Customer Reviews
What makes this book so good? - By: Gillyp, 03 Nov 2008 
Bret Easton Ellis documents the life of Clay, eighteen years old, back homein LA for the holidays from his New England college. Clay does little. He movesin a daze, from bedroom to pool to parties & tense family dinners, watching the lives of his family & friends - mostly fellow teens with no direction, too much money & too much freedom - their parents all divorced & mostly absent.
The style is choppy- deliberately so - as Clay's thoughts & feelings grasshopper through observations & feelings. Emotionally detached, he watches his world with the blinds drawn, numbed by a haze of sex, drugs & alcohol, witness to the slow-motion death-dives of the lives around him as his friends competein an endless, no-holds-barred search for ever bigger & more contemptible thrills to alleviate the ennui of their hopeless lives.
Darkly pessimistic, Less than Zero confused me; why did I keep reading? Nothing really happens. There is virtually no plot & the only character development is that of Clay himself & his slow realisation that he's livingin Hell.
Clay's final vow to leave LA & never return is the final wordin a book that goes nowhere but is, nevertheless, always disturbing, fascinating & compelling.
Disappear Here - By: Starkweather, 31 Jul 2008 
I for one thoroughly enjoyed this book. Bret Easton Ellis sets the tone of his writing style with his first novel here. It doesn't disappoint & is still an enjoyable read twenty years later. Likein the style of Ellis's other novels, Less Than Zero is no different: this book is about a group of seemingly bored, rich & attractive individuals who appear to have everything but happiness. It's basically writtenin the style of a diary, narrated by the main character Clay, & is entertaining, believable & sad.
Depressingly brilliant - By: Bruno Alves, 03 Nov 2007 
I think the most astonishing thing about Bret Easton Ellis's first book is how well constructed it is, how it permanently keeps you on edge, & how effectively it conveys an atmosphere of increasing dread out of what starts out to be just an impressive amount of shallowness. American Psycho notwithstanding, Less than Zero might just be his most powerful book, & if you are new to Ellis, then you arein for a real treat. For thosein the know, all the familiar Ellis themes are already firmlyin place: the emptiness, the alienation, the complete boredom of a spoiled generation - abandoned & eaten by their parents - who only get their kicksin the most perverse & obscene ways. These LA scenesters are utterly dead, or better yet, they are undead, and, like proper vampires, need to sustain themselves on a steady diet of human sacrifice. The deaths, OD's, car-crashes & snuff films are the only things that raise a flicker of genuine interestin them. All the rest (the parties, the drugs, the sex) is just business as usual.
What is not business as usual is the way Ellis carefully builds on this, introducing & exposing the reader to all the superficial drug abuse & mindless sex before building up to the real decadence underneath - the only one that seems to elicit a flicker of interest (if not true excitement) from these walking dead. Andin Clay, Ellis has one of his best characters: as dead as the rest of them, he expertly guides the reader through this emotionally barren landscape, showing just the tiniest bit of troubled humanity needed to sustain the reader, towards the final scenes, before returning to his emotionally flat-lined natural state. In any novel, this type of pacing would be great, but for a first novel writtenin his mid-twenties, it is absolutely ace. Read it & be depressed by Ellis's brilliance.
The dumbest generation yet - By: Trevor Coote, 22 Oct 2007 Very much a practise run for American Psycho, this nihilistic tale of alienation & ennui among 1980s Los Angeles youth leaves the reader with a feeling of emptiness & despair. This is not alienation through poverty but through excess, the triumph of consumerism over imagination, catalysed by a second-rate culture & education system, & poor quality parenting. Narrated by Clay, on holidayin Los Angeles for Christmas, a clique of decadent & aimless young Californians subsists on a soulless diet of MTV cable, porn films, cocaine, crystal meth & loveless sex; what Philip Roth has called `the dumbest generation yet.' In this moral vacuum they drift from one ruinous party to another, indifferent to the often tragic consequences of their actions (ODs, abortions), balancing precariously between a meaningless life & a meaningless death. The novel is powerful, effective & accomplishedin a horrible sort of way, with an undertone of menace, butin the end you can't help feeling that it is as pointless as the lives of the cartoon-ish characters within. A book to sink the spirits.
The No Future Generation - By: Stephan Überbacher, 19 Oct 2007 "Less Than Zero" is the first novel by the American writer Bret Easton Ellis. The main characters name is Clay, a New Hampshire college student, who returns home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation. Clay & his friends are travelling from party to party, taking drugs & having sex with one another. It's the normal life of American upper class teenagers, but then the parties are getting wilder & wilder, Clay notices that his best friend is a junky & other friends of his are watching hardcore snuff pornos. And once Clay asks a friend: "Why are you doing this? You have everything," & he answers: "No I don't. I don't have anything to lose."
And that's exactly what the book is about - the description of the "no future generation". It's the generation which has nothing to do, because they have everything. So they are destroying themselves, & B. E. Ellis describes this mercilessly.
"Less Than Zero" is a harsh & violent book, which shows the problems of our society: boredom, egoism, over-stimulation... "Less Than Zero" was writtenin the 80's, but the problems are as relevant today as they were then.
