Less Than Zero (Picador Books)

by Bret Easton Ellis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times
They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute 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 and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

• ISBN10: 0679781498
• ISBN13: 9780679781493
• Publish Date: 30 June 1998 (first published 1 January 1985)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Pantheon Books Inc
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 208
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780679781493

Reviews

[Cameron Trost]

I'll give it more than zero, but just one. I don't usually give books one or two stars simply because I seldom finish books I don't like at all, and I don't review books I don't finish. With "Less Than Zero", I decided to read it all the way to the end, mostly because it's a relatively short novel. This is a novel about vacuous rich kids in California. The characters are of no interest and there isn't really a plot. There's nothing special about the writing style either. Reading this book is like sitting in a shopping centre and listening to the inane blabbering of jaded bourgeois brats. They do some namedropping and compare cars, they talk about how cool they are because they're drug addicts, and they try to work out who's getting their socks of with whom. It's all rather pointless, which may be the point. I'm not sure. If I'd been a vacuous Californian rich kid, I might have appreciated this book. I guess I'll never know.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

25 years ago Less Than Zero was published by a 21 year old Bret Easton Ellis with reviews like "Oh, this is just nihilism. These people don't exist! There's nobody that rich and stupid and narcissistic!" (The New Yorker, June 1985). Reading it now, we all probably know self-destructive people like these. Less than Zero has developed a cult following and feels like you are reading a diary of a lost and unsure rich 18 year-old who come back to the destructive neighbourhood of his past. Though out the book you are unsure if Clay will even grow or learn from all this and it almost feels like he doesn’t.