Reading Order
Less Than Zero Reading Order
Less Than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis is a debut novel narrated by Clay, a college student who returns from Camden College in New Hampshire to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation. Over the course of a few weeks, Clay observes his wealthy friends' emptiness — the drugs, the casual sex, the music videos, the designer clothes, the complete absence of feeling — without being able to fully leave or fully participate. The novel was written when Ellis was nineteen and is organized around its mood rather than its plot: a portrait of a generation of wealthy California young people raised on surfaces, incapable of connection, and heading somewhere without being able to name what it is.
Where to start
Less Than Zero (1985)
Complete Less Than Zero Book List
- 1Buy
Less Than Zero
Bret Easton Ellis·1985 - 2Buy
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis·1991·Ellis's most controversial and most discussed novel — the same blank affect and brand-name saturation, amplified to grotesque violence on Wall Street. - 3Buy
Imperial Bedrooms
Bret Easton Ellis·2010·Ellis's direct sequel to Less Than Zero — Clay returns to Los Angeles decades later, and the novel revisits the original characters and their fates.
Less Than Zero — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Less Than Zero part of a series?
Less Than Zero has a direct sequel — Imperial Bedrooms (2010) — in which Clay returns to Los Angeles many years later. The two novels share characters but Imperial Bedrooms is a much darker, more explicitly noir work.
Is Less Than Zero a difficult novel?
Less Than Zero is short (about 200 pages) and written in a deliberately flat, affect-free style that some readers find instantly hypnotic and others find impossible to engage with. The novel is organized around mood and observation rather than plot; very little 'happens' in a conventional narrative sense.
Is Less Than Zero similar to The Catcher in the Rye?
Both are first-person novels about a young man who observes the world around him with detachment and cannot connect. But The Catcher in the Rye is saturated with feeling (Holden's alienation is passionate); Less Than Zero is deliberately evacuated of feeling. Clay doesn't feel much about anything he sees; that absence of feeling is the novel's subject.
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