Less than zero

I first read Breat Easton Ellis' 1985 debut Less Than Zero years and years ago, after reading and falling in love with American Psycho. So now that Elllis has published a sequel to it, I thought I'd start by re-reading the first book, since much like John Self notes in his review of Imperial Bedrooms - and I'll get back to this - I honestly couldn't remember much about it.

It's a different novel now than it was when I read it at 19 or 20. While it's certainly not as pornographic as its scandalous big brother, LTZ is a novel that can be read for shock value alone, a seemingly nihilist tale of sex and drugs and MTV. No wonder I couldn't remember the story; there really isn't much of one. Clay, an 18-year-old from California and from money, has finished his first semester at college in New Hampshire and is now coming home to spend Christmas with his friends and family. For four weeks before heading back to college, he does little but go to a never-ending series of parties, do copious amounts of drugs, tan, sleep with acquaintances of both sexes, try to avoid conversations that always end up petering out or spinning off into a never-ending who's-dating-who's-dealing-who's-dead. It's all surface - but as always with Ellis, it's the kind of surface that invites you to punch (or stab) holes in it and see what's (lacking) underneath.

"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.

...which, admittedly, is not one of the novel's subtler moments. Ellis wrote this when he was 19, and at times it definitely shows that it's a first work: the prose falls apart now and then, and for all their empty-headed hedonism, some of the characters are a little too fond of stating the theme of the novel.

Typical Hollywood crowd. All the kids are on drugs and all the adults are on rollerskates.

These are kids who've always had it all. Who lack for nothing. They get Porsches for christmas, they've done it all at 18, they'll never have to work a day in their life. And yeah yeah yeah, you know where this is going, the emptiness of success and materialism in the glitzy 80s, we've heard it already. But there are few stories we haven't heard before, and what makes LTZ so fascinating is the narrative, the way it feels like a free fall through it with nothing to break the fall. Clay speaks to us in short, frantic chapters, a modern noir detective except tan and successful, searching for a plot that got lost. Sure, there's a missing friend mixed up in bad company whom he's trying to find and possibly rescue, there's a sometime girlfriend, etc, but he's frequently too cynical and too stoned to care. (One could probably make a good case that Pynchon's Inherent Vice, written 25 years later but set 15 years earlier, is a mirror image of this). Clay is 18 in 1985, he was born in the summer of love, the culmination of America's push to the west, and once it got there everything just piled up against the Pacific and got stoned and commodicized. This is as far as the idea got. Now it's all horrorshow - literally. As in Pynchon, there's a horror movie between the lines, werewolves, zombies and ghosts stalk the stifling Christmas heat of LA. They're just rumours, not real. Probably. But then, what is?

And before I left, I read an article in Los Angeles Magazine about a street called Sierra Bonita in Hollywood. A street I'd driven along many times. The article said that there were people who drove on the streets and saw ghosts; apparitions of the Wild West. I read that Indians dressed in nothing but loincloths and on horseback were spotted, and that one man had a tomahawk, which disappeared seconds later, thrown through his open window. One elderly couple said that an Indian appeared in their living room on Santa Bonita, moaning incantations. A man had crashed into a palm tree because he had seen a covered wagon in his path and it forced him to swerve.

That's more like it. Young Bret could write. Clay isn't a perfect narrator, and that's probably deliberate; he's grown up on the shallowest of lifestyles and ideas, his parents and his grandparents have nothing to pass on to him but money, and now he has no words, no concepts for why everything slips. The clues don't form a whole picture. For all of Ellis' supposed "refusal to condone or chastise [his characters'] behavior", to quote the blurb on the back, the howling emptiness under the glitzy surface is the question of the book. The emptiness that leads people to look for depth in Huey Lewis lyrics (or, if you're feeling mean, Ellis novels). How do you wake up from a nightmare when it contains everything you know?

Some of them would mouth the words to the song that was being played. But I'd concentrate on the teenagers who didn't mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them.

Less Than Zero was shocking in 1985. Today, we have Paris Hilton. And the cosmic dance continues.