Less Than Zero is Bret Easton Ellis‘ first novel.
Plot:
Rich college student Clay returns home to L.A. for the winter break. He spends his time going to parties, doing drugs and having sex while thinking about whether or not he wants to have a relationship with Blair, his girlfriend. But Clay grows increasingly alienated from the amoral behaviour of his friends.
Less Than Zero is a good first novel, but not the best Bret Easton Ellis has ever written. It’s also completely stuck in the 80s (it was published in ’85) and seems a little out of date for that. [Actually, I read the first pages and the looked up the first publication date because I had to know if it really was published in the 80s.]
This novel is hard to pull off – all the characters are incredibly jaded and unsympathetic, even Clay who tries to excise the effects of growing up in this company and tries to get some sense of (moral) direction.
I wanted to feel sorry for everybody but Ellis didn’t really let me. I mean, these are young people who are very lost. But then they go ahead and [SPOILER] get their rocks off to a snuff film and rape a twelve year old [/SPOILERS] and whatever sympathies I could muster just evaporated.
As I said before, sometimes the book feels a little dated because it asks questions that are not so en vogue today. But since the questions asked have never been really answered, since nihilism is still something that continues to engage people, I didn’t mind.
It’s definitely a book worth a re-read (especially since Ellis has announced that he’s writing a sequel). [And I think I need to get my hands on the movie – Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader? Cool.]
kalafudra's Stuff 
I liked Less than zero.
Couldn’t read American Psycho, though. It made me sick. (Both this yuppie-nihilism and the slaughtering.)
I can’t say that I liked it because it’s not a book you can like, I think and I thought that American Psycho was a lot better. But it’s a strong debut and I don’t mind having read it.
eins meiner lieblingsbücher, zumindest damals, als ich frisch nach wien kam. erst jahre später hab ich den film gesehn- mit james van der beek (oder so? der dawson halt!) und fand ihn überraschend gut.
insofern freu ich mich über die gute nachricht, dass er eine fortsetzung schreibt- und das “According to a tweet by Elllis, the first sentence of the novel is, “They had made a movie about us.” klingt spannend =)
und ja, ich stimme dir zu. nicht sein bestes buch, aber definitiv ‘a strong debut’.
Der Film mit James van der Beek (ich glaub, der schreibt sich eh so) ist “Rules of Attraction”, nicht “Less than Zero”. Mich hat der Rules-of-Attraction-Film auch überrascht. Besonders war der Dawson ein echt guter Cast, weil er dieses Saubermann-Image hat, das dann Schritt für Schritt zerstört wurde.
“They had made a movie about us.” ist echt ein cooler Anfang.
[…] Imperial Bedrooms is the newest novel by Bret Easton Ellis, a sequel to his debut novel Less Than Zero. […]