in on the LA scene: cruising around, getting drunk, laying out to get a tan, and just general partying non-stop. Now, Ellis is edgy, and this is most apparent when he, or rather HIS character starts watching bootleg Mexican porn that involves chain saws and some other horrific incidents. It's not pretty, and the novel pull no punches in this corner. Ellis makes no apologies for this, and actually pulls it off within the context of the story. It's not just there for shock value but rather fits neatly in with the character's self-destructive mode. I was reminded at time of the novels "Running With Scissors" by Burroughs or McCrae's "Katzenjammer--Soon to be a major motion picture, with their edgy and tart keen sense of irony and persecption. "Less Than Zero" is this and much more, for Ellis takes things to a deeper level.

Now, all this said, about the plot, etc. let's talk about the writing. Reading this book made me want to become a writer, not because I thought I could do better, but because I wanted to create something this good. And here's a reason why: Nothing really much happens to transform the character in the book; nothing makes the protagonist different in the end than he was in the beginning, yet the journey was something else. And this is where the great writing comes in, for it makes the book riveting and you won't want to put it down. There's a glimmer of hope in the end of the novel and this saves the book from being a "downer," but really, you have to read this to understand what I'm talking about here.

"Less Than Zero" is not going to be for everyone, especially those easily offended, but if you're used to the likes of, say, Chuck Palanhiuk with his novel "Invisible Monsters" or McCrae's "Katzenjammer," then you'll get through this just fine. I highly recommend this for anyone interested in cutting-edge literature.

Make no mistake about it: Bret Easton Ellis can write. He can produce spare, tight sentences that evoke chilling and haunting images. But there's something fundamentally lacking in "Less Than Zero" which makes me give this book only three stars.

Ellis is a master at depicting the anomie of the young, bored, and super-rich, as he did superbly in "American Psycho"; but at least the loathsome yuppies in that book were alive. "Less Than Zero" seems populated by walking zombies. Here we have Clay, the protagonist (or is he an anti-protagonist?) fresh off the train home for mid-year break from a college in New Hampshire (Dartmouth, maybe? Ellis carefully declines to identify the school); he hasn't been home for two minutes before he's bored into a coma. The problem is, he's already bored the reader. And the rest of the people in the book aren't any better: Blair, his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, spoiled rotten by her film-director father; Julian, descending into a miasma of drugs and prostitution; Daniel and Trent, indistinguishable blonde beach boys with too much money and nothing to do for it; and Clay's parents, dashing from one extra-marital affair to the next, and his sisters, only in their early teens but already as crass, materialistic and soulless as Clay and the parents -- are there any redeeming virtues to these people? Or is what passes for their lives an experience in pure hedonism? Clay seems more like a cardboard cutout than a person; his soul is so shriveled he can watch a snuff movie featuring a fifteen year old girl and yawn through the whole thing. He's a passive sociopath, uncaring, unfeeling, un-alive. One gets the impression that the only reason he's not out making a snuff film of his own is that it would take too much effort. Clay is fascinated by a billboard on the freeway that says "Disappear Here". We get the feeling that if Clay disappeared, nobody would care much one way or the other. He's that much of a cypher.

Ellis's problem in this book is he does such a great job of describing the emptiness of his character's lives, we wonder why he bothered writing about them at all. They don't grab us, they don't interest us, there's nothing about them we can relate to. As Blair says to Clay toward the end of the book, "You're a beautiful boy, but that's about it." It's not that Ellis can't invent interesting characters; Patrick Bateman, the anti-hero of "American Psycho", was a loathsome psychopath, but at least there was some substance to him. The characters in "Less Than Zero" seem to be made of air. Perhaps that's the fundamental problem with the book; the sense of emptiness is so overwhelming that ultimately the book's impact on us fades to less than zero.

The writing style is okay, but nothing special. Like a stripped down and stupid Hemingway, sort of. I really liked Ellis for a while when I was younger, but looking back, this book wasn't great. Worth a read if you're in the Ellis phase, but if you're new to him, I suggest 'American Psycho', which remains as his one truly good book.