Less Than Zero

The first thing you notice is the voice. Clay narrates in short, flat sentences, usually in the present tense, and he describes a party, a movie, a dead body, and a pool with the same tone. There is no outrage, no analysis, no obvious feeling. For the first few pages it can seem like bad writing, as if the author has no style. Then you realize the flatness is the style, and the absence of feeling is the subject.

Clay is eighteen and a student at Camden College in New Hampshire. He comes home to Los Angeles for Christmas break. His family is rich. His parents are distracted. His grandmother is dying of cancer, and he seems to be the only person who notices. He reconnects with his ex-girlfriend Blair, his friend Trent, and a circle of wealthy teenagers who spend their nights driving, drinking, doing drugs, and having sex with people whose names they barely remember.

The plot, such as it is, is a series of encounters. Clay goes to parties. He goes to a concert. He has sex with a male student and with a woman whose name he does not give. He tries to find his old friend Julian, who has disappeared. When he finds him, Julian is a heroin addict and a prostitute, and he owes money to people who are not patient. Clay lends him money, then asks for it back, and Julian takes him to meet Finn, his pimp. The meeting leads to a hotel room, a married businessman from Indiana, and a scene that Clay watches without intervening.

The circuit

The novel is organized around movement. Clay drives from one house to another, from a party to a club to a diner, and the repetition creates a sense of a city without exits. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is bored, and everyone is looking for the next thing that will make the night feel like something. The drugs are everywhere. The sex is casual and often transactional. The conversations are fragments, half-finished sentences, names of bands and brands.

Ellis is precise about the texture of this world. The cars, the clothes, the restaurants, the music, the way people talk about movies they have just seen. The details are not there to create nostalgia. They are there to show how a culture trains people to experience life as a series of products. Even the bodies become products. Julian sells his. Rip, the dealer, keeps a drugged twelve-year-old girl in his bedroom and offers her to his friends. Trent stays to participate. Clay leaves.

The scene with the girl is the novel's most notorious, and it is meant to be. Ellis does not describe it graphically, but he does not soften it either. The horror is in the casualness. Rip is not a monster in a cape. He is a bored rich kid with a trust fund and a taste for control. The other characters do not react with shock. They react with curiosity, or indifference, or a joke. Clay's revulsion is the only moral response in the room, and it is not enough to stop anything.

Julian

Julian is the emotional center of the book, though Clay would never use a phrase like that. He is Clay's friend from grade school, the one who was always around, the one who belonged to the same world. Now he is thin, nervous, and desperate. He borrows a large sum of money from Clay and says it is for an abortion. Clay does not believe him. Later, when Clay asks for the money back, Julian takes him to Finn, and the truth comes out.

The hotel scene is the novel's moral test. Julian is going to have sex with a businessman for money, and the businessman wants Clay to watch. Clay stays. He tells himself he is there because he wants to understand, or because he cannot look away, or because Julian asked him to. The reasons are not convincing. He stays because he is curious, and because his curiosity has always been stronger than his conscience.

Ellis does not give the reader a speech about exploitation. He gives the reader the details: the man's wedding ring, the way he talks to Julian, the way Julian performs. The scene is long enough to be uncomfortable and short enough to avoid exploitation. It is one of the few places where the novel's flatness feels like a form of restraint rather than a lack of feeling.

The parties and the corpse

The party scenes are the novel's signature. At one, Muriel, a girl Clay knows, shoots heroin while the other guests take Polaroids. At another, Trent shows a snuff film, and several people are aroused. Later, Clay and his friends find a dead body in an alley, a young man who has apparently overdosed, and they stand around looking at it. Nobody calls the police. Nobody covers it. They treat it as a spectacle, something to talk about later.

The repetition of these scenes is deliberate. Ellis is showing how quickly the mind adapts to horror when the horror is surrounded by comfort. The characters are not evil in a dramatic sense. They are numb. They have been given everything except a reason to care, and they have learned to fill the emptiness with sensation. The novel's title comes from an Elvis Costello song, and the phrase captures the condition: less than zero, a deficit of feeling that cannot be measured.

