SOURCE: "'But This Road Doesn't Go Anywhere': The Existential Dilemma in Less Than Zero," in Critique, Vol. 33, No. 1, Fall, 1991, pp. 23-42.

In Less Than Zero (1985), Bret Easton Ellis joins the tradition of Hollywood writers who have been capitalizing on southern California, its landscape, and its lifestyle for more than fifty years. That group includes writers such as Nathanael West, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and, more recently, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Hollywood has long served as a setting for fiction that reveals the corruption lurking behind glamorous lifestyles or, in the case of crime and detective novels, the intrigue and masquerade so suited to a city whose business is a form of deception. By the time Joan Didion published Play It As It Lays (1970), the Hollywood tradition had dispensed with a large portion of the glitter, moving toward heavier doses of cynicism, which Didion parlayed into her own brand of existentialism or even nihilism. Yet even as early as Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939), "the absurdist tradition" was putting down roots in Hollywood, and, for the next few decades, major novelists hired as screenwriters were expressing their disillusionment in "nihilistic novels which have made the Hollywood antimyth a permanent part of our national folklore." [Mark Royden Winchell, 1984.] By now, Hollywood has a fifty-year history as a setting for varying levels of disillusionment and various kinds of revelation, and existentialist readings of Hollywood novels are to some degree inevitable.

Less Than Zero, narrated in deadpan style by an eighteen-year-old named Clay, takes its place in the Hollywood scenario so naturally, with the book's overprivileged cast of characters playing their roles so convincingly, that reviewers have regarded the book as no more than an adolescent novel, an updated version of The Catcher in the Rye that just happens to take place on the West Coast rather than the East. Perhaps because of the author's youth—Ellis was just twenty-one at the time of the novel's publication—reviewers have treated the book as if it were a quasi-fictional rendition of Ellis's personal history and have labeled its author a member of the "brat pack," a specialist in "the lifestyles of the young and naughty." That these lifestyles might have been consciously shaped by the author and might have symbolic or philosophical implications are possibilities that were hardly considered by reviewers of the novel.

Ellis's writing is most often viewed as a kind of effortless self-indulgence. "… [Y]ou sometimes get the feeling that chunks of this book were lifted whole from the high melodrama and adolescent angst of Ellis's diary," comments one reviewer. Moreover, Ellis's fiction is not generally regarded as a genuinely fictional, or even fictitious, creation. "Less Than Zero is almost more interesting as a cultural document than as a novel," observes one reviewer, whereas another, admitting that Ellis "clearly possesses talent," claims that Less Than Zero "… ends up feeling more like a 60 Minutes documentary on desperate youth than a full-fledged novel. A critic less responsive to the inherent interest of Ellis's material characterizes the novel as "a rather juvenile attempt to capture the sense of purposelessness that seems to afflict so many young people these days."

Reviewers accuse Ellis, on the one hand, of owing too large a literary debt—"… his descriptions of Los Angeles carry a few too many echoes of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and Nathanael West"—or, on the other, of possessing no literary ties at all—"Reading [the novel] is like watching MTV." One reviewer finds that the novel's tone is marked by "an obvious indebtedness to … Hemingway"; another maintains that it is "[w]ritten in the inarticulate style of a petulant suburban punk." A reviewer who feels that Ellis draws his material too directly from reality wishes the young novelist would "write a story that doesn't merely depress us with sociological reports"; another suggests that his characters seem too little in touch with reality: "Prematurely world-weary, these martyrs of anomie and non-existential alienation go from party to party looking for cheap thrills…." In one way or another, all of these critics use Ellis's youth as a basis for their complaints, dismissing his clean style as inarticulate and his philosophical effects as "non-existential," or, at best, strictly "documentary." One wonders whether an identical first novel by a middle-aged author might not have received more credit for its art and fewer accusations of artifice.

In any case, after the rash of reviews that appeared when it hit the best-seller list, Less Than Zero never received further critical attention. A factor contributing to the neglect may have been the failure of Ellis's second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), to live up to the promise of the first. A mediocre, if technically accomplished novel, based too much in the trivia of college life, The Rules of Attraction should not detract from the power of Ellis's first work. Firmly in the Hollywood tradition, Less Than Zero is far from being a random, diary-style pastische of minutiae drawn from the decadent life-styles of Los Angeles youth; it is stylistically accomplished, carefully crafted, close to the bone in its use of telling detail. First acting on the advice of his Bennington teacher, Joe McGinnis, and then under the supervision of his editor, Ellis spent between two-and-a-half and three years revising and paring down the original version of his novel. The patterns of symbolism and imagery in Less Than Zero are remarkably consistent, contributing to the overwhelming sense of dread that pervades the book and finally giving it an existential dimension that goes beyond the limits of verisimilitude.

It is unlikely that Ellis was writing as a disciple of any specific existentialist philosophy; it is highly probable that his unsparing portrayals of absurdity and nothingness in the Hollywood setting owe a great deal to American literary influences. Ellis has acknowledged his indebtedness to Nathanael West, Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway. There can be little doubt that within the usual purview of a liberal arts education and within the range of influences available in writing workshops, Ellis would also have been exposed to more explicit existentialist outlooks on life.

Whatever the immediate influences, the elements of existentialism evident in Less Than Zero are most readily seen as a mixture stemming from both Camus and Sartre. Like the "stranger" or "outsider" portrayed in Camus's