Less Than Zero

“Nobody’s home. The air conditioner is on and the house smells like pine. There’s a note on the kitchen table that tells me that my mother and sisters are out, Christmas shopping.”

These lines illustrate the nature of the household in which Clay grew up. His family is not there to greet him upon his return from his first semester of college. Their physical absence is representative of their emotional absence, as is also true of many of the other families depicted in the novel.

“What are the two biggest lies? ‘I’ll pay you back and I won’t come in your mouth.’”

Alana shares these lines at Kim’s party, claiming to have heard them from Jared, the partner of Blair’s father. She claims not to understand them, but they illustrate the nature of Ellis’s characters and their social milieu. They also reveal Ellis’s style, which captures his characters’ ways of speaking with full fidelity to their environment and age.

“I wonder if he’s for sale,” the other of my two sisters, who I think is fifteen, mumbles, and both of them giggle from the backseat.”

Clay and his mothers and sisters have just finished shopping at La Scala boutique, and Clay overhears this vapid conversation between his (to him, indistinguishable) sisters. Their response is a passing comment made by their mother that a particular neighborhood home is for sale. Particularly the words, “wonder if he’s for sale” continue to resonate with him. Clay repeats them over and over in his mind. Moreover, they exhibit an element of foreshadowing in recognition of Julian’s ultimate enmeshment in prostitution.

“She’s really pale and so totally thin that I can make out the veins in her neck too clearly. She also has dark circles under her eyes and the pink lipstick she’s put on clashes badly with the pale white skin on her face. She’s watching some exercise show on TV and all these issues of Glamour and Vogue and Interview lie by her bed.”

These words mark Clay’s visit to his high school friend Muriel, who Blair says wanted him to visit her at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. These lines exhibit both irony and tragedy in depicting a girl hospitalized for anorexia watching an exercise show. They also clearly demonstrate the extremes to which women will go in pursuit of the unhealthy standard of beauty that is propagated by the magazines that Muriel features in her hospital room.

“‘Hey, listen,” he starts. ‘I’m sorry about not meeting you and Trent at Carney’s that night and freaking out at the party. It’s just like, I’ve been strung out for like the past four days, and I just, like, forgot…I haven’t even been home…oh man, my mother must be freaking out.’”

Such are Julian’s first words to Clay, the first words spoken by this pivotal character in the novel. Julian is revealed to be desperate, distracted, and sick. Although Julian—and Ellis—do not disclose further details about his condition at this point in the novel, the reader can infer drug use as at least the partial cause. Moreover, the fact that Julian hasn’t seen his mother in four days underscores the detached nature of the families depicted in the novel.

“Daniel also thinks that Vanden, a girl he saw at school in New Hampshire, is pregnant…got this letter from her a couple of days ago and he tells me that Vanden might not be coming back; that she might be starting a punk-rock group in New York...that it may or may not be his kid”

Clay’s half-hearted attention to his friend Daniel’s report matches the disinterested nature with which Clay himself delivers the news. After reporting this news from his first-semester love tryst, Daniel admits that he doesn’t see the point in even calling her. These lines demonstrate Ellis’s characters’ complete disregard for the circumstances of others, especially women. They also demonstrate the characters’ penchant for using music as an escape.

“I realize that all it comes down to is that I, this eighteen-year-old boy with shaking hands and blond hair and with the beginnings of a tan and semistoned [sic.] sitting in Chasen’s on Doheny and Beverly, waiting for my father to ask me what I want for Christmas.”

These lines are especially expressive. They provide a rare physical description of Clay's appearance and surroundings. They also characterize his headspace as perennially distracted and detached. Ellis leaves ambiguous whether Clay himself recognizes the irony that he, who seems to have access to unlimited resources, is waiting to be asked about his Christmas gift.

“We leave Chasen’s and the streets are empty and the air’s still dry and hot and the wind’s still blowing. On Little Santa Monica, a car lays overturned, its windows broken, and as we pass it, my sisters crane their necks to get a closer look and they ask my mother, who’s driving, to slow down and she doesn’t and my sisters complain”

These lines showcase again the disregard of Ellis’s characters—here Clay’s sisters—for other people. Ellis’s paratactic prose is meant to resemble Clay’s stream-of-consciousness thinking. Finally, the fact that the mother refuses to slow down is intended to demonstrate her own disinterest in accommodating her family, rather than a morally centered refusal on her part. Those in Clay’s family exist within their own worlds for themselves alone.

