Less Than Zero

Rating:
Summary: A young writer who understands his subject & what a subject!
Review: I learned about Bret Easton Ellis from an interview in "High Times" magazine. His age at Less Than Zeros publishing (21 yrs.) is what interested me the most. I read the rave reviews on the books cover and decided to give it a go. From the first few lines you're thrown into a world that, although on a much more extreme level than the everyday life I'm used to, is an obvious example of art imitating life in its most Kafka-ish depths. Ellis pulls no punches, hides from no subject and tells everyone to open your eyes and open them wide. He also manages to slip in many of the literary techniques and characteristics used by the writers which I have been studying and trying to understand for my own personal benefit. Ellis's style, a modern-day Henry Miller type of journal entry that is fast paced and quick chaptered, was a pleasant surprise. He should stand on the literary mountain for quite some time, and will probably be standing on top before everything is said and done. Try this book. It's the real Beverly Hills 90210, without a single Tori Spelling smile.

Rating:
Summary: Drains you dry
Review: Probably my fav book by Ellis seeing as I felt so utterly empty inside after finishing it. These characters Blair, Julian and friends have got to be the most shallow and unfeeling people I've ever read. Sure, Bateman in "A. Psycho" was materialistic but he was insane unlike these kids who're supposedly NORMAL teenagers!! If this is what the rich life in L.A. is all about than I'll be certain to never visit. But I am so sick of hearing people say this was a boring story and don't feel sorry for these kids just because they're spoiled and rich! Can we honestly say we wouldn't be as empty if we lived the way they did with only cocaine and meaningless sex to entertain us? Ellis is brilliant in depicting the lives of materialistic, spoiled brats having to live without love and emotional security. If you're looking for a novel to leave you feeling hollow and disturbed emotionally, I highly reccommend this. It gives the word 'dreary' a whole new meaning.

Rating:
Summary: Dissatisfied Youth, Got the Point
Review: I have read most of these reviews & all of you are basically saying the same thing but in different words & some of you just plain didn't get it. The point Ellis makes is simple satire dissatisfied kids nothing is enough while having everything. I read this book after college actually I saw the movie first. What impressed me about Ellis writing is he has the ability to make it personal. What I mean is he brings you there as if your living right along with these kids. His words tell a story of empty rich kids in LA. There whole existence consists of sex, drugs, & total consumption to the extreme you can feel the desperation inside them. This book brings you to that place of these empty kids who's search for soul, feeling , and a voice is constant never reaching satisfaction. It's quite a sad story but Ellis words are unique and the protagonist- Clay somewhat reaches validity in himself in the end by wanting to leave LA and start over. I have to mention the movie came out in 1987 and was amazing one of my top 5 films of all time.

Rating:
Summary: A very dark, well written book.
Review: I read this book and I expected it to be a simple trip into a dark place. I was wrong. This book takes you into a place and a state of mind that is so dark and disturbing it is hard to believe. The book is scary, to be honest. To think that a world like this actually exists should apall people.
The book, about an eighteen year old who returns home to L.A. after his first year of college, is deeply rooted in the idea that underneath a lot of things is a darker side. Ellis takes the reader into a place that people thought was only a myth, where sex is as casual as conversation, snorting cocaine is like eating dinner and spending time with your family is like having a root canal.
The book is sad beucase it depcits a generation that is lost. They have seen too much at far too young an age. Clay'y (the main character) little sister says to him "We can get our own (coke)." She's thirteen years old.
Ellis has done a great job of capturing a mind frame. These people love the life. Clay is seen as an outcast when he is shocked by what he sees. There are sertain passages about Clay's past that are written with such eeriness, they made me shiver. The book acutally gave me feelings of paranoia when I read it. This book is wonderful and is a lot more than less than zero. It is highly enjoyable and interesting. It is one of the darkest, most original, most frightening books I have read in years. It is well worth the time.

Rating:
Summary: My New Favorite Book
Review: Bret Easton Ellis was twenty when he wrote one of the new masterpieces of contemporary fiction, Less Than Zero. The novel is a chilling, disturbing depiction of a group of first year college students returning home to Los Angeles during the Winter Break. Although he may not be the most stylistically talented writer, Easton Ellis captures the aura, atmosphere, and attitude of Los Angeles and its wealthy, westside-inhabitants like no one else before him. Easton Ellis not only conveys the despair and disillusionment felt by all the charachters, but he is able to encompass the reader with the same emotions. All of his charachters are jaded, desensitized, and left numb by living in Los Angeles. All of the outlets they seek for solace and comfort wind up only driving them deeper into their downward spiral that is life. This is a must read for anyone. I am not sure if someone who has not lived in LA would be able to appreciate the book to the extent that an Angeleno would, but it is a quick read so its worth the try.

