Product Description

Clay comes home to L.A. for Christmas vacation and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs. Morally barren, ethically bereft and tinged with implicit violence, Less Than Zero is a shocking coming-of-age novel about the casual nihilism that comes with youth and money.

‘An extraordinarily accomplished first novel’ New Yorker

‘One of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality’ Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

‘The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation’ USA Today

‘Remarkable. A killer – sexy, sassy, sad’ Village Voice

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7794 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Review
'It is all too relevant to teenagers today'
--Alastair Hutchinson in The Times

About the Author

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of five novels and a collection of stories, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. He divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.

Customer Reviews

The Dead Generation
Where did Bret Easton-Ellis come from? I don't mean geographically. I mean how did someone in their early twenties write such a complete book? Less Than Zero is so accomplished it's incredible. It tells the story of the teenagers of the rich and famous, and their decent into decadence simply in search of something to do. These characters simply have nothing to risk. They are dead to the world and completely souless.
I think a lot of other authors wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to satirise the characters. Easton-Ellis looks beyond the shallowness of his characters and the result is a tragedy worthy of Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. Unfortunately, Less Than Zero is not as entertaining as Vile Bodies or The Great Gatsby. It's on a par with The Sun Also Rises though.
I think as the years go by, this book will be seen as more and more tragic, and an extremely good record of 1980s America at it's most empty and decadent. When it was first released some reviewers misread it as some kind of nihilistic call-to-arms for young party people. There's even an excerpt on the back of the book from one reviewer who compares the characters to The Beat Generation and generally approves of their wild party antics. I think now that the dust has settled it's easier to understand the meaning of this book. There's no soul in this party.

stunning - boredom never sounded better
The first book I have ever read by Ellis and I will be reading more as a result. I have just finished the book and it has become one of my all time favourites. Ellis writes about boredom and irrelevant conversation in a gripping manner. Hard to comprehend I know but the author summaries the 80's perfectly. Anyone in their mid-twenties onwards should be able to relate to this book and find it spot on and possibly even miss those times.

Ellis is the voice of the 80s
I went into a bookshop looking for American Psycho, but ended up being attracted to Bret Easton Ellis' first novel instead, not least because it said he wrote it when he was my age.

I consider myself a writer's worst reader, because it takes a lot to keep me turning the page. I get lost in endless poetic prose, tune off and then put down. I have to say, though, that Less Than Zero is the first book I've read in about seven years which I considered 'unputdownable' (even if I had to, it reaching 2am on several occasions).

It's a difficult book to sum up. There's very little in the way of narrative that I can pin down. Teenager Clay comes back from college after a term away and slides back into his old, banal, repetitive lifestyle, except now, having escaped it for a while, he begins to see it for what it is. Ellis' crisp, frugal prose reminds me of Hemingway, but Hemingway not afraid to hide what he's saying behind politically correct metaphors.

At times it was moving, and others shocking, but it was never less than absorbing, even if much of what Ellis writes about here is a representation of boredom. By the end, I was almost feeling sympathetic toward Clay. Ellis could have made it more of a clear cut tragedy, but I don't think it would have been as half as realistic (and therefore, effective) as it is.

Since reading this I've gone out and bought the rest of Ellis' books.