Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero

Book Critique

When I first saw that I needed a book to critique pertaining to the class, I had a few in mind. But the first to come up was Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. He is known to write what is referred to as “social sattire”, so I saw it fitting to go with this book.

The narrator, Clay, returns home for Christmas break from school in New Hampshire to his family’s home in southern California. The area in which his family lives is high class, and drug-rich. All the teenagers are into name brands, drives Porches or Fararris, do mountains of pills and drugs, and basically sleep with whomever they feel like. So Clay returns home to find his best friend, Julian, is into drug dealing and prostitution. Blair, his longtime girlfriend, has seen her life spiral downward with family issues, health problems and drugs, ever since Clay left for school, and he finds himself wondering whether the two of them will ever get back together. The book follows Clay through many exploits, all of which include having a whole lot of money, with nothing to do except for partying it up. Clay goes through problems with his sisters, to problems with his divorced parents, he has a run in or two with the local drug dealer, and is left, most of the time, trying to get his friends out of trouble. All the while, he is baked off his head, and conjuring up all sorts of randomness.

One thing that stood out to me as I read this book, and mostly because I’ve read some of his other work, is that the characters aren’t described, not even Clay. You can’t picture them, sympathize with them, or get to know them. Some of my friends felt like the book let them down in that sense, because they couldn’t even imagine for themselves what the characters were like. But for me, I enjoyed that part of it. I felt like the author did this for a reason, not to make a point, but to be real, because a main point of the book is that the world the kids were living in was...