Rating:
Summary: Disapper Here
Review: In Bret Easton Ellis's book Less than zero is a tale full of drugs and immoral acts. During and after reading this book i couldn't help feeling as strung out as the protagonist Clay, who through out the book needs a snort of coke to get through the day. After reading the book you may feel the same way. The amount of drugs that is taken by all the characters in the book is enough for ten people to OD. Strangely enough i couldn't help wondering after reading this well written book, whether to be affraid of LA or the people that inhabit LA? But any way read the book with a snort of coke.

Rating:
Summary: sounds a bit like college, only more extreme
Review: This was the first Ellis book I read. I enjoyed it a lot. Ellis is has a unique style, and I'd consider him among the top contemporary authors. Less Than Zero took the college experience, and juiced it up a little. The only problem with the book is that there doesn't seem to have a conclusion, it just ends. Over all, I really enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to those who are somewhat facinated with the so called "drug culture." Bottom line... good book!

Rating:
Summary: Quite a debut for Ellis
Review: Although this book is about as old as I am, but hey it is still a damn good novel. Less Than Zero takes place in Christmas 1985 in L.A. where the narrator Clay comes back from college from break, and he discovers his friends deep into sex, drugs, prostitution, and just about everything you can imagine about the 80's. As the story moves along, we meet Rip; Clay's dealer, Julian; a male prostitute, and Blair; Clay's girlfriend, and ex girlfriend. As you get deeper into the novel; which isnt that long; just about some 200 pages, not a lot of things happen, but Bret creates his characters with no emotion and very little self-conscience. We also see Julian having sex with a older man, which he is also deep into cocaine himself, and crack. Rip and Clay friends are so deep into it, that they dont even recognize what these drugs are doing to them, but they are young and they could care less what can happen to them. As we near the end, Clay then realizes that this is not for him, so he heads back East and leaves L.A. forever.

Now the moral of this story is that, drugs can ruin your life, and also mixed with money, power, and youthfulness, nothing can stop you, or so they think. This book brings a generation to life, and the perils of generation X.

Rating:
Summary: A Definite read....worth reading twice!
Review: Less Than Zero is Bret Easton Ellis first novel, and I fell in love with it like I did for American Psycho. The story takes place in L.A. in 1985, and the narrator is Clay; a young adult who comes back to L.A. from college in the East for Chirstmas vacation. Now as he comes back, he see's his friends doing drugs, having sex, and basically ruining their lives. His best friend is Julian; a heavy drug user, and a male prostitute, there is Blair; Clay girlfriend, and ex-girlfriend. Rip; Clay's dealer. As the story moves along, Clay gets sucked in the life style they have chosen, and realizes that this is not for him. He see's his friend Julian get caught in prostitution, Rip gettign rich from drug dealing, and Blair doing the same thing.
In the end, he then heads back East and leaves California forever.

So what makes this book so good? The way the story is told, and also how Ellis expressed his characters, and also how he can write. Good book.

Rating:
Summary: Running on empty
Review: Make no mistake about it: Bret Easton Ellis can write. He can produce spare, tight sentences that evoke chilling and haunting images. But there's something fundamentally lacking in "Less Than Zero" which makes me give this book only three stars.

Ellis is a master at depicting the anomie of the young, bored, and super-rich, as he did superbly in "American Psycho"; but at least the loathsome yuppies in that book were alive. "Less Than Zero" seems populated by walking zombies. Here we have Clay, the protagonist (or is he an anti-protagonist?) fresh off the train home for mid-year break from a college in New Hampshire (Dartmouth, maybe? Ellis carefully declines to identify the school); he hasn't been home for two minutes before he's bored into a coma. The problem is, he's already bored the reader. And the rest of the people in the book aren't any better: Blair, his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, spoiled rotten by her film-director father; Julian, descending into a miasma of drugs and prostitution; Daniel and Trent, indistinguishable blonde beach boys with too much money and nothing to do for it; and Clay's parents, dashing from one extra-marital affair to the next, and his sisters, only in their early teens but already as crass, materialistic and soulless as Clay and the parents -- are there any redeeming virtues to these people? Or is what passes for their lives an experience in pure hedonism? Clay seems more like a cardboard cutout than a person; his soul is so shriveled he can watch a snuff movie featuring a fifteen year old girl and yawn through the whole thing. He's a passive sociopath, uncaring, unfeeling, un-alive. One gets the impression that the only reason he's not out making a snuff film of his own is that it would take too much effort. Clay is fascinated by a billboard on the freeway that says "Disappear Here". We get the feeling that if Clay disappeared, nobody would care much one way or the other. He's that much of a cypher.

Ellis's problem in this book is he does such a great job of describing the emptiness of his character's lives, we wonder why he bothered writing about them at all. They don't grab us, they don't interest us, there's nothing about them we can relate to. As Blair says to Clay toward the end of the book, "You're a beautiful boy, but that's about it." It's not that Ellis can't invent interesting characters; Patrick Bateman, the anti-hero of "American Psycho", was a loathsome psychopath, but at least there was some substance to him. The characters in "Less Than Zero" seem to be made of air. Perhaps that's the fundamental problem with the book; the sense of emptiness is so overwhelming that ultimately the book's impact on us fades to less than zero.