Overall a decent book, in many ways a more likable teenage version of American Psycho; review to come.
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My friend and I had a debate a few days ago about how American tv shows and books are relatable to Americans and nobody else.

It’s crazy what consumerism, capitalism, racism, and classism are doing down there, there is nothing more privileged than a white American person born in a middle-class/high-class family.
The problems they are facing are vastly different from the ones we are facing here.

The root of the problem is the estrangement between people, between parents and children, siblings, relatives, friends. Everyone seems to be seeking refuge in substance abuse or constant movement because if they stop moving and drinking/doing drugs the reality comes crashing down, unsatisfaction, loneliness, confusion. There is a displacement of life values, where the goal is the accumulation of materialistic goods and high social status forfeiting any spiritual benefit and genuine connection.

Bret Easton Elis has a writing style that reminds me of Hemingway, it’s compact, has a lot of dialogue, few glimpses into the mind of the characters, the reader is spoon-fed bits of the social scene and context, it’s blurry.
Either way, I don’t believe I will return to this book in the future but it has one example of moral decadency I hope never extends to the east.

El fin justifica los medios. Hacia la mitad se vuelve repetitiva para luego dejarte helado de verdad como parece la novela

"I wait for something to happen. I sit there close to an hour. Nothing does."

Indeed, nothing does. Unfortunately, for quite a bit more than an hour, Less Than Zero had me in a state of catatonic boredom.

It consists of little more than a series of pointless, plainly-written vignettes about the vacuous lives of vacuous people through the vacuous eyes of a vacuous narrator, Clay. Bret Easton Ellis only half bothers to create enough authorial distance from his characters to allow for the impression that this is somehow commentary or art, making only vague attempts here and there to affect his protagonist's apparent disaffection. The prose is as vacuous as the cast, and the dialogue is, well... judge for yourself:

"'Hello, Clay.'
'Hi, Daniel.'
'Having a good time?' he asked real slowly, turning to face me.
'I just got here.'
'Oh.' He pauses for a minute. 'Who'd you come with?'
'Blair. She's getting a drink. I take off my sunglasses and look at his bandaged hand.
'I think she thinks we're lovers.'
Daniel leaves his sunglasses on and nods and doesn't smile.
I put my sunglasses back on.
'Where are your parents?' I ask.
'My parents?'
'Yeah.'
'In Japan, I think.'
'What are they doing there?'
'Shopping.'
I nod.
'They might be in Aspen,' he says. 'Does it make any difference.'"

Frankly, it was painful for me to type that up. Simply terrible. I began to make highlights with the note "VD" for Vacuous Dialogue and hit around 20 entries before I lost interest. I had to be charitable to the rest of the dialogue to keep that number so low.

The protagonist, Clay, rarely comments on his own state. We are to judge that his physical and mental wellbeing are getting worse from the observations of other characters and the snatches of dull dialogue, as well as the reminders every other page that he is doing/running out of/seeking to buy cocaine. I know it was perhaps easier to be edgy in the 80s, but I hope that most readers then, as much as now, would roll their eyes at such chapter openers as: "It's Christmas morning and I'm high on coke..."

There were also times when I wondered: Is this literally just an embellished diary, names changed? I can't imagine that reading the holiday diaries of a mildly talented wealthy 20 year old asshole are much more or less interesting.

Towards the end, Ellis throws in some shock and awe. We get some coerced male prostitution with a side of forced intoxication, a castration snuff movie, and the torture and rape of a minor. These scenes are pointless, gratuitous, artless ("but that's exactly the point!" my straw man apologist bemoans); it feels like Ellis was panicking at the poor quality of his own work and thought a cheap, sensational scandal would save him. Judging from the sales and the movie and the subsequent career (in which, I gather, he keeps repeating this trick), it seems, sadly, that this strategy was entirely successful.

Fortunately for me, by the time I reached these scenes, I had almost entirely lost interest. I skimmed the final third of the book, and in doing so, saved myself from much of the suffering the first two thirds had caused me.

I'm sure it shocked and disturbed when it first came out in 1985 (while Ellis was barely 21), but I guess the shock value decreases over time. However, I agree it manages to capture the zeitgeist, and, more importantly, the shallowness and the emptiness of the young and the privileged in LA.

