Zombies Less Than Zero

By Paul Gray

This decidedly offbeat first novel offers a mixed message to all those who might be worried about contemporary teenagers. On the one hand, the example of its author looks hopeful: Bret Easton Ellis, 21, is a student at Bennington College and obviously an enterprising and successful young man. But the story he tells about members of his generation is lurid in the extreme. Most readers who are not helplessly zonked on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will finish Less Than Zero with the conviction that they have not fretted over the current condition of young people nearly enough.

Clay, 18, a freshman at a college in New Hampshire, spends a monthlong Christmas break back home in Los Angeles. He seems to remember that Blair, who picks him up at the airport, was his girlfriend before he went off to school. He also dimly recalls his parents' separation, "which was, I think, about a year ago." He stays with his mother and two younger sisters; the precocious girls watch porno videocassettes in their bedroom and assure Clay that they will not snitch any more cocaine from his room because they can now buy it on their own. Before too long, Clay faces the same daily decision that afflicts all of his rich L.A. friends: whether to get drunk or stoned or both.

He tells his parents he wants "nothing" for Christmas and seems to mean it. Indifference may be Clay's most endearing virtue. He sleeps with Griffin (male) and Blair (female); whoever asks first gets him. When one of his sisters gives him an expensive leatherbound datebook, he knows at once he will not use it: "I tried to keep a datebook one summer, but it didn't work out. I'd get confused and write down things just to write them down and I came to this realization that I didn't do enough things to keep a datebook." Still, he shambles with a fast crowd; one girl keeps track of her mother's whereabouts by reading Variety. Clay and his pals party nearly every night and do dope while cruising through some of the city's most expensive homes and restaurants. As Clay's month in L.A. draws to a close, the collective search for thrills grows wilder and nastier.

* Ellis conveys the hellishness of aimless lives with economy and skill; his efforts to distance Clay, the narrator, from all the other zombies is unsuccessful. True, he has a few scruples. He does not mainline heroin, he walks out before the end of an apparently genuine snuff film, and he refuses an obliging friend's invitation to rape a drugged and trussed up twelve-year- old girl. He is also sensitive. The crying jag he experiences at his psychiatrist's office may suggest some inner anguish, although it might just as easily occur because he spends so much time drugged to the eyeballs.

Ultimately, Ellis' novel is anchored to a hero who stands for nothing. How Clay managed to muster the energy to go to college in the first place remains mysterious; so do the forces that made him so passive and world-weary at age 18. That such questions about the central character seem important is a tribute to Ellis' talent; his refusal to address them is thus all the more unsettling. In spite of its surface vitality and macabre glitter, Less Than Zero offers little more than its title promises.