“Last Christmas in Palm Springs, I’d be lying in bed, naked, and even with the air conditioner on, the cool air blowing over me and a bowl of ice, some of it wrapped in a towel, next to the bed, I couldn’t become cool….I’d try to smoke a joint but I could barely breathe, I’d smoke it anyway, just to get to sleep.”

These lines figure in a flashback scene during which Clay recalls the previous year’s Christmas in the desert of Palm Springs. Ellis here gives an exceptional characterization of place, after the fashion of John Steinbeck’s description of the Salinas Valley. These lines, delivered with his characteristic privileging of stream-of-conscious narration over attention to punctuation, are an effective and compelling representation of Clay’s physical surroundings.

“I find this picture of myself, wearing jeans and no shirt and no shoes, lying on the floor, with sunglasses on, my hair wet, and I think about who took it and can’t remember.”

This is one of several instances in the novel wherein Clay looks within the contents of a shoebox of his childhood bedroom. These lines are emblematic of this critical juncture within Clay’s life, as, having returned from college, he stands at the precipice between adolescence and adulthood and reflects on the former. These lines also suggest the incomplete nature of memory, as well as underscoring the importance of images.

“I get up late the next morning to the blare of Duran coming from my mother’s room. The door’s open and my sisters are lying on a large bed, wearing bathing suits, leafing through old issues of GQ, watching some porno film on the Betamax with the sound turned off.”

These lines are almost comical for the excess they exhibit, which they suggest is common in privileged California lives. The moment is the day after Christmas, and each of Clay’s family members is shielded from society and their own family in favor of indulging in entertainment used for isolation.

“I don’t know why the fire bothered me, but it did, and I had these visions of a child, not yet dead, lying across the flames, burning. Maybe some kid thrown through the windshield and who’d fallen onto the engine, and I asked my sisters if they thought they saw a kid burning, melting on the engine, and they said no”

These lines exhibit Clay’s first experience of the fiercely disturbing images from which he will suffer several times during the novel. The scene of a car crash, told in flashback, prompts this first grotesque image of dead children, and Clay will continue to see visions of dead children as well as collect newspaper clippings of heinous crimes in the novel’s present tense. This culminates is his witnessing the suffering child who is being raped at the end of the novel, an act that he questions and is distressed by but does not try to stop.

“On the news I hear there were four people beaten to death in the hills last night and I stay up most of the night, looking out the window, staring into the backyard, looking for werewolves.”

These lines demonstrate Clay’s increasing paranoia. They also impart a quasi-Gothic element to the setting of Clay’s Los Angeles home as well as to the novel itself. Clay seems genuinely fearful of werewolves, which the reader can interpret as his incrementally increasing detachment from reality and his hypochondria as well as a metaphor for the untamed behaviors of the human denizens of Los Angeles.

“I had this dream, see, where I saw the whole world melt. I was standing on La Cienega and from there I could see the whole world and it was melting and it was just so strong and realistic like. And so I thought, `Well, if this dream comes true, how can I stop it, you know?’...So I thought if I, like, pierced my ear or something, like alter my physical image, dye my hair, the world wouldn’t melt.”

These lines are spoken by Ronette, a friend of Trent’s who appears only once in the novel. Although at first glance this half-musician, half-hair stylist character seems erratic and unpredictable, in a way, the Los Angeles world that she inhabits is in fact melting, both in the sense that it is consistently oppressively hot and in that the people in it are morally degenerate.

“An old woman, holding an umbrella, falls to her knees on the other side of the street. ‘Remember last summer?’ he’s asking me. ‘Not really.’ There are people standing over the woman and an ambulance comes, but most of the people in La Scala don’t seem to notice.”

This is an important scene due to the disinterest shown by Clay and others to the physical distress of an old woman. Elderly women are often represented as alternately pitiable and respectable figures; nevertheless, although Clay takes notice of the ailing woman, neither he nor those in his company take any action, which represents the extent of Ellis’s characters’ self-involvement and social apathy.