I just can't decide what to make of this book.

At first, felt like there is nothing to it but with each part, things started to make a lot of sense, the book was harder to swallow, with a lot of empty people and bad people. A world I know I would never be able to relate to or to its people, their life felt like just a facade to show the world and when it's about their personalities you could just puke over it.
Telling the book from the pov of this guy Clay who came back for a while to his hometown made things make sense.
I am pretty sure I didn't grasp a lot of things that happened but a lot of things just told how bad things were rooted deep in the roots of this town life, no morals to even consider.


I won't exactly recommend the book to people. there is a lot of intrigue warning that I didn't know about and it is just horrible. So people need to carefully consider it before jumping to read it.

Short but so depressing, emotions that are described are not something good to hear they are bland and have no soul or color to them so yea it's something but not an enjoyable book.


Not recommended!

I feel bad giving one star since I know the writing is good but the emotions I felt from the book scared me they are dark in a bad way.

This book seems boring and shallow, and reading it gives me an anesthetized, hollow, detached feeling that I would not describe as entirely pleasant.

And yet I cannot seem to stop, and whenever I have to, I become very anxious to return to it as quickly as I can. Its appeal is no less powerful for being difficult to pinpoint or explain.

This experience reminds me of something, but I'm not sure what.... Oh yeah, I know: Bright Lights, Big City. Way better, though, so far. I love all the characters' clothes.

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Okay, so I really, really liked this a lot, though I totally get why a lot of people didn't. I must say I find many reactions to it perplexing. The Village Voice blurb on the back of my copy calls Less Than Zero "sexy and sassy," which has to be one of the most bizarre characterizations imaginable: to me, this is one of least sassy, least sexy books I can think of (might tie with Marilynne Robinson's Gilead for that prize?). However, maybe that's just because I got confused and missed the point, as often happens.... I mean, a lot of what I kept thinking while reading this was about how tragically I was born in the wrong time, and why didn't I ever get to see Fear and X in LA in their heyday, and I'm pretty sure this was not really what I was supposed to take away from this novel.

My experience of this book was no doubt colored by an unexpected plate-of-shrimp coincidence of life and fiction that I cannot expand upon adequately on this family website. I will say that I think this is the perfect cocaine novel because it so perfectly epitomizes the soul-sucking hollowness and numb angst at the core of this kind of lifestyle and drug use (or so I've heard).

The reason why I thought this was so good, though, and what I'm surprised no one else on here seems to have felt, was that while in one way this was such a total period piece specifically criticizing the materialistic hedonism of the eighties or whatever, to me it transcended that. I seem to be in the minority in feeling this way, and without that sense that there was a larger point, this novel would've been just the cheap trick many other readers accuse it of being. To me, though, this completely deadening, unappealing, unglamorous litany of friends' names and routes driven and restaurants visited and drugs taken was so skillfully done because it should have been so boring but was somehow strangely mesmerizing. With a few missteps towards the end -- I found the whole thing with the friend and the pimp maudlin, silly, and totally off pitch from the rest of the novel -- everything is presented in a flat, deadpan way that makes it both so horrific and yet comprehensible. I never wondered why this kid was doing the things that he did, and that was where the book worked for me, because it's what created a kind of bridge to other lives, including my own.

If Less Than Zero's just a criticism of spoiled, zonked-out rich kids, there's not much of a point to this book, but if you start thinking about your own life, and life in general, then for me that's where it transcends its subject matter. You look at these extreme, exaggerated characters' ridiculous activities and the bizarre, soulless ways they live and relate to each other and it seems so sickening and meaningless, but then in a certain way it forces you to look at activities and life and relationships generally with a wider scope, and you start to wonder how meaningful any of it is, even if you aren't some gross millionaire LA cokehead, even if you're some mild-mannered social worker whose biggest addiction is Bookface. Like, this character's life is obviously pointless, but really, let's be honest, how much of a point is there to anything?

Does that any make sense? It did to me. I know the point I'm saying he makes isn't particularly brilliant or earth-shaking, plus maybe I'm giving BEE too much credit, but I thought this book worked. If you look at it just as a satire of this kind of lifestyle then yeah, it seems like a waste of paper, because how tough a target are these subjects? But then if you start thinking about glass houses and stones, for me that's where it gets good. It's a certain nihilistic way of looking at the world that I usually try to shy away from myself, but it was good to be reminded of it, because this stuff is there. People are really like this. I mean, they are and they aren't, you know?

