Close Reading 'Less Than Zero'

Reading is Writing #12: Was Norm MacDonald right about Bret Easton Ellis?

Note: I am sort of ending the practice of titling these posts “Reading is Writing.” I intend, at the end of the semester, to publish a continually updated master list of “reading is writing” posts as part of a broader effort to organize this blog.

Bret Easton Ellis at an event in 2023, Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0

This semester, I am disregarding the common advice in MFA programs and am working on a novel length project, instead of discrete short stories. I chose to do this because I find it easier to write novels than short stories. The project in question is about a group of 20-somethings Having A Bad Time.

Because this project deals primarily with disaffected and unstable youth, my reading list this semester is skewed toward the Young, the Troubled and the Modern. I have a couple Bret Easton Ellis novels on there. Part of this is institutional loyalty, Ellis is a Bennington grad. But part of it is a desire to look more closely at late postmodern style. Norm MacDonald once called Ellis “the talentless hack’s talentless hack,” and I want to see for myself if the great Canuck was right about this one.

But even if Norm was right, I am sympathetic to talentless hacks and men who write in the prevailing style of their day. I am a partisan of the commercial: Dashiell Hammett and Stephen King belong in any serious list of great American writers. This sympathy for the merely successful is, doubtless, a product of my own insecurity. I am, professionally, a hack. Anyone who produces daily news is a hack, and hackery, the art of churning out unstylish prose for a biweekly paycheck, is a good school for style: The first time you edit a piece with the word ‘revamp’ in it you think: ‘Gee, don’t see that one too much,’ the 100th time you do it, you jump out a window. I have a personal ban list of words and phrases.

Hacks, I’m saying, learn what they hate.

And what better way to interpret style than by close-reading? For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term (or who were not subjected to the technique in high school english), Close Reading is the bread-and-butter of good criticism, it is the process of paying deep attention to a text’s structures. Close reading looks at everything from the syllable flow and recurrence of vowel sounds to the length of sentences and the presence of embedded allusions.

We’re doing a close reading this week of part of Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel. This book is written in a first-person, present tense. That stylistic choice is important to discuss upfront, because I have an ideological dislike of the present tense.

In Immediacy Anna Kornbluh identifies a first-person, present tense narrative style with an emphasis on scene-time as indicative of the general style of contemporary prose fiction.* Kornbluh argues this evolved out of the techniques of literary postmodernism as the crises of capitalist production resulted in an economy focused on personal participation in the circulation of (ephemeral, low-quality) commodities, rather than the social production of capital goods (or durable commodities).

While I have my criticisms of Kornbluh’s read of international political economy (post 70’s stagnation is real in the imperial core. However: China.) her analysis of prose style is very interesting. Less Than Zero, which I just finished reading for school, embodies this shift towards unmediated.

I shall start with a plot summary to bring readers up to speed. Less Than Zero follows a college student, Clay, who has returned (from not-Bennington) to Los Angeles for a winter break. On this winter break, he wanders around LA watching his friendships disintegrate, sleeping with people and doing lots of coke. The novel is significantly concerned with sexual exploitation: Julian, Clay’s friend, is coerced into prostitution; Trent, another friend, shows a snuff film of the sexual torture of a teenage girl at a party; Rip, Clay’s coke dealer, keeps a young girl as a sex slave at the end of the novel. Clay and his ex(?)girlfriend, Blair, resist participating in this violence and question its morality, but Clay never addresses this directly through narration. We are left with actions as the evidence of this revulsion.

Less Than Zero works by adopting a stream of anti-consciousness. There is little personal awareness, little thought and little commentary. The novel is unemotional about its subjects, staying at a dissociative distance that mimics a horrified, but enthralled, participant’s inability to intervene in the events around him. It is a novel of absence: absence of morality, of conscience, of meaning, and it works because Easton Ellis matches his style to this thematic concern. But it prefigured later Realist works that try (and imo largely fail) to use this sort of gestural writing to evoke intellectual and moral depth. Where Easton Ellis’ technique fits into the schema proposed by Kornbluh is its hostility to artifice and fictionality and other people: “Fiction, narrative, impersonality and collectivity withdraw; reality, voice, personality and atomism ascend. To get at value, get rid of mediation.” (Kornbluh, 68) First person present tense does this by shedding the other-facing interest of previous generations of realism in favor of a narrow, atomized mimetic reproduction of experience, but an experience stripped of its interior aspect. Thought becomes perception, deliberation action, and doubt with “Why not? What the hell.”

