Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985, Simon & Schuster)

Disappear Here

Though American Psycho continues to top best-seller lists and grows in cultural significance each year, Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero remains by far my favourite, capturing a moment and a feeling like almost no other book since.

Less Than Zero is more than a book to me; it exists as an artefact. When I see a physical copy, it registers as something beyond a mere 'book,' feeling more like a map, a crystal ball, or a mirror.

I read the book in the summer of 2005, when I was twenty-one, the same age Bret Easton Ellis was when he wrote it, after I had fallen out with and alienated every friend I thought I had.

I had a literary upbringing. As a child, I loved the Paul Jennings Round the Twist novels, as well as Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. I was read Ray Bradbury short stories as bedtime tales and encouraged me to tackle A Clockwork Orange by Burgess and science fiction by Isaac Asimov. My family owned hundreds of books, and I remember studying the spines and covers of giant David Icke tomes alongside old eighties hardcover editions of the Dune series.

In secondary school, after my English teacher noticed my enthusiasm for Lord of the Flies by William Golding, she led me into a dusty old book cupboard so narrow you could barely turn around in it, its walls lined with tatty orange Penguin paperbacks. I filled my bag with Orwell, Conrad, and Wilde, books offered as gifts to foster the only subject in which I had shown any interest.

All these books, however, didn’t prepare me for the life-altering experience of reading Less Than Zero, the book no one had suggested, which I discovered through my own curiosity.

Frequently and erroneously categorised as a work of nihilism, or at least one that glamorises it, a notion Ellis constantly challenged, the book is actually a morality tale if you focus on the narrator, Clay, rather than the vacuous world around him.

It’s the ultimate Sensitive Young Man novel, to use a modern meme term. Clay is not only the narrator; he is also the reader, this is a story shared with the reader, not merely told.

The closest approximation I can think of in cinema is the film Goodfellas. The only character to show any horror at the actions of the film’s many monstrous figures is Ray Liotta as Henry Hill. To emphasise the evil nature of the Mafia, an un-nuanced version of the world is presented, with Liotta serving as the sole moral compass for the viewer.

Clay in Less Than Zero serves a similar role. The hyper-real version of Los Angeles in the novel is not meant as an accurate portrayal; it exists to illustrate the deepest and darkest corners of the real city. Ellis isn’t suggesting that every human being on earth, except Clay, is trapped in some self-destructive spiral of sex, drugs, or both, with him somehow above it all. He is simply giving the reader a body and mind to stand aside, to witness the adjacent evil of the world through the book rather than brushing up against it in the Hollywood Hills.

There are times in your life when the world will feel like a loveless place, and you’ll believe that no one truly cares about you beyond what you can do for them. There will be days when you wake in your bed and it feels like a grave; when your loved ones seem like zombies to you, and when your ‘friends’ lunge at you to drink your blood like vampires.

Those are the days presented in Less Than Zero, in a flat, disaffected tone: a world so hollow it hardly feels worth existing in, a world so toxic you struggle not to become radioactive yourself.

The value of the book for me was knowing that someone else had felt that isolated and at odds with the world. It made me feel less alone to realise that, across the pond, twenty years before I experienced the same emotions, a parallel life had played out, and not only had Ellis made it through, he had turned it into one of the most important modern novels ever written, which remains as electric and enthralling today as it was in 1985.

Buy Less Than Zero, here.