Bret Easton Ellis

With an introduction by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh Eighteen-year-old college student Clay is back in his hometown of Los Angeles for Christmas break. Clay is three things: rich, bored and looking to get high. As he reacquaints himself with a familiarly limitless world of privilege, along with his best friend and his ex, his shocking, stunning and disturbing adventure is filled with non-stop drinking in glamorous nightclubs, drug-fuelled parties, and endless sexual encounters. Published in 1985, when Bret Easton Ellis was just twenty-one, Less Than Zero is a fierce coming-of-age story which quickly defined a genre. A cult classic beloved for its dogged portrayal of hedonistic youth and the morally depraved, this extraordinary and instantly famous novel is a landmark in modern fiction: an inventive, precocious and invigorating story of getting what you want when you want it.

Less Than Zero

Louis Norton

this book irritated me, but what irritates me the most is the fact that I couldn’t stop reading it

paola !

Less Than Zero (Picador Books)

Colton Ray

Perhaps its our current cultural moment, but I find it nigh impossible to give a single care about the angsty, tough, rough lives of rich L.A. kids who can afford to spend their jobless days high on coke and wandering through parties and one-night-stands being just too cool to care about anything. The characters don't care about their own lives, so why should I? 

There's nothing substantive here, just repetitive drugs, party, sex, and whining. No arcs, no plot, no characterization. I didn't need a whole novel to realize that unearned wealth breeds entitlement and boredom. At least American Psycho had a clever hook. At least Patrick Bateman actually got off his butt and DID something, unlike Clay. On the final pages of the novel, Clay finally gets told off in this completely accurate description: 

"You were never there. I felt sorry for you for a little while, but then I found it hard to. You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it."

But just because you're aware of the emptiness of your protagonist doesn't change the fact that he is still an empty vessel on a somnambulist journey where he never goes anywhere, accomplishes, or learns anything. Ellis was clearly trying to ape The Great Gatsby for edgy Gen-X'ers, but it didn't work for this reader. Less Than Zero turned out to be a perfectly apt title.

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, a best-selling novel follows a cast of upper-class, good-looking, oversexed, drug-addled, thrill-seeking, college-age characters on the road to perdition. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

_linia_

You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.

“It’s something you must live with if you live in the hills.”

Niko

“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.”

Hoooooly shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. 

“It’s something you must live with if you live in the hills.”

Geoffrey Froggatt

““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.”

Less than Zero is the debut novel of Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1985. It was his first published effort, released when he was 21 years old and still a student at Bennington College. The novel was titled after the Elvis Costello song of the same name. I read The Rules of Attraction when I was in college and it became one of my favourite books of all time, so I knew I wanted to read more from this author. Like The Rules of Attraction, this story drops us in the middle of a group of apathetic complex characters without explanation, and takes us through vignettes of their lives seemingly without direction. Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, 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 in a place devoid of feeling or hope. The characters felt so raw and real, carrying the problematic characteristics of most characters found in a Brett Easton Ellis novel. I’ve always loved how this author’s characters feel complicated, complex, hypocritical, and messy, which makes them feel authentic to the era they were written in and elevates them from caricatures to characters. These characters always felt authentic and like real people, not just characters in a novel. These are all people I could easily meet in real life. The racism and xenophobia was jarring but very realistic to the time and setting that this was written and to the disillusioned characters this story followed. This book seems boring and shallow, but as bleak as it was and as hollow as it made me feel, I do feel like this book did what it set out to do, and that was to make me feel that lost and detached feeling you get when you’re a lonely 20 something trying to figure yourself out while living in a big city. Despite lacking a strong plot, this book was precise in its use of theme and tone. Bret Easton Ellis often crosses the line where unhinged becomes disgusting, but that somehow always makes it feel more real and human to me, and I think that despite the dark and bleak nature of these characters, I find it compelling because they feel more authentic and flawed than the sanitized and fictionalized characters that I’m so used to seeing in media. The scene where the boys watch a snuff film felt uncomfortably familiar with certain moments I had with guys I knew growing up during my teens years when we used to watch internet shock videos and experience the darkest parts of the world just to feel something. The scene towards the end with the guys and the younger girl and the dark conversation that followed reminded me too much of guys I crossed paths with in my younger years and conversations I had about morality in real life. There were one or two moments that felt too on the nose, but most of it was subtle enough and most importantly effective, especially for a debut novel. I think this is easily one of the strongest debut novels I have ever read. This book was the definition of nihilistic, and I was fortunate enough to read it while I was in the right mood to process it properly. While I didn’t resonate with this novel the way that I did with The Rules of Attraction, this exploration of pure nihilism and hollowness felt significant and effective the way that most books don’t. I would only recommend this book to people that want to revel in the feeling of nihilistic meaninglessness.

