SOURCE: "Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero: Entropy in the 'MTV Novel'?" in Modes of Narrative, Königshausen & Neumann, 1990, pp. 68-87.
In the following essay, Freese contemplates the narrative qualities and social commentary of Less Than Zero.
In 1985, a twenty-year-old Bennington College undergraduate named Bret Easton Ellis published a book which, as rumour has it, he had typed on his bedroom floor in about a month and which he entitled Less Than Zero. The young man, who had grown up in Sherman Oaks as the son of a well-to-do real estate analyst, wrote about what he seemed to know well from personal experience: the aimlessness and angst of rich Los Angeles youngsters in their hectic world of drugs, casual sex and violence. In a surprisingly short time his lurid tale about "the seamy underside of the preppy handbook" turned into a craze in Los Angeles and a must on many American campuses. The movie rights were secured by independent producer Marvin Worth before the novel had even appeared in the stores, and Penguin Books bought the paperback rights for $100,000. Meanwhile the film has been released, and the book is out in a fast-selling German translation. Ellis has followed his successful debut with a second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), which the blurb of the paperback edition describes as dealing with "the couplings and capitulations, the dramas and the downfalls of American college life in the 1980s" and which reads like a fictional confirmation of Allan Bloom's crushing diagnosis of contemporary student life in his controversial bestseller The Closing of the American Mind.
This is a free excerpt of 264 words. There are 8,305 words (approx.
28 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Bret Easton Ellis: Critical Essay by Peter Freese Access Pass.