Reading this book also reminded me of that time I went out on a date with my (formerly) Angeleno Bookster Marshall. When he finally came to New York, I was dismayed to learn that in fact he'd been joking about his willingness to breed with me, but after I got over that initial disappointment, we scored a gram and spent a very pleasant evening going up and down in the elevator of the Flatiron building, arguing over Elvis Costello and American Psycho, and gossiping about our mutual Booksters. It was a fun evening, and it's too bad Marshall wouldn't reproduce with me because I bet those Bookster genes would've created an awesome reviewer, albeit one with a frighteningly low birth weight.

I never tried to play rock 'n roll when I was young because eighties albums were so dense and overproduced, I figured you needed a PhD from NASA just to lay down a few tracks, and I never thought I could write a novel because I was big into John Updike and Robertson Davies, and there was no way I could get down so much as a sentence that would come anywhere close to their level.

Years later, when I heard The Ramones, I thought, shit, I could've figured out how to write, play, and produce something like "I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You," and I'm thinking like that tonight after LESS THAN ZERO. Why couldn't I have read it thirty-eight years ago, when it might've inspired me to attempt my own decayed American youth novel?

Now I'm too old to be a young talent, but the benefit of middle age is realizing no matter how tossed-off Dee Dee Ramone and Bret Easton Ellis' classics initially appear, there's more inspiration, craft, labor, and life experience behind their minimalism than most of us will ever likely conjure.

I wouldn't really recommend LESS THAN ZERO, but I did like it. It's neon slick and has the same soundtrack as Paul Schrader's AMERICAN GIGOLO, which likewise fetishized a beautiful guy-whore named Julian. Maybe that's why Schrader and Ellis finally teamed up for THE CANYONS (2013), arguably the most overlooked gem in both of their careers.

The title describes the chances of my rereading the book.

"This is what would happen if I gave my kids a trust fund." - said someone, about this book.

I fear this frame of mind for our youth. This casual nihilism, this destructive illusion of indestructibility. At times powerful, at other times, just not that compelling. Excessive, isn't it? It is, at the very least, thought-provoking on the level of: If only you kids understood anything about how the world works. I recommend listening to the audio version, love thy neighbor, and try to wash out your ears afterward.

Bret Easton Ellis' remarkable debut novel, rife with topical allusions, already glows with pure pop 80's nostalgia (not that I'm that old...) in the 2010's - why, it's almost 2020, but somewhere, probably, kids are acting like this, and B. E. E. was brave enough to write about it in the first person, and having spent a day in L. A. I feel like I might have seen some of these people walking around... Joking, of course. Take the whole thing as a joke, it's obviously an exaggeration... right?

It benefits from brevity. Being in the vicinity of these characters is possibly toxic. I found the other Ellis book I read less bearable than this one. He works in this sub-genre, skirting Hunter S. Thompson and Johnathan Lethem, carving out his own literary digs next to Donna Tartt, and reusing his characters later, at greater length, though I don't think I have the wherewithal to follow through and read the rest of his oeuvre.

Un retrato desolador sobre una época y una parte de la sociedad demasiado habituada a tenerlo todo y no disfrutar con nada.

some books are like the face of Justin Long:

n  n

this is a highly punchable face. don't you just want to punch that smug look right off of his corny face? it is a face born for being stomped into the ground. ugh, i hate justin long. although i loved him in the last few seconds of Jeepers Creepers, he was perfect for the role of Gutted Horror Victim.

i also hate Less Than Zero. i blame this book for all of the ennui-laden, masturbatory nonsense that was foisted upon the world in the 80s. shouldn't Bret Easton Ellis be in jail for this crime? who gives a fuck about the so-called lives of a bunch of entitled twits and their nonsensical concerns, their tedious yearnings? for chrissakes, in a civilized society, they would all be taken and shot in the college basement, before they became the financial magnates and doyennes of style whose sole goal seems to be to eat the world. the worst crime of this gag-worthy book is that Ellis appears to take his characters' issues to be genuinely weighty. that is as deluded as the delusions of his extremely lightweight and eye-rolling characters.

instead of reading this jackassery, watch Walt Stillman's Metropolitan instead. a much more pleasant experience!

