![]() ![]() ![]() This would best capture the existential reality of youth boredom, which of course, as all teenagers knew, was the most significant problem confronting society in the Reagan years.Įven as a 15-year-old, though, I had a hard time imagining any adults reading the book or taking it seriously. It played to all of my aesthetic proclivities then, all the bad ideas I ever had as an aspiring fiction writer: Write about apathetic teens doing lots of drugs and having sex indiscriminately dump in a lot of inscrutably allusive pop-culture references strip the prose of all lyricism and substitute a brutalist stream of consciousness, with the trick that the consciousness you’re streaming is so devoid of reflexive insight that it comes across as aleatory and affectless. ![]() ![]() I was working at Waldenbooks in the mall then, and the novel seemed to come out of nowhere it just appeared on the shelving cart one shift as if it were my destiny to read it. I first read it as a teenager in high school, and it sort of blew my mind. Prompted by editing this essay about the Less Than Zero film and by fortuitously coming across a copy of the novel in a thrift store, I decided to re-read Bret Easton Ellis’s debut book, Less Than Zero, which was published in 1985. ![]()
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