In Bret Easton Ellis’s doomy debut novel, Less Than Zero, widely believed to be a roman à clef, we’re brought into the anhedonic world of hyper-privileged Los Angeles young adults via a narrator who has returned home from his East Coast college for winter break. Clay is picked up from the airport by his former girlfriend Blair—his parents have split from each other, and nobody is at his childhood home in a gated community when he arrives. As the days pass, his alienation increases; he encounters his old friends—some of their multimillionaire parents have departed the city for the holidays and gone abroad, leaving them to their own devices. Parties pile up, and drugs, rape, and a snuff film are introduced casually, made all the more disturbing by Ellis’s stark, first-person, present-tense prose. Memories of a past vacation in Palm Springs when his grandmother was dying of cancer and nobody seemed to care slip into Clay’s consciousness.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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In light of Less Than Zero’s influence, it’s hard to believe that Ellis was merely 21 years old when the novel was published. While subsequent fictional representations of rich and feral California youth have focused on the insubstantiality of wealth and pleasure under similar bleak circumstances, few capture the dramatic scope of these unsettled lives as fully as Ellis does.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
