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.