La prima volta che ho letto Bret Easton Ellis (per gli amici Bret-Ellis) l'ho odiato a morte, cioè proprio detestato come se fosse l'Isis, la forma sulla pasta al ragù, la morosa del mio migliore amico. La conclusione che ho tratto, dopo aver letto lo spietato "Meno di zero", che è spietato sì, ma in maniera diversa da quella di "American Psycho", è che se anche io posso capire l'insensatezza di vivere, ancora non posso dire lo stesso della psicosi (e spero mai mai).

I protagonisti di "Meno di zero" sono vuoti, non trovo una parola migliore per descriverli. Vuoti come delle volte ci auguriamo di essere, quando soffriamo tanto ma proprio tanto, che ci sentiamo a terra che più in basso non si può andare, e vorremmo sentirci svuotati di tutto quel sentimento doloroso. Dobbiamo invece ricordarci di Clay e degli altri, che hanno superato quel fondo che si chiama umanità e sono arrivati fin qui.
Mentre leggevo questo romanzo, che Ellis ha scritto a soli 21 anni, pensavo a come ci si può sentire così giovani e così vuoti. Cavolo, Guccini ci ha raccontato che a 20 anni si è tutti ancora interi. Cavolo, se non ci innamoriamo a 20 anni, se non ci disperiamo a 20 anni, se non sogniamo a 20 anni, se non vogliamo cambiare il mondo a 20 anni. Io lo giuro, lo giuro, se mai mi dovessi sentire così, m'ammazzo. E invece poi penso che è proprio quando si perde quel briciolo di umanità, che non ci si ammazza neanche più.

Dio santo, salvate Clay e salvate Blair!

Comunque ecco che hanno scritto di qualcosa che mi spaventa ancora di più delle guerre, dei terroristi e della dittature.

270119: 80s? review from when i joined gr, thus 2010: why do i give this such high marks? mostly because of time i read it, place i was in both physical and psychic, how his deadpan flat writing and denatured dialog that never really says anything, his flat characters, his amoral protagonist, his plotless plot, all seemed an understated satirical portrayal of postmodern life...

i was not as very wealthy, not as jaded, not as left at sea (morally) by parents or others, not as passive (maybe) and emotionally blunted, but i read it as a work that demands close attention to hear what is never said but is screaming in every scene... how can you be crippled by nostalgia when you are only twenty? how can you refuse to engage any feeling? how can i ever forget this book: i am a contemporary of ellis...

270119: not read again but having read enough to argue more literature about it. or do i want to argue? i do not know. i got this out of the waimea town library one christmas, mostly because of the cover, the first page, the fact i wanted then so much to find now voice rather than what i got at u. chaucher, shakespeare, milton... etc, were not my thought world, anglo modernists were boring, self-referring, pretentious, the american beats were not my generation, and most contemporary lit, critically approved lit, was not it either. i think this is when i first read Jealousy & In the Labyrinth by robbe-grillet, not for class, but it blew me away. so did this book...

of course, being of that era, wanting to write, i read also with aspirations. if this is what to write, sure i’ll do this, though my attempts ended up somewhere between sf, Less than Zero, Jealousy & In the Labyrinth, Naked Lunch... and, like, The Great Gatsby . i could not get excited about those contemporary american/canadian/english authors, or the approved structures of most novels. so i started to read other cultures in translations, get serious trying to understand genre, read more lit by Robbe-Grillet, discover Calvino Italo, Umberto Eco, Julian Barnes etc. and reread this book. did then does later will always do something for me...

i know too many readers/critics who dismiss it as shallow affectless images hard at work disturbing all those hallowed values of literature. like character, place, plot, theme, some kind of appreciable moral arc, in book if not ‘characters’. like this is bad? to me this is avant-garde disguised as decadence, this is the kind of work that escapes. this is perhaps unconscious poetry. critiques of this work always seemed about a longing for a book that was not there, some plot, some resolution, some kind of satisfaction in living another life but never leaving your own... i have never been so affected by anything else he has written (now after American Psycho and Glamorama i have...) but if you only have one book in you, well this is one to be remembered for...