Less Than Zero

What unsettled me first in Less Than Zero was how little it tried to persuade me. Bret Easton Ellis does not guide the reader toward outrage or pity. He simply places us inside a world drained of reaction and lets it speak for itself. The novel follows Clay, a college student returning to Los Angeles for winter break, moving through a landscape of wealth, drugs, parties, and emotional absence. From the opening pages, I felt a cold flatness that was impossible to ignore.

As Clay drifts between friends, relationships, and excess, I noticed how little anyone seems anchored to consequence. Violence, exploitation, and cruelty appear without commentary. That silence disturbed me more than explicit judgment would have. I felt myself waiting for someone to care deeply about what was happening, and that waiting became part of the experience. Clay observes everything, but rarely intervenes. His passivity made me uneasy, yet it felt honest. Detachment here is not a pose. It is survival.

What struck me most was how repetition creates numbness. The same parties, the same drugs, the same conversations return with minimal variation. I felt time flatten as I read. Pleasure loses definition, and danger loses shock. Ellis’s stripped language reinforces this effect. There is no lyrical escape. Everything feels immediate, disposable, and already forgotten.

Emotionally, the novel left me hollow rather than angry. The moments that should provoke outrage arrive quietly, and that quietness felt intentional. It mirrors a culture where excess has erased scale. By the end, I did not feel resolution. I felt exposure. Less Than Zero does not ask the reader to condemn its characters. It asks the reader to sit with what happens when meaning erodes and nothing rushes in to replace it.

Closing the book, I felt chilled but alert. Ellis showed me a world where privilege offers insulation but no protection, and where emptiness is not dramatic, only constant. That realization lingered longer than any plot point ever could.

I read Less Than Zero after reading American Psycho about a year ago. This is an incredibly powerful book with solid motifs and themes - it almost feels like a prototype of Ellis's future work. Clay's lifestyle, as described, is completely alien to me, personally. Still, Ellis is so effective at conveying the emptiness and the disconnect at the core of these youths' psyche that I cannot help but feel for them despite their overwhelming privilege. The plot isn't exactly linear, but Ellis manages to gets his point across nonetheless. Overall, Less Than Zero is an impressive endeavour for such a young author that I greatly enjoyed reading.

1) "All it comes down to is that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge."

2) "My mother and I are siting in a restaurant on Melrose, and she's drinking white wine and still has her sunglasses on and she keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they're shaking. She tries to smile when she asks me what I want for Christmas. I'm surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her. 'Nothing,' I say. There's a pause and then I ask her, 'What do you want?' She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands and she sips her wine. 'I don't know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.'"

3) "A truck with video games strapped in the back passes by and my sisters are driven into some sort of frenzy. 'Follow that video game!' one of them commands. 'Mom, do you think if I asked Dad he'd get me Galaga for Christmas?' the other one asks brushing her short blond hair. I think she's thirteen, maybe. 'What is a Galaga?' my mother asks 'A video game,' one of them says 'You have Atari though,' my mother says."

4) "During the day I'd sit in the living room and try to read the San Francisco Chronicle and she'd walk along the beach and collect seashells, and before too long we started going to bed sometime before dawn and then waking up in the midafternoon, and then we'd open another bottle. One day we took the convertible and drove to a secluded part of the beach. We ate caviar and Blair had chopped up some onions and eggs and cheese, and we brought fruit and these cinnamon cookies Blair was really into, and a six-pack of Tab, because that and the champagne were all Blair would drink, and we'd either jog on the empty shore or try to swim in the rough surf."

5) "'Girls are fucked. Especially this girl. She is so fucked up. On cocaine. On this drug called Preludin, on speed. Jesus.' Trent takes another drag, hands it to me, and then unrolls the window and stares at the sky. We park and then walk through the empty, bright Beverly Center. All the stores are closed and as we walk up to the top floor, where the movies are playing, the whiteness of the floors and the ceilings and the walls is overpowering and we walk quickly through the empty mall and don't see one other person until we get to the theaters. There are a couple of people milling around the ticket booth. We buy our tickets and walk down the hall to theater thirteen and Trent and I are the only persons in it and we share another joint inside the small, hollow room.'"

6) "I get a message that Trent stopped by. He was wearing a really expensive suit, my sisters said, and driving some-one else's Mercedes. 'Friend of mine's,' Trent told them. He also told them to tell me that Scott O.D.'d. I don't know who Scott is. It keeps raining. And that night, after I get three of the weird silent phone calls, I break a glass by throwing it against the wall. No one comes in to see what the sound was. Then I lie on the bed, awake, take twenty milligrams of Valium to come off the coke, but it doesn't get me to sleep. I turn MTV off and the radio on, but KNAC won't come in so I turn the radio off and stare out across the Valley and look at the canvas of neon and fluorescent lights lying beneath the purple night sky and I stand there, nude, by the window, watching the clouds pass and then I lie on my bed and try to remember how many days I've been home and then I get up and pace the room and light another cigarette and then the phone will ring. This is how the nights are when it rains."

7) "'Why?' is all I ask Rip. 'What?' 'Why, Rip?' Rip looks confused. 'Why that? You mean in there?' I try to nod. 'Why not? What the hell?' 'Oh God, Rip, come on, she's eleven.' 'Twelve,' Rip corrects. 'Yeah, twelve,' I say, thinking about it for a moment. 'Hey, don't look at me like I'm some sort of scumbag or something. I'm not.' 'It's...' my voice trails off. 'It's what?' Rip wants to know. 'It's... I don't think it's right.' 'What's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.' I lean up against the wall. I can hear Spin moaning in the bedroom and then the sound of a hand slapping maybe a face. '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.'"

7) "Rip told me that, on some quiet nights, late, you can hear the screeching of tires and then a long silence; a whoosh and then, barely audible, an impact. And sometimes, if one listens very carefully, there are screams in the night that don't last too long. Rip said he doubted that they'll ever get the cars out of there, that they'll probably wait until it gets full of cars and use it as an example and then bury it. And standing there on the hill, overlooking the smog-soaked, baking Valley and feeling the hot winds returning and the dust swirling at my feet and the sun, gigantic, a ball of fire, rising over it, I believed him. And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. 'Where are we going?' I asked. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Just driving.' '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."

8) "Later, in the video arcade, Trent plays a game called Burger Time in which there are all these video hot dogs and eggs that chase around a short, bearded chef and Trent wants to teach me how to play, but I don't want to. I just keep staring at the maniacal wiggling hot dogs and for some reason it's just too much to take and I walk away, looking for something else to play. But all the games seem to deal with beetles and bees and moths and snakes and mosquitoes and frogs drowning and mad spiders eating large purple video flies and the music that goes along with the games makes me feel dizzy and gives me a headache and the images are hard to shake off, even after I leave the arcade."