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Less Than Zero
  
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Less Than Zero (Hardcover)

by Bret Easton Ellis (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (173 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Written when the author was 20, this first novel tells the story of Clay, a New Hampshire college student who returns home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation. Vignettes show Clay and his friends aimlessly traveling from party to party, doing drugs, having sex with one another. PW noted that Ellis "brilliantly conveys this crowd's delirium as well as the lack of fulfillment they cannot remedy."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


Product Description

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this 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 a place devoid of feeling or
hope.

Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of
limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago,
and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his
best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday
turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy
mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews

173 Reviews
5 star:
 (69)
4 star:
 (36)
3 star:
 (24)
2 star:
 (17)
1 star:
 (27)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (173 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most helpful customer reviews

 
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Won't be for everyone, but still great, Mar 16 2007
This review is from: 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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Running on empty, Feb 26 2004
This review is from: Less Than Zero (Paperback)
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.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Okay..., Dec 13 2007
By Benjamin Anderson (Fredericton, NB CAN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Less Than Zero (Paperback)
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.
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 		 Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A dark, smothering, disturbing, downward spiral into hell.
Written in clear, simple, matter-of-fact prose, Less Than Zero, is a chillingly disturbing and hair-raising novel that hones in specifically on L.A. Read more
Published on Jul 20 2004 by Christian Engler

5.0 out of 5 stars A trully unsettling novel. One I'll never forget.
Less Than Zero tells in vivid first person a journey through the underbelly of 1980's L.A. life from the passive point of view of Clay, a young man who finds himself facing the... Read more
Published on Jul 7 2004 by pizowell

1.0 out of 5 stars Life's too short to read this book
After reading so many positive reviews of this book and enjoying so many books that have been compared with this novel,I decided to read it . Read more
Published on Jul 2 2004 by angie

2.0 out of 5 stars More than Zero, Less Than Three
This book gets one star for writing about "something different." BEE definitely "made it new"- which is more than we can say for some of these fossil novelists... Read more
Published on Jun 18 2004

2.0 out of 5 stars Anticlimactic-- 2 1/2 Stars
I found this to be a quick, easy read that built up to a very dissapointing conclusion. A good way to pass some time but not a very good read.
Published on Jun 2 2004 by C. Cates

4.0 out of 5 stars Disapper Here
In Bret Easton Ellis's book Less than zero is a tale full of drugs and immoral acts. During and after reading this book i couldn't help feeling as strung out as the protagonist... Read more
Published on May 23 2004 by sharrese

5.0 out of 5 stars Dissatisfied Youth, Got the Point
I have read most of these reviews & all of you are basically saying the same thing but in different words & some of you just plain didn't get it. Read more
Published on April 5 2004 by N. Damiano

4.0 out of 5 stars sounds a bit like college, only more extreme
This was the first Ellis book I read. I enjoyed it a lot. Ellis is has a unique style, and I'd consider him among the top contemporary authors. Read more
Published on Mar 26 2004 by M. Rinehart

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite a debut for Ellis
Although this book is about as old as I am, but hey it is still a damn good novel. Less Than Zero takes place in Christmas 1985 in L.A. Read more
Published on Mar 16 2004 by Eric

5.0 out of 5 stars A Definite read....worth reading twice!
Less Than Zero is Bret Easton Ellis first novel, and I fell in love with it like I did for American Psycho. The story takes place in L.A. Read more
Published on Mar 15 2004 by Eric

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