To me, though, this completely deadening, unappealing, unglamorous litany of friends' names and routes driven and restaurants visited and drugs taken was so skillfully done because it should have been so boring but was somehow strangely mesmerizing. I seem to be in the minority in feeling this way, and without that sense that there was a larger point, this novel would've been just the cheap trick many other readers accuse it of being. The reason why I thought this was so good, though, and what I'm surprised no one else on here seems to have felt, was that while in one way this was such a total period piece specifically criticizing the materialistic hedonism of the eighties or whatever, to me it transcended that.

I will say that I think this is the perfect cocaine novel because it so perfectly epitomizes the soul-sucking hollowness and numb angst at the core of this kind of lifestyle and drug use (or so I've heard). My experience of this book was no doubt colored by an unexpected plate-of-shrimp coincidence of life and fiction that I cannot expand upon adequately on this family website. I mean, a lot of what I kept thinking while reading this was about how tragically I was born in the wrong time, and why didn't I ever get to see Fear and X in LA in their heyday, and I'm pretty sure this was not really what I was supposed to take away from this novel. However, maybe that's just because I got confused and missed the point, as often happens.

The Village Voice blurb on the back of my copy calls Less Than Zero 'sexy and sassy,' which has to be one of the most bizarre characterizations imaginable: to me, this is one of least sassy, least sexy books I can think of (might tie with Marilynne Robinson's Gilead for that prize?). I must say I find many reactions to it perplexing. Okay, so I really, really liked this a lot, though I totally get why a lot of people didn't. Oh yeah, I know: Bright Lights, Big City. This experience reminds me of something, but I'm not sure what. Its appeal is no less powerful for being difficult to pinpoint or explain. This book seems boring and shallow, and reading it gives me an anesthetized, hollow, detached feeling that I would not describe as entirely pleasant.Īnd yet I cannot seem to stop, and whenever I have to, I become very anxious to return to it as quickly as I can.

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis