A review of Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. Vintage Contemporaries, 1985.

In Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, Less than Zero, set in the 1980s, Clay is an eighteen-year-old trying to navigate ‘being home’ from college for Christmas break. He needs to reconnect with his friends, and he needs to figure out if he still has feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Blair. Throughout the book, Clay and his friends bounce from party to party–while consuming drugs and alcohol–every chance they get. Some of these characters try to help Clay, but most of them try to take him down a dangerous path that will be very difficult to leave. Clay has to make a choice: he can stay in Los Angeles or go back to college after break.

I believe Ellis was trying to work outside the box and create a novel ‘that had not been done before.’ He did not care to have character arcs and plot development. Everything that is traditionally involved in writing a book was not his goal. Ellis worked within Less than Zeros to subvert traditional genres. If you liked it… great! If not… then you were not the reader that he was looking for. Usually a main character faces choices throughout a story which can spark amongst readers. Within this more non-traditional novel, Ellis creates a different world. The kids in the book are numb, but we receive little context as to why (other than their use of drugs). As a reader, you would want to figure out how they spiraled out of control and why they do not feel their emotions. However, there is very little response from Clay as to why he feels how he does. Within Less Than Zero, Clay witnesses a grotesque sex/murder tape, and then later, his friend rapes a twelve-year-old girl. Unfortunately, nothing comes from these scenes, and the characters act like nothing happened.

When people hang out with their friends, they want to have fun. Clay and his friends seem to have lots of fun, but we do not get to be a part of that. They go clubbing and take drugs throughout the book, but we do not get dialogue or more details about these situations. These kids prove repeatedly that they do not lead ordinary lives:

“It’s a Saturday night and on some Saturday nights when there’s not a party to go to and no concerts around town and everyone’s seen all the movies, most people stay at home and invite friends over and talk on the phone. Sometimes someone will drop by and talk and have a drink and then get back into his car and drive over to somebody else’s house. On some Saturday nights there’ll be three or four people who drive from one house to another. Who drive from about ten on Saturday night until just before dawn the next morning” (77).

Clay does not seem to be particularly close to his family or his friends. They never have any meaningful conversations that friends and family would typically have. One thing to be noted in this novel is the lack of emotion. The characters all appear to be flat and bored:

“No one talks about anything much and no one seems to mind, at least I don’t. My father mentions that one of his business associates died of pancreatic cancer recently and my mother mentions that someone she knows, a tennis partner, had a mastectomy.  My father orders another bottle—third? fourth?—and mentions another deal. The older of my two sisters yawns, picks at her salad” (66).

As for the plot of Less than Zero, there is not much to potentially spoil. There is no normal arc. All two-hundred-and-eight pages encapsulate the same events with small differences. Many of the characters are very similar to each other. They do not offer many defining traits, so they blend. I found myself forgetting who was who and how they were relevant to the plotline.

Scenes are very short within this novel. Some do very little in terms of moving the book forward. The scenes are constantly moving locations; they never establish themselves in a place for too long. Everything would need to be more detailed if the characters stayed in them longer. There are a few small scenes where it seems like Clay is in therapy. What for? We never really learn, and it does not seem to help his character in any way:

Some parts of the novel are very unsettling and shocking. The graphic nature of the book also did not resonate with me. I kept trying to suspend my judgments as I was reading Less than Zero; I just kept hoping that there was more coming, and I was dissatisfied when I did not get my wish. Just because I did not enjoy the book as much as I would have liked does not mean that I denounce it. I understand why it was a big topic of conversation in the book industry, but this style is not my favorite.