Fear never shows up and the party ends early

I decided to re-read Less Than Zero when I found out that Bret Easton Ellis' forthcoming novel will be a kind of sequel, Clay and Friends 20 years on (great interview here). I have a bit of strange relationship with Ellis' books, in that I don't find them at all pleasurable to read but for some reason, I keep coming back. Is it because I want to cultivate hipsterish literary taste, or is there really something more there?


My first introduction - and I'm sure I'm not alone in this - to Ellis' work was American Psycho. I picked it up in my late teens in order to tick some late-20th-Century controversial literature boxes (see also: Trainspotting, which, incidentally, remains one of my favourite re-reads today as well - there goes that hipsterish taste again). American Psycho is a kind of good/bad introduction to Ellis' work, as it is what Ellis does best, but obscured, or maybe so grotesquely magnified it is difficult to recognise when you look directly at it. I recall being astounded, not by the violence, although that could be pretty heart-stopping at times, but by the absence of... something. Humanity? I don't think that's quite right, because really, on reflection I think Patrick Bateman could be embued with more pathos and desperation than any other character I've encountered. His lack of humanity is humanising, if that is ever possible. Whatever that absence is, I found it far more terrifying than any of Bateman's acts of unbelievable violence.


It's been a few years since I first encountered Less Than Zero - I first picked it up in 2005, which I realise now was 20 years after its first publication. It's hard to conceive of 1985 as being that long ago, but now that I revisit it, it strikes me as a surprisingly modern novel, despite the characters' continual discussions of The Human League. It could be yesterday, or this morning. It's vicious and funny and thoughful. But the lack, that gaping, suffocating black hole of emptiness that he somehow captures by cataloguing the minutiae of his characters' actions and reactions is everywhere. In this second reading of Less Than Zero I am choking on it. I have read and re-read that passage where Clay describes his dream of being sucked underground, fear and paranoia of the house sliding down into the canyon during the nights of rain, prank calls, a dead fish in the jacuzzi. The city is a monster and we are all monsters.

I'm not sure what has changed - my expectations, my tastes? - but this is incredible.