Clay's family is part of the same pattern. His parents are divorced or absent in the way that rich parents can be absent while still in the room. His grandmother is dying, and the family treats her illness as an inconvenience. Clay visits her, but he cannot connect. He is not cruel to her. He is simply unable to be present. The novel suggests that this inability was learned at home, long before the parties and the drugs.

Blair is the closest thing the novel has to a conscience, and she is given very little to do. She loves Clay, or thinks she does, and she keeps asking him to talk to her. He cannot. Their scenes together are painful because she is trying to reach a person who has already left. Ellis is good at the small failures of intimacy, the way a conversation can end without anyone raising their voice.

The style

Ellis wrote Less Than Zero when he was a student at Bennington College, and it was published when he was twenty-one. The style is often called minimalist, and it owes something to Joan Didion and to the noir films of Los Angeles. The sentences are short. The paragraphs are short. The descriptions are precise but not lyrical. The effect is a kind of deadpan, a voice that reports without interpreting.

The repetition is important. Clay says the same things over and over. He describes the same drives, the same conversations, the same parties. The repetition creates a sense of time without progress. It also makes the moments of violence stand out, because they are described in the same tone as everything else. When Clay sees the dead body, the prose does not change. That is the point. The prose is the character's nervous system, and it has been flattened.

The brand names are another feature. Ellis lists products, bands, films, and places with the specificity of a catalog. Some readers find this shallow. Others find it devastating, because it shows how a person can be made entirely of references. Clay knows the name of every band and every restaurant, and he does not know how to feel about his dying grandmother. The contrast is the novel's argument.

Where it strains

The biggest criticism is that the novel is monotonous. Clay's voice does not develop. The scenes repeat. The characters are thin, and some of them are indistinguishable. Blair exists mostly to be sad about Clay. Trent exists to be awful. Julian exists to suffer. The novel is more interested in the atmosphere than in the people, and that can make it feel like a mood piece rather than a story.

The shock value is also a problem. The underage sex slave, the snuff film, the corpse, the heroin, all of it is designed to provoke. Some of it earns its place. Some of it feels like a young writer testing how far he can go. The novel does not always know the difference between showing the numbness of a culture and enjoying the spectacle of its excess.

The film adaptation, released in 1987, is a different creature. It softens the story, adds a romance, and gives Clay a clearer moral arc. The novel is colder and more unresolved. Readers who know the movie may be surprised by how little comfort the book offers.

The novel's whiteness and wealth are also worth naming. Los Angeles in the book is a city of rich white kids and the people who serve them, and the servants are mostly invisible. That may be an accurate portrait of Clay's circle, but the book rarely steps outside it. The result is a critique of privilege that is itself enclosed by privilege. It shows the cage from the inside, which is useful, but it does not show who built the cage or who is kept outside it.

What it gets right

For all its flaws, Less Than Zero captures something about privilege that is hard to capture without sounding like a sermon. It shows how money can insulate a person from consequence, and how that insulation can become a kind of death. The characters are not poor, not oppressed, not trapped in any obvious way. They are free, and their freedom is the problem. They have no reason to grow up, no pressure to become anyone, and no one who will tell them no.

The novel also understands the economy of bodies. Julian's body is a commodity. The girl in Rip's room is a commodity. The people at the parties trade attention, sex, and status. Clay is part of this economy even when he thinks he is observing it. He watches, and watching is a form of participation. The novel's refusal to redeem him is its most honest move.

The ending is not an ending. Clay goes back to college. Nothing has changed. He has seen terrible things, and he has not been transformed by them. That is the point. The book does not offer a lesson. It offers a portrait of a person who has been trained not to feel, and it leaves him there.

Why it lasts

Less Than Zero is not a pleasant book, and it is not a generous one. It is a young man's book, with a young man's certainty that the world is hollow and that saying so is enough. But it is also a precise book, and its precision has lasted. The flat voice, the brand names, the endless parties, the dead body in the alley, all of it has become part of the way American culture talks about wealth and numbness.

I would not recommend it to someone looking for a plot. I would recommend it to someone interested in style, in the 1980s, in the way a generation of writers learned to describe emptiness. It is a short book, and it goes by quickly. The feeling it leaves is not quick. It is a cold, thin feeling, like the air in a house where nobody is home.