You are currently browsing the start narrative here posts tagged: 1985

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)

January 29, 2010 Book Reviews
No comments

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, and while I always enjoy learning about new things and discovering new perspectives, I also love getting lost in the imagined worlds of fiction, so I turned to some of my staple comfort fiction: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. Not the typical warm and fuzzy type of comfort fiction, but I wrote my undergraduate thesis on novels and films about adolescent malaise, youth disaffected by everything around them: Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, one of my favourite films, and the films of Gregg Araki (many of which have dialogue lifted straight from Less Than Zero.) It could be familiarity, or recognition, with these themes. Nonetheless, rereading Less Than Zero has confirmed that I still really enjoy it, disturbing, unsettling and confronting as it is.

I turn the radio up, loud. The streets are totally empty and I drive fast. I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is “Disappear Here” and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light. I put my sunglasses on even though it’s still pretty dark outside and I keep looking into the rearview mirror, getting this strange feeling that someone’s following me.

Less Than Zero sees eighteen year old Clay returning home to Los Angeles for Christmas after four months away at school in New Hampshire. He returns to his old life of endless parties, excessive drug use and general sense of apathy. Gradually, the horrors of L.A. infect his psyche and he begins to see violence evident everywhere, deciding to never return. He has an ambiguous sexuality, sleeping with both men and women, and having had an on/off again relationship with Blair, which neither of them seem to be too emotionally involved. This lack of involvement extends to every aspect of Clay’s life, frequent “I don’t know”, “I don’t care”, “nothing”, he just doesn’t care about anything. He’s not alone in this, his friends are all equally detached.

He’s staring at me and I look down and take a drag, a deep one, off the cigarette. The man keeps staring at me and all I can think is either he doesn’t see me or I’m not here. I don’t know why I think that. People are afraid to merge. Wonder if he’s for sale.”

The strength in Less Than Zero is how Ellis captures Clay’s disenchanted voice, everything is recorded with this blank monotone as though nothing can possibly touch him. It’s infectious, sort of rhythmic in a jagged, paranoiac kind of way. It’s only as Clay’s so-called normalcy becomes more and more surreal, that anything really begins to register with him. The images of violence start off relatively tame, watching a sick friend shoot heroin at a party wearing a vest that makes her look like she’s been shot, to coyotes hit by cars, dead bodies found in alleyways and his friends engaging in brutal rape. Clay’s search for his old school friend Julian takes a similarly violent turn as he discovers that Julian has become a male prostitute for a vicious pimp in order to pay off a drug debt. As Clay watches Julian engage with his pimp and his clients, his current image of Julian begins to clash with the images he has of him as a child. I think this, really, begins the descent into mayhem that eventually sees Clay denounce Los Angeles, as well as cementing the theme of the desire to return to the past, even if it is unknown, imagined, or just doesn’t exist anymore. Or never did.

The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.

Less Than Zero is so much more than a novel which captured the zeitgeist of the materialist 1980s, not just a blank look into the superficial lives of bored, numb and dumb teenagers. Hypnotically narcotic, it is a reflection on moral deterioration and an underlying meaningless than we struggle (or refuse) to grasp.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

September 15, 2009 Book Reviews
1 comment
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale: Offred is a national resource. In the Republic of Gilead her viable ovaries make her a precious commodity, and the state allows her only one function: to breed. As a Handmaid she carries no name except her Master’s, for whose barren wife she must act as a surrogate. But Offred cannot help remembering subversive details of her former life: her mother, her lover, her child, her real name, women having jobs and being allowed to read, fun, “freedom.” Dissenters are supposed to end up either at the Wall, where they are hanged, or in the Colonies, to die a lingering death from radiation sickness. But the irrepressible Moira shows Offred that it is possible to cheat the system.

A short break from Palahniuk mania for the minute, and instead, some classic feminist dystopian fiction. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator, Offred, is a Handmaid, a surrogate, live-in fertility vessel. She occupies the lowest position in the household of the Commander, she is given no voice, and no freedom. Her sole occupation is to assist the Commander and his Wife in producing a progeny.

She remembers, partially and quietly, her past life, her friends, her child, her husband and the political path that led to her current situation and the creation of the Republic of Gilead. She repeatedly reflects that after her, the future Handmaids won’t be able to remember anything from before, their reality as Handmaids will be the only one they know. This idea was profoundly effective, the idea that you need to have some grasp of alternate possibilities in order to hope. While Offred does hope, dream and remember about how things were before, and how things could be, she is ultimately oppressed by the new system. She can remember all the freedoms she took for granted in the past – of reading, studying, working, walking the streets without supervision – but the idea of these alone, purely because of the system in place, does not set her free. It almost becomes frustrating, because for every possible way out, the new political/social system seems to have a method of preventing it. Offred herself, however, never frustrates the reader because we recognize the brutality of a system which denies her her rights. The first person narration allows the reader to see her as an active subject, as a woman with thoughts and feelings that wildly contradict the social structure. Hers is a quiet subversion.

Also hugely effective is Offred’s recollection of the systematic removal of women’s rights that occurred with the political changeover. Almost overnight, women are forbidden access to their own money, they are fired from their jobs. What is most chilling about this, is it feels as though it is entirely possible. It doesn’t seem so alien and impossible.

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Dystopian science fiction with a decidedly feminist twist, The Handmaid’s Tale offers a chilling glimpse of an all too possible future.