Less Than Zero

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-11

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Effects of Dysfunctional Families on Society

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, drug addiction and overdose, sex work, and graphic violence.

Less Than Zero is very critical of elite society, specifically as far as the family unit is concerned. The families that appear in Less Than Zero are not happy, nor do they often exhibit conventional family structure. Of course, the departure from the conventional family structure is not what makes them reproachable; instead, it is the lack of concern that they show for one another.

Clay’s girlfriend, Blair, is the daughter of a successful film producer. Blair’s father is dating a model-perfect man, Jared. At the party where Clay meets Jared, he also meets Blair’s mother “who is sitting at the bar, drinking a vodka gimlet” (8). One of Blair’s friends comments, “Oh God, I wish Blair’s father wouldn’t invite Jared to these things. It makes her mother so nervous” (9). The heavy use of hard drugs and drinking at the party, which takes place early in the novel, establishes these characters' environment as one in which the young adults’ reckless behaviors echo those of their self-absorbed, frequently absent parents.

In Beverly Hills, Clay’s sisters are shopping for their father’s Christmas gift. Clay notices that the girls “used our father’s charge account to buy him and me something and then to MGA and Camp Beverly Hills and Privilege to buy themselves something” (14). Meanwhile, Clay sits at a nearby café, “bored out of [his] mind” (14). This shopping episode demonstrates the level of entitlement to which all three kids (Clay and his sisters) have become accustomed.

Clay’s parents are separated, and his mother seems to be dating someone new, which Clay deduces based on a Ferrari he doesn’t recognize that is sitting in his driveway. Nevertheless, the family spends spend Christmas together as a matter of tradition. After going out to dinner and drinks on Christmas night, Clay remarks that his “sisters open their gifts casually, indifferent [sic.] My father is writing out checks for my sisters and me and I wonder why he couldn’t have written them out before” (63). Rather than being offended, or even grateful, for his father’s generosity, Clay wonders why his father hadn’t already prepared the checks that he is used to receiving.

Although Clay and his father enjoy a lunch together over the course of Clay’s four-week visit home, his father spends most of the time “looking out the window, eyeing the fire-hydrant-red Ferrari '' that he just bought (133). Neither do Clay’s childhood memories of his father, presented in flashbacks, involve shared activities or provoke warm emotions. While his memories of his grandparents include simple moments eating candy or sharing a meal, Clay remembers his father being drunk and saying that he would rather die in a plane crash than any other way. His reasoning paints him as a man who prefers to be drunk, stoned, and passively detached from his feelings: “You get bombed on the plane, take a Librium, and the plane takes off and crashes and you never know what hit you” (113). These images of his father also invite the reader to consider whether Clay’s emotional and moral makeup might have turned out differently if he had been brought up with warmth by sober parents or whether he was destined for an aimless life due to his upbringing in which wealth and materialism replaced emotional connection. Clay’s repertoire of friends and their dispassionate lifestyles and excessive behaviors strongly mirror the characteristics of his loveless family, suggesting that the family unit is the root cause of his dissatisfaction and purposelessness.

Ultimately, the characters in the novel exhibit little in the way of empathy or concern for one another in general, and family members' relationships to one another are no exception.

The Objectification of the Body

Less Than Zero is a novel that is flooded with images and the defining gaze of others. These images start as benign ones, such as an Elvis Costello poster in Clay’s room, regarding which he notes, “The eyes don’t look at me, though. They only look at whoever’s standing by the window” (3). The novel’s focus on images is heightened by Clay’s preoccupation with billboards, particularly one on Sunset Boulevard that reads, “Disappear Here.” Clay first notices the billboard on his trip home from the airport with Blair, but he is haunted by its words at several other points in the novel.

Clay’s forced observation of his childhood friend Julian’s prostitution may be considered the climax of the novel. In this pivotal scene, Clay listens to a client tell Julian, “You are a beautiful boy…and here, that’s all that matters” (163). These words are echoed during Clay and Blair’s passive farewell in which Blair admits (after Clay tells her that he never loved her), “You’re a beautiful boy, Clay, but that’s about it” (192). Blair and Clay’s final meeting in LA before Clay’s return to college in New Hampshire features an important message about the relative importance of looks and aesthetics: they are enough for momentary pleasure, but they do not permit the meaningful connection that would allow Clay to forge intimacy with other human beings.

