Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis · 1985

Premise

Clay, a college student home in Los Angeles for Christmas break, drifts through a month of parties, drugs and empty encounters with wealthy friends; the novel, told in a flat, detached voice, is about a privileged generation so numbed by money, pleasure and neglect that nothing, not even atrocity, can move them.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

The main ideas

Wealth without purpose or care produces not freedom but numbness.
When nothing is denied to people, they come to believe they have the right to take anything, including other people.
Constant stimulation turns even death and suffering into spectacle.
Passivity is a moral choice. Watching without acting makes the watcher part of what happens.
Absent parents leave children to raise themselves in a world with no limits.
The only escape the novel offers is to leave.

Disappear Here

The novel's first line is "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Blair, Clay's on-and-off girlfriend, says it as she drives him from the airport, home from his college in New Hampshire, and the sentence sets the tone: a city of people moving fast in isolation, afraid of contact.

Clay narrates in a flat present tense, recording parties, drives, drug deals and conversations without comment. His friends are rich, beautiful and bored. They talk about clothes, music and who is doing what drugs, and almost never about anything that matters to them.

A billboard reading "Disappear Here" unsettles him, and the phrase recurs through the book. It names the danger the city poses: not violence or failure, but the dissolving of the self into a life of surfaces where no one is really present.

Implication: comfort and constant activity can hide an absence of purpose. Ask whether the life you are living requires you to be present in it.

Spectacle without feeling

The novel's set pieces show a generation for whom horror has become entertainment. After a concert, Clay's friends take him into an alley to see the body of a young man, apparently dead of an overdose, and they stare at it with fascination. At a party, a snuff film is screened, and several of the guests are excited by it; Clay and Blair are the only ones repelled.

Clay himself is not exempt. When Blair hits a coyote on the road, he watches it die, for about ten minutes. He records these scenes in the same flat voice he uses for everything else.

The mechanism is saturation. People who have had every pleasure and stimulation available to them need ever more extreme experiences to feel anything, and lose the capacity to respond to suffering as suffering.

Implication: be wary of a habit of treating others' suffering as something to watch. Repeated exposure without response dulls the capacity to respond at all.

Julian

Julian, a friend from Clay's school days, asks to borrow money, saying it is for an abortion. When Clay asks for the money back, Julian takes him to meet Finn, a dealer and pimp who keeps him supplied with heroin and sells him for sex to wealthy men.

Clay accompanies Julian to a hotel room where Julian meets a client, a married businessman. Clay stays for hours and watches, detached from what he sees; elsewhere he admits that what he wants is to see the worst.

The episode shows how the same wealth that surrounds these young people can consume them. Julian, from a rich family, has become a commodity to be bought by other rich people, and his friends' response is to look on.

Implication: watching a friend being harmed without intervening is a choice, not neutrality, and it makes the watcher a participant.

The right to take it

The novel's darkest scene comes near the end. Clay's dealer, Rip, shows him and others a twelve-year-old girl, drugged and tied to a bed in his apartment, whom Rip and his friends are sexually abusing. Clay says, "I don't think it's right." Rip answers: "What's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it." When Clay protests that Rip has everything, Rip says he has nothing to lose.

The scene is the end point of the world the novel describes. Rip is not a monster from outside that world but its product: someone who has been given everything and therefore recognizes no limit on what he may take, and no consequence that could touch him.

Clay leaves, but does nothing to help the girl.

Implication: a culture that denies people nothing teaches them that their wants are a sufficient reason to act. Moral limits are learned, and wealth can remove the occasions for learning them.

Leaving

Clay's family barely engages with him. His parents are separated; his father, who works in the film business, sees him for lunches at expensive restaurants, and his mother is preoccupied and, Clay discovers, seeing another man. He is not sure of his younger sisters' ages. His psychiatrist is too absorbed in himself to help. The adults in the novel are as empty as the young people they have left to themselves.

Near the end, Blair asks Clay whether he ever loved her, and he says no. He explains that he does not want to care, because caring would only make things worse. Then he returns east to college.

The novel closes with Clay remembering a song he heard in Los Angeles, whose images were of people driven mad by living in the city, and of parents so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Those images, he says, were so violent and malicious that they seemed his only point of reference for a long time afterward.

The ending offers no redemption, only departure. Clay has seen what his world does to people, and leaves it, but carries its images with him.

Implication: sometimes the only available response to a corrupting environment is to leave it, and leaving does not undo what it has done.

Where it falls short

Its flatness cuts both ways. The detached narration that conveys the characters' numbness also makes them hard to tell apart and gives readers little reason to care about them.
It is unclear whether it criticizes the world it describes or simply reflects it. The novel never steps outside Clay's affectless voice, and critics have debated whether its shocking scenes amount to a judgment or merely a catalogue.
Its shocks accumulate rather than build. Each scene of cruelty is more extreme than the last, but the novel has little plot or development, and Clay ends much as he began.

American Psycho — Ellis's later, more violent satire of the same emptiness among wealthy adults.
Brave New World — a society in which constant pleasure has replaced feeling, imagined as a deliberate design.