Less Than Zero
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I can see that this book is the spiritual ancestor of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Minus the man-whore scene. It differs from The Magicians in the way the character’s apathy is shown. Ellis literally shows us the things Clay does. He travels around LA in a stupor, home on Christmas break from college. He sees things and experiences. But the neat thing is that I still sensed his desperation, his need for contact and to feel, to break away from the decadence of his teenage life. Grossman took the opposite approach; the reader knows what Quentin feels. Regardless, both writers made successful portrayals of walking pieces of shit.
One other note: I have the same thought on reading this as I did Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both writers used simple syntax and grammatical construction. So much so that the book just drones.
<satire>It is a lot of monotony without any break and without any spark to life and life is boring and then my friends show up in their new Mercedes and where is my coke dealer but I would rather go out with my girlfriend but instead we go home and sit on her bed smoking pot. </satire>
At the time, I had thought Atwood’s point was to make her character seem limited in terms of her intellect, enforced by the patriarchal society. But then I saw that it was actually Atwood’s writing style. I have not yet read Ellis’s other books (American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms are next), so I will find out if this drone actually served to underscore Clay’s being inured to life or if that’s Ellis’s writing style.
No Time to Read 