(Part of this is the evacuation of ideological content from art: “Less than Zero,” is a song about English fascism and the complacency of socialist British youth and their acculturation to an ambiently racist and authoritarian culture through mass media; everything means less than zero. Hey…Keir [Enoch Powell Starmer]. Less Than Zero is a novel about the decadence of the upper stratum of imported California Babbitry that adopts disaffected fear as its primary ideological weapon.)

I think the unmediated mode in realist fiction makes for bad, lazy fiction. But I think Easton Ellis is good at a slightly older, more stylistically complex and self-aware use of these tools. His authorial control has not dissolved into the flow of expression; there is still irony, still depths beneath the gestural surface—the point of absence in his novels is to call attention to itself.

Here’s what that looks like in a short sequence:

“So you’re actually going back to school,” [Blair] says.
“I guess so. There’s nothing here.”
“Did you expect to find something?”
Like I’ve been here forever.
I quietly kick my foot against the terrace railing and ignore her. It is a mistake. Suddenly she looks at me and takes off her Wayfarers.
“Clay, did you ever love me?”
I’m studying a billboard and say that I didn’t hear what she said.
“I asked if you ever loved me?”
On the terrace the sun bursts into my eyes and for one blinding moment I see myself clearly. I remember the first time we made love, in the house in Palm Springs, her body tan and wet, lying against cool, white sheets.
“Don’t do this, Blair,” I tell her.

(Less than Zero, p.203)

This dialogue exchange from near the end of the novel shows one of the central concerns of Ellis’ book. This is a book written around avoidances and absences: the absence of affect, of reaction, of feeling. It is a portrait by omission with the emotional weight of the novel conveyed by the absence of direct interior insight in Clay’s (the narrator) narration. That restraint suggests Clay is disaffected and alienated from his social surroundings, while his personal passivity prevents him from taking action in the plot. When his alienation becomes unbearable, Clay intersperses his present tense narrative with more emotionally charged italicized sections or, very occasionally, intrusions of interior monologue.

Here we have Clay confronted directly about his desires by Blair, his ex(?)girlfriend, as he prepares to leave Los Angeles. Clay and Blair have largely avoided a direct conversation about their relationship because Clay feels detached from everything: “There’s nothing here,” plays double duty as a descriptor of Los Angeles’ social scene and Clay’s connection with Blair. So when Blair asks if Clay expected to find something, she is really asking if he expected to find a connection with her. Clay’s italicized inner thought interrupts this: He has been here forever, he knows the terrain, he has been having this conversation forever. In an italicized section immediately before this chapter, Clay reminisced about his relationship with Blair, suggesting a direct continuity of thought. His nonresponse is taken for a negation.

There are several ways to read: “Clay, did you ever love me?” It can come as a demand for an answer, an ironic sneer, a plaintive, genuine attempt at connection. I choose to read it as the latter, because when Clay tries to retreat into irony, by studying a billboard, he fails and is caught out. His psychological defenses begin to break down. Prior to this, Clay’s dialogue has been short, two sentences of three words each, while his narration has also been clipped, ranging from a four word sentence to a thirteen word one. But when Blair pushes him again, Clay’s thoughts become longer (an eighteen and a twenty four word sentence) and more grammatically complex. The outer world imposes, he must begin to think.

Of note here is the change in verb intensity. Before Blair repeats her questions we have: “quietly kick,” “ignore,” “is,” “am,” “say,” “didn’t hear,” and “said.” These verbs are attenuated by weakening adverbs, are directly negated or else indicate a fairly passive state. Clay is not active in the conversation and when he kicks the railing the preposition “against” suggests an encounter with an emotional barricade.

Then, in the paragraph after the repetition of the question: “bursts,” “see,” “remember,” “made love,” “lying,” and “tell.” The verbs here have more emotional weight, the suddenness of the sunburst is clear, and see is not accompanied by negation; Clay specifies that this is a clear sight, the first in a long time. “Made love” is also telling—previous instances of sexuality in the novel are technical, detached or profane. Clay’s word choice indicates a real attachment to this relationship; there was something here for him to find and in finding it he remembers its worth, though he will soon discard it. It’s an oddly tender verb choice in a book otherwise full of cold description, suggesting that Clay is threatening to abandon his detachment. Clay’s mode of engagement has shifted from an external passivity to scrambled internal analysis. Part of this is the external world’s ability to overwhelm his sensory perception. To see clearly he must be blinded by the sun.

Even the reuse of the preposition “against” shows a change in tone. Blair isn’t striking something in frustrated distraction: her body stands out from an undifferentiated background, tan and wet against a changeless cool white. But it’s notable that the memory evoked isn’t a feeling for Clay or a memory of touch. He sees her body like this and the contrast is in the visual field, an object separate from himself, at a distance despite the sex act. Then there’s the “lying” verb, which gestures at a perceived dishonesty in a bit of wordplay. “Lying” is actually unnecessary from a stylistic perspective, “tan and wet against the cool, white,” would be perfectly fine.

Because this is a novel about absence and distance, Clay slams the door shut on this emotional connection. He orders Blair not to continue the line of questioning and that begins a new phase of their confrontation, which is beyond the scope of this close reading. Because Ellis writes so much in the immediate present, it’s difficult for a second to tell if Clay is telling Blair not to talk in the present or if he is speaking to her and rejecting her in the past. This slight ambiguity adds to the merger of memory and present in the passage.

Clay’s ability to maintain his distance from events is fragile and easily disrupted by the expression of genuine feeling. The novel revolves around this constant wobbling of affect, from disinterested to out-of-control or even desperate. Ellis makes use of layered irony, gestural wordplay and syntactical complexity to show Clay’s inner state.

There is another, intertextual layer in this passage. Less Than Zero, like much of Ellis’ work, frequently deploys allusions to music and other texts as a tool of characterization. Clay’s tastes run towards slick 80s production and artifice. And the novel’s title is itself a reference to a sardonic Elvis Costello song. But I think some of the word choices in this section suggest a deeper confrontation with desire, geographical entrapment and masculinity. Specifically, the words “her body tan and wet,” neatly match the lyrics of the final verse of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” where a similarly psychologically blocked young man recalls an earlier sexual encounter with his now-wife: “But I remember us riding in my brothers car/Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir.” Ellis, according to Far Out Magazine, admires Springsteen. “The River,” released in 1980 when Ellis was 16 years old,** is one of Springsteen’s sociological albums, and the titular track follows a blue collar couple stuck in a post-industrial valley town. The “tan and wet” flashback in the song, as in the novel, recalls a period where the narrator was entranced with a lover and where life seemed full of possibility. But the similarities end there. Clay talks about listening to older records he used to like at various points in the novel, and I take this allusion to Springsteen, to indicate Clay’s desire to escape Los Angeles, his high school girlfriend, his stagnant social circle and his old taste. He can’t see desire as a way through his predicament and he can’t find it as a flowing, emotive driver of his personal experience. This stands in contrast to the narrator of the Springsteen song, who identifies the return to desire and to the site of desire as a possible way to rediscover a dynamic, erotic force in life.

Clay, it seems, is aware of the possibility that he could relate to people differently, could even love them. But he chooses not to in the book’s most direct confrontation.

Get ready to read a lot about Bret Easton Ellis over the next four months lol.

-30-

*Footnotes are back, baby. For what I mean by Scene Time, read Brandon Taylor’s Story Basics #3: Scene

**Bret Easton Ellis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.