'Less Than Zero'

Brett Easton Ellis is one of the most devastating writers of the past 30 years. Devastating.

I don't know what it means, necessarily. It's just, read one of his books and let me know how you feel about things afterwards.

Typically, you feel like shit. His novels do not evoke goodwill and hope. They evoke sadness, loneliness, desperation, dependence and depravity.

His books are where human animals exist outside of the normal mores and laws of human nature, where life is precious and there is at least the vague attempt at caring for one another.

Not for Ellis. His chractesr maim and kill with no remorse. It's literary natural selection. The strong survive and the weak end up becoming male prostitutes.

While reading Less Than Zero, I came away thankful that I wasn't brought up in any kind of life that those fictional teenagers were brought up in. One might say that it's fiction. Probably. But you can't tell me that there aren't 100,000 brats in Los Angeles just like Clay or Blair. It's happened and has been happeneing for probably 50 years.

Someone wrote that Less Than Zero is Catcher in the Rye for Gen X. I'd like to think it's more of a The Graduate or Reality Bites for Gen X. Holden Caulfield was far too young to realize that people were such dopes. To really grasp the sadness enveloping us, one must be a bit older.

Recently, Ellis wrote a sequel to the book. It basically catches up with the Less Than Zero crew 25 years after the fact. I will probably read it. Although, I suspect I'll be disappointed because there's no way these people are as interesting at 40 than they were at 19.