Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)

Returning home from his first semester at college in the East a young man revisits old friends and familiar L.A. haunts.

Book Review: Less than Zero was famously published when the author was 21 and still a student, and is a striking first book. Given the amount of background violence this Gothic novel contains the seeds of American Psycho (1991), but the darkness is obscured by a general boredom and ennui. Nobody gets offended or upset or bothered, at most there's a vague resentment. I kept waiting for any character to hit another, but no one cares enough. Wealthy, the characters have all their wants met but not their needs (though they can't express those needs). There's no commitment, no need to strive. They can't work up the energy to engage, to communicate, be involved. It's all too much too soon, no limits, innocence is long lost. It becomes unsettling just how apathetic they all are, with the only reason to make an effort being to maintain their drug supply. This malaise results in a lazy amorality, uncaring, heedless of the horrors they see and talk about. Any genuine feeling is only a faint faded image in the novel, a palimpsest of real emotions distantly felt, until it becomes unclear whether the characters are feeling emotion or the reader's intuiting them. Mostly plotless, the characters are simply waiting for something to happen and even when it does and even if gruesome it doesn't fully register because they don't react except in a childishly ghoulish manner. The novel has its own gestalt: MTV seems to be mentioned on every page, bands and the occasional (bad) movie are referenced, gender is fluid (38 years ago). Cocaine is as rampant as in Bright Lights, Big City, released the previous year. Both novels are Great Gatsby short, both grabbing for attention and unafraid to shock while staying safely in the literary tradition. At times Less Than Zero reminded me of Nathanael West, Catcher in the Rye (1951), The Graduate (1963), and the immortal Joan Didion essay "Waiting for Morrison" (1968). A good thesis could be written comparing Less Than Zero with another great first novel about partying, The Sun Also Rises (1926). This is an important and necessary novel both of its time and of ours.  [5★]