Less Than Zero

The only thing I’ve read, in terms of fiction, by Bret Easton Ellis is American Psycho.  I must have been about sixteen or seventeen and had seen the film so decided to give it a go.  I was too young.  The only think that I really remember from the carnage of the plot is the tone of the entire book.  Patrick Bateman is blank.  He describes dismembering young women as though he were reciting a shopping list.  And that tone very clearly takes its roots in Less Than Zero.  It’s a fascinating read for so many and I’m so glad that I avoided the film version with Robert Downey Jr in the first throws of his fame.

The book’s brilliant.  It’s actually the sort of book that makes me a little bit sick.  Ellis was twenty-one when he wrote it and it’s brilliant and I wish I were that talented.  I’m only twenty-six, which I do acknowledge is by no means old, but I’m nowhere near being as just plain good as Ellis.  The bastard.  Luckily, though, I do get to enjoy his books.

Less Than Zero follows Clay, an eighteen year-old home for Christmas in Los Angeles after his first semester in an East Coast college.  He essentially hates the place, L.A. I mean.  Having left four months previously, Clay has attempted to make a clean break from his not-quite-girlfriend Blair, distant family and the drug fuelled parties of his friends.  The book is nearly two hundred pages of successive parties, drugs and semi-anonymous sex.  Clay refuses to pass judgement on any of his friends’ activities- even when they veer into paedophilia that he so clearly wants no part of.  That fact that one of his friends has slipped into drug addiction and sex work passes with similarly few consequences or emotional reaction from Clay.  The only thing that he gets any real joy from is counting down the days until he can leave L.A and the friends he so clearly despises.

One of the little things that I really appreciated about this book was the way Ellis only uses first names, or nicknames.  No-one, not even Clay has the privilege of a surname.  It makes the entire book wonderfully anonymous.  These could be any spoilt, rich as hell Hollywood brats.  On top of that, Ellis doesn’t bother to explain relationships.  It’s always, “And then I went to a party at Trent’s house,” or, “I went for lunch with Blair and Kim,” without telling us who these people are.  The only exception to this is Daniel, a friend of Clay’s from college who we’re only told about as he furthers Clay’s emotional isolation when he decides to stay in L.A. rather than return to school in New Hampshire.

Less Than Zero has done that wonderful thing of making me want to read more of its author.  My interest is thoroughly piqued.  Admittedly, that’s partially because I’ve read American Psycho too.  Both of Ellis’s books that I’ve read so far have protagonists who are complete moral blanks and I want to know if it’s his thing.  Are all his heroes so morally ambiguous and empty, or is it just Patrick Bateman and Clay?

I’m now on Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy.  I may be some time.