“‘I mean his father’s got a fucking series that’s in the fucking top ten. He’s got his own steadicam and U.S.C. still doesn’t let him in? Things are fucked up.’ ‘They didn’t let him in because he’s a heroin addict,’ Rip calls out.”

Trent and Spin discuss a mutual acquaintance named Larry who didn’t get into film school. These lines are both funny and ironic. These lines showcase the high social status and entitled attitudes of Clay’s milieu. Rip, himself a drug dealer, casts aspersions on another absent character—who is mentioned in the text only here—pointing out the likely truth that his struggles with addiction to heroin are the reason for his exclusion from the University of Southern California.

“It begins to rain in L.A. I read about the houses falling, slipping down the hills in the middle of the night and I stay up all night, usually wired on coke, until early morning to make sure nothing happens to our house.” 

These lines provide further description of the physical setting of the novel, replete with extreme temperature and weather. Rather than a sunny paradise, Ellis reveals Los Angeles as a landscape of extremes with land that is as vulnerable as its people. These lines contain a metaphor: Clay’s descent into his drug habit mirrors the physical fall of Los Angeles homes. Moreover, drugs have become a way for Clay to cope with the tragedy around him.

“’I think I would rather die in a plane crash than any other way,’ my father said after some time. ‘You get bombed on the plane, take a Librium, and the plane takes off and crashes and you never know what hit you.’”

Such is the family conversation at the gathering of Clay’s extended family in Palm Springs. Here, Clay’s drunk father casually reads the paper and admits to this sort of thought. Despite his family members’ protests that such a fate would be awful, Clay’s father, like Clay himself, irreverently explores the topic of death and aims to strengthen his claim. These lines suggest that Clay’s father is probably the root of many of Clay’s own detached and irreverent tendencies.

“I realize that the money doesn’t matter. All that does is that I want to see the worst.”

Clay speaks these lines after being told that he will bear witness to his childhood friend Julian’s prostitution. These lines strengthen the novel’s motif of voyeurism. At the same time, they demonstrate Clay’s attachment to Julian, evidenced by his commitment to stand by his friend at a vulnerable moment, and his concomitant disregard for Julian, whom he might have protected in such a circumstance, given Clay’s access to the money that Julian needed.

“I cannot take my eyes off the dead boy. There are moths flying above his head, twirling around the light bulb that hangs over him, illuminating the scene…Trent starts to laugh and lights up a joint.” 

This is the first cadaver that Clay witnesses in the novel. The dead body of a teenage boy found in a back alley of a club is the result of a drug overdose. On one level, this unidentified teen’s fate is a cautionary tale against the risks of drugs. On another level, these lines reinforce the lack of respect, or even humanity, of Clay and his friends, who smoke and chat casually around the corpse.

“‘If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.’” 

These lines, delivered near the novel’s close by Clay’s friend and drug dealer, Rip, help to characterize him as the novel’s antihero. He speaks these lines in response to Clay’s uncharacteristic protest that Rip’s act of tying up and raping a 12-year-old-girl is not “right.” These lines exhibit a play on the word “right” and reveal the morally bankrupt Rip as the novel’s most debased character.

“‘Oh, shit, Rip, what don’t you have?’ ‘I don’t have anything to lose’” 

This powerful exchange between Rip and Clay takes place when Clay confronts Rip for the planned rape of a young girl, asking him why he can’t be satisfied with what he has. It underscores the villainy of the former while affording a glimpse at the protagonist’s possible development of a sense of humanity and responsibility for another person. Clay, who has indifferently looked upon a young person’s dead body, cheated on his girlfriend, and watched an elderly woman faint from the heat without offering her any aid, finally takes a stand against his friend on the basis of morals. Rip, for his part, suggests that his privilege might be the cause of his own depravity.

“‘It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who doesn’t care.’” 

Blair delivers these lines at her final meeting with Clay, her estranged boyfriend, just before he returns to school. He has just admitted that he perhaps never loved her, while she, claiming that tried, admits that she found it hard to love him, too. These lines of dialogue reveal the consequences of apathy. Rather than being the easy way out, detachment prevents the development of meaningful emotional bonds that attend a relationship of real love.