Less Than Zero
Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, published in 1985 when its author was just twenty one, is the slim, glassy debut that announced an entire generation of American fiction. Clay is a college freshman who has come home to Los Angeles for Christmas break, which he spends drifting through pool parties, snorting cocaine on the marble countertops of Beverly Hills, and watching friends sink into pornography, prostitution, and addiction. The novel is composed of short, almost cinematic scenes whose flatness is itself the point: Clay's voice records the parade of gleaming surfaces, MTV jingles, and casually monstrous behavior without ever quite letting himself feel any of it. Ellis's signature obsessions, brand names, blank affect, the moral flicker just behind the social surface, are already fully formed, and the novel's portrait of Reagan era affluence helped shape everything from Brat Pack cinema to American Psycho. The book remains one of the defining nihilist novels of late twentieth century America.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Clay flies home from his East Coast college for winter break and slides through Christmas-week parties in Beverly Hills, watching his old friends do increasingly worse things. Nobody quite registers anything.
Less Than Zero is fictional but draws on Bret Easton Ellis's own experience growing up in 1980s Los Angeles. He wrote much of it as a college sophomore. The setting and culture are documentary in tone even if the events are invented.
Yes. A 1987 film adaptation starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, and Robert Downey Jr. was released. The film softened many elements of the novel and shifted the moral stance significantly.
Less Than Zero was written by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1985 by Vintage Comtemporaries.
Less Than Zero is 208 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Less Than Zero takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Less Than Zero is a standalone novel by Bret Easton Ellis, not part of a series.
Less Than Zero is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
