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).
No less than the New York Times’s indomitable book critic Michiko Kakutani proclaimed Less Than Zero “one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time,” and the book became a bestseller, and Ellis a kind of celebrity, associated with the lifestyle he wrote about. More books followed: The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho (canceled by its first publisher pre-publication due to its horrific content; picked up by another and still a cult novel), Glamorama, Lunar Park, and others. In 2023, Ellis returned to the environs of Less Than Zero with The Shards, which is the subject of a buzzy Ryan Murphy adaptation coming in August from FX.
Ellis is a sly satirist and his detached view of California’s darker side is as indelible as it was 40 years ago. “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,” it starts… and doesn’t let up. So pick up a copy—head to Bookshop.org and use the code Vogue15 for a 15% discount!—and follow along with us as we read and post stories about Less Than Zero on the Vogue app.
Reading Guide (based on the 1998 Vintage Contemporaries edition)
July 30–August 6: pp. 9 (People are afraid…) to pp. 118 (For some reason I believe this and unroll the window and we drive to After Hours.)
August 7–August 13: pp. 119 (The girl I’m sitting next to…) to end.