“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.”

Katherine 

There's a book and a movie. Read the book. It's better.

Reading this after finishing The Shards was enlightening in some areas, and ruined it in others. Overall, the simplicity of the timeline, and inner conflict and disillusionment were incredible, and I could not put it down. 

Jacque

A viscerally disturbing story of a rich, urban generation. A trudge to read through the first two thirds, but at the end I was fucked up and about to vomit. Deeply depressing, and horrifically based in reality.

Maya

Adriana Sanchez

Kelsey Lynn

I read this for a reading challenge, the prompt being an authors first bòok. I was warned by multiple people not to read it but I'm glad I did.

Ellis writes in an apathetic, straight forward and Minimalistic style that surprisingly made this book very powerful and brought it to life. On the outside this book is just about rich entitled children going on drug binges and living pointless broken lives, the author gives you play by plays of Clay ' s visit home from college in a very basic "and then I brushed by teeth and called Blair" kind of style.

 It seems boring and depressing, yet somehow enthralling , and if you stick with it you see a broken child coming to terms with just how messed up everything is and beginning to ask himself why.

 This book is depressing and haunting. Clay is apathetic and unfeeling, disconnected from everything and the authors style makes this so believable. I felt it in my gut, this heaviness, this despair. I felt clay ' s disconnection.

 I feel like lots of people will struggle with seeing it for anything other than rich kids on drugs. But the few who will read it and feel the character will get a haunting coming of age story about children who have everything and because of it have nothing .

one of my all time favorites — quite graphic but it's a great fly on the wall narrative depicting the dark underbelly of rich white asshole suburbia. 

markelle e. e.

Roman

Unter Null

Patrick Baumann

Almost quit reading in the beginning because everything was so dull and depressing. But that's what the book is actually about and in the end it moved me quite a bit.

erin hanley

i reread this book all the time and it always fucks my shit up

Casie Blevins

Awful. The worst of the worst of humanity. The characters are the real walking dead. Vacuous. Vapid. Empty. Pointless. Hopeless. It's been a very long time since I have hated a novel but I truly hated this one. At least it wasnt long. How the hell did they make a movie out of this novel? Oh yeah, they didnt. They couldnt. Because you can't put the depravity found in this book into a blockbuster movie, and for damn sure not in the eighties. The movie is Less than Zero Lite, and the plots barely resemble one another.

steffi

Jessica Smith

This review probably won't be very long. Basically, this is about the general malaise of obscenely rich kids in LA who have nothing better to do with their time than do lots of drugs. This means they make lots of bizarre and illogical decisions, and some of them seem very fuzzy on the idea that all human beings are entitled to bodily integrity and (view spoiler)[not being abducted, raped and/or murdered on camera (hide spoiler)]. At least the narrator isn't so bereft of ethics that he enjoys watching that, but he doesn't go to any lengths whatsoever to try to stop it either. He says things sometimes about how caring is too hard, it just makes you get hurt, so he tries not to. I'm not sure if the book is nihilistic or a denunciation of nihilism or both.

To its credit, the book is hard to put down – it just kind of rattles along at a consistent pace until the end, and the segments it's divided into are mostly shorter than a page each so it's really easy to do the "just one more... just one more" thing. Plus, it's really short. That doesn't make it fun to read, though.

Galaxia

this novel sketches an eerie portrait of Los Angeles and the drug-soaked underbelly of the elite. Ellis never fails to deliver a story that sits on the precipice between slightly surreal and achingly realistic, and i really loved the vacuous delivery and overall tone. while the novel was definitely interesting, the lack of any semblance of a linear plot made it difficult to connect to any of the characters and the novel ultimately lacks the impact that i wish it had had.

Less Than Zero

Reviews