Although all bodies are objectified at various points within the novel, the female body is subject to especially gruesome treatment. Although they are introduced in a relatively benign manner, Clay’s sisters remain nameless, and their brother admits to not knowing their ages. Despite being young teenagers (Clay guesses 13 and 15), they are equally interest in pornography and the images presented in GQ magazine as they are in video games. This objectification of the female body grows incrementally more critical and violent. At one of the novel’s many parties, there is a scene in which Muriel, drunk and recently released from Cedars-Sinai Hospital for treatment of her anorexia, shoots up heroin in the bathroom. Clay notes that as “Muriel closes her eyes and the syringe slowly fills with blood,” his friend Spit is entertained, remarking, “‘Oh, man, this is wild.’” As a final testament to the spectacle made of Muriel’s victimhood, “The photographer comes in and takes a picture” (77). This party episode makes it clear that Muriel’s friends care more about the visual entertainment that she provides them than about her friendship or her health and well-being.

Clay has a college friend Daniel who also lives in Los Angeles. As the winter break nears its end and Clay visits him, he is surprised to hear that Daniel has chosen to write a screenplay instead of returning to Camden. In a plot summary that reveals Daniel’s view of women, he explains:

She’s pretty and sixteen and she lives around here, and on some days she goes to the Westward Ho on Westwood Boulevard and she meets her dealer there: This seventeen-year-old guy from Uni. And this guy spends all day shooting her full of smack again and again….and then he feeds her some acid and takes her off to a party…and she gets gangbanged by the entire party (147).

Clay understands the story as a real-life anecdote. When Daniel asks, “What do you think?” Clay responds, “That’s…too bad.” Daniel’s subsequent question, “Good idea for a screenplay?” (147) reveals the story as pure fiction. Nevertheless, the story is made manifest in one of the novel’s most brutally rendered scenes, which graphically depicts the image of a naked, barely conscious 12-year-old girl whom Spin injects with drugs before the others rape her. This image of the girl—younger than Clay’s sisters—is a symbol for the role of women in the world that Ellis has created. Reducing individuals to simply objects of visual and sexual gratification to be used for one’s own pleasure escalates in the novel to the crimes of rape, pedophilia, and human trafficking as the culmination of this separation of sexual satisfaction from emotional connection and shared responsibility for others.

The Corruptive Nature of Pop Culture

Ellis depicts 1980s pop culture as equally alluring and degenerate. His characters wander aimlessly through their days, distracting themselves with—in addition to alcohol, parties, and drugs—the relatively new music television station known as MTV, which debuted in 1981. None of Ellis’s characters are musicians, although some occasionally aspire to it, as evidenced in Blair’s passing comment, “Someone in Fred Segal said that I should be in a band” (45), an observation based on her video-ready looks rather than on musical talent or training. This new phenomenon, music television, has intensified the image-obsessed nature of society, and the novel often presents it in the background at parties as another aspect of hedonism and detachment.

Less Than Zero features countless references to specific bands, including Duran, The Go-Go’s, The Fleshtones, and The Clash. These specific references locate the novel squarely in the 1980s. This historical moment is significant because it is the generation which saw the arrival of music videos to the home. Music, which formerly could only be listened to, could now be watched. Moreover, the relatively new availability of cable television, which was developed in the 1970s, allowed these videos to be consumed in individuals’ private homes. Because of this, Ellis’s characters are the first generation to make use of this new technology during their formative teenage years.

Ellis’s characters use MTV to pass the time, thus encouraging their idleness. In one of Clay’s earliest visits home, he writes, “I turn on MTV and tell myself I could get over it and go to sleep if I had some Valium and then I think about Muriel and feel a little sick as the videos begin to flash by” (4). Trent’s mother’s cleaning lady sits in the living room “with this dazed look on her face, watching MTV” (44). As Clay’s friend Daniel tells him that a love affair from college might have resulted in a girl becoming pregnant with his child, Clay’s describes his response as follows: “I’m lying on my bed, watching MTV, the phone cradled in my neck, and I tell him not to worry about it” (55). Not only do music videos prevent Ellis’s characters from engaging in more purposeful work, they prevent them from emotionally investing in one another.

In addition to music and MTV, the films featured in Ellis’s novels are representative of a deteriorating, image-obsessed culture. Most of the films specifically mentioned are sensational horror films such as Friday the 13th and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Moreover, Ellis depicts his characters not as savvy cinephiles but as mindless consumers of these images. When Clay and Trent go to the movies together, they cannot even remember the name of the film. Instead, they smoke joints in the “small, hollow room” (90). Movies, like music videos, are a place for these characters to pass the time and feed their appetite for images as a distraction.