Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
“I notice that I can see my Father’s penthouse in Century City from this room and I get paranoid and start to wonder if my father can see me.” Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
Clay comes home from his university in New Hampshire for a month home during winter break. It’s set sometime before cell phones, while MTV still played music and movies were on videocassette and people used Walkman’s. It actually took me a while to realize that they didn’t have cell phones, and I had to keep reminding myself of that fact. There were a couple times in the book where one of the characters would tell someone else they didn’t have a friend’s number, and I kept thinking ‘Well why isn’t it in your Contacts list?’ There’s drugs and sex and parties and prostitution. If you’ve read Catcher in the Rye and didn’t like it, then I don’t recommend you read this book. Clay is reminiscent of Holden, and the writing style is very similar.
Besides the similarities to Catcher in the Rye, I thought it was a good representation of how it feels to those who go a long way to college to come home during their breaks. He seems disinterested in everything that’s going on at home with his old friends, and his old girlfriend. Actually, Clay was really disinterested in everything. He didn’t even seem to be that interested in the drugs he bought from his dealer, or the people he had sex with. Sometimes I got so tired of Clay’s disinterest in everything that I just couldn’t read it anymore and had to put the book down for a while. None of the interactions he had with his friends seemed to be meaningful at all. The dialogue was never really deep conversations. A lot of “What have you been up to?” “Nothing.” “Are you going back up to school?” “Probably.”
Speaking of sex, all of the guys in the story seem to be indifferent to the gender of their sexual partners. It’s not that I have anything against that, I just found it weird that all the guys were sleeping with other guys casually and still dating girls. I have no idea if the drugs would make them less inclined to care about the gender of their sexual partners, but felt it wasn’t realistic that all of the guys in that group would swing both ways. They were all also so very casual about sex. (Also there’s an underage rape scene… sort of. So if that is a trigger for you, I recommend you stay away.)
The parents also didn’t seem to care much what their children were doing. Clay talked about his drug use in front of his parents a few times in the book and didn’t seem to care that they heard, and they didn’t seem to react to it at all. It just seemed like a strange scenario to me.
Overall, I’d probably give it a 7/10. The writing style was well done and fit with the character and the scenario, but I felt like the character wasn’t connecting with anyone else in the book, which made it difficult for me to connect with him.
Read on!
Molly
redbirdbookreviews 