Brett Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero is a Fitting Satire of American Narcissism

The dark side of American culture is an individualistic narcissism. We are obsessed with personal success. We want to make money. But why? What is the end goal of that wealth and success?

Certainly not doing cocaine and eating McDonald's. Most people have the good sense to exclude empty hedonism as an answer to that question. However, our collective culture hasn't gotten the memo. Just listen to popular music: "I get money, I get hoes, I get cars, I get clothes." No one really sings about "I have a loving family" do they? Or "I love my dad."

Indeed, though it's true that many would say that hedonism is not the end goal of their life, often our revealed preferences suggest otherwise. We don't seem to believe in any shared or transcendent good.

But what if this nihilism is taken to its extreme? Brett Easton Ellis's "Less than Zero" can be read as a dark satire of that extreme. The result is a slow-burn horror story that you will welcome escape from, but that achieves morality in its repulsiveness.

The story centers around Clay, a college freshman returning to his hometown in Los Angeles for winter break. Clay returns to a lifestyle of unmitigated hedonism. He seems to have unlimited money from his family wealth and absentee, divorced parents who are too self-absorbed to pay him any notice. Clay is also self-absorbed to the point where he can't remember the ages of his two sisters or really anything about them, except that they steal the cocaine Clay keeps in his room.

Clay spends his time going to parties, going to the movies, and eating fast food. At these parties he meets up with his girlfriend Blair, who he doesn't have strong feelings for because he seems to prefer men, but he can't make himself care enough to break up with her either. So he passively leads her on and their relationship slowly fizzles out.

Other "friends" Clay encounters include Trent, a morally vacant male model Clay follows around, and Julian, whose life seems to be collapsing from the drug use.

Clay does cocaine every couple of hours, and the result is a baseline of elevated stimulus that he has completely adapted to, making all experience seemingly dead and filled with malaise. Clay constantly reminisces to "before", his childhood before he started living this lifestyle. This longing sometimes gets emotional and causes him to break down. However, at the same time Clay can never break through his fundamental self-absorption and apathy towards everyone else.

The story starts slow, deliberately agonizing, but Ellis does a great job slowly, imperceptibly ramping up the horror of the situation. Julian disappears, but no one in Clay's friend group seems to care enough to look for him. Suddenly he reappears and asks Clay for a large sum of money "to pay for an abortion". Despite vague skepticism, Clay has so much money that he lends it to him.

When Clay asks for this money back, Julian reveals that he's been forced to become a male prostitute and can only pay him back via payment from his pimp, Finn. This escalates into one of the most horrifying scenes, when Julian tries to quit this "business" but is grabbed by Finn, forcibly injected with heroin, and is dragged into another room. In this, the story channels a much darker version of Pinocchio, with Finn as the Coachman.

However, the most spiritually horrifying part of the book is when Clay sees Finn at the supermarket the next day, smiles and waves to him. His apathy wins.

To be honest, to be absorbed into the story of the book is to be teleported to a version of hell. It is a tough read, one that the reader is glad to be over.

At the same time, while fantastical and featuring extreme drug use, the world is a little bit too close for comfort. Certainly closer to home than Ellis's other works - most people are not high flying financiers like those in American Psycho, but many people grow up in American suburbs and experienced the culture there. This book is that culture taken to a nihilistic limit.

Actually, the benefit of the book is how it makes the reader want to run as far away from that world and its characters as one possibly can. To escape that world, one is motivated to do the opposite of the characters of the book, to do charitable acts, to care for others, to be cared for, to have a good relationship with one's parents and children, to plan for the future, to get an education, etc.

I would say that this book should be taught in high schools to disenchant students from the materialistic lives advertised in mass media. However, few parents would be comfortable with their kids being exposed to the horrifying scenes in the book. Perhaps then the parents should read it instead.

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