Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis

Never fear, I have many more Bronte books to unleash like child-crackens upon this blog - but even I can get bored of the amazingness of that family and long for a change of scene and society. I wasn't quite prepared for Bret Easton Ellis' debut novel Less Than Zero though. I think the cover of this book tricked me by provoking happy David Hockey swimming pool thoughts like this -



whereas actually what this book makes you feel like is this -



This is actually an image from the 1987 film made of Easton Ellis' book, which I haven't seen and I'm not sure if I could bear it now - even though it has my future husband Robert Downey Jr in it. It's my own fault, the Bronte sisters tenderised me and I've never read any of Easton Ellis' books before or managed to develop anything more than a vague idea about what they might be like. Less than Zero is like an 80s version of one of my favourite books Catcher in the Rye, just without as much verbal roguishness, Robbie Burns references or good headwear. I wish I had been the first to make the comparison between Easton Ellis' and Salinger's teenage-angst-coming-of-age stories because that would have been amazing of me and I could die happy but it's actually so obvious it could easily have been a deliberate 'update' on the classic by the younger writer. The title was taken from an Elvis Costello song that attacks the conservative politics of England in the 1970s by making nasty comments, and rightly so, about a butt-headed English fascist from the 1930s called Oswald Mosely. Both song and novel are concerned with a world in chaos, and the often disastrous consequences of materialist culture. In fact the David Hockney allusion on the cover of the edition I read may be quite appropriate in it's hyper-real, luscious, perky-bottomed other-worldliness...

Less than Zero is about an eighteen year old guy called Clay who has come home to Los Angeles after living in New England for four months. He is beautiful, bored and ridiculously wealthy, as are all of his friends - they do a lot of drugs, have sex with everyone regardless of their age or issues of consent, look at a few dead bodies, watch porn and snuff films, do more drugs, have more sex, there's a dalliance with prostitution, trips to the grandparents summer house, some eating disorders and lots and lots of nihilistic angst. Surprise, surprise, it's a critique on consumer culture! Easton Ellis was 21 at the time this book was published and from what I've read about the author significant episodes of Less than Zero are autobiographical. The anger and despair that presents as the apathy of the narrator feels real. It's a good and useful book. It marks a scary moment of excess and dissipation in capitalism. It's just really unpleasant to read because it's so unrelenting - because the narrator isn't a hopeful existentialist like Sartre or even Holden Caulfield but is instead more akin to the depressed blackboard in Mr Squiggle. And there's no comic relief! Easton Ellis is a talented writer though, and it's certainly a memorable novel but that doesn't mean I could ever bring myself to like Less Than Zero. He also announced that a sequel called Imperial Bedrooms, focussing on the same characters now middle aged, will be published in May this year - hopefully it'll be slightly more uplifting on the philosphical front, though I imagine the bottoms wont be quite as perky.


**/***** (Two stars out of five for freaking me out).