Less Than Zero Selected for Vogue's Book Club
Less Than Zero, the debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis '86, published while he was a student at Bennington, is Vogue's next book club pick.
Writes Vogue:
"Vogue’s Book Club is back, and for our third installment we’ve got our Ray-Bans on, our Elvis Costello cued up, and we’re afraid to merge.
"That’s right—our pick is none other than Bret Easton Ellis’s classic first novel, Less Than Zero, a book that burst onto the literary scene in 1986, when Ellis was just 21 and an undergraduate at Bennington College. Less Than Zero was his chilly, haunting debut about his Los Angeles teenage life, written in declarative, hypnotic sentences influenced by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway—Ellis’s two literary heroes—and preoccupied with emotional numbness, drugs, partying, rich-kid culture, and meaningless sex.
"Does that sound like fun? Less Than Zero is definitely a disquieting read; rarely has Los Angeles seemed so ominous. And yet it has a mesmerizing specificity. Here are meetups at Du-par’s and the Galleria, parties in Holmby Hills, drives along Wilshire and out to ghostly Palm Springs. The movies in the multiplexes are name-checked, so is the music on the radio, the cars Clay’s friends drive, the things they wear. Clay is home in LA from an unnamed college in New Hampshire for Christmas and has four weeks to reconnect with friends, break up with his maybe girlfriend Blair, and find out what’s going on with his friend Julian (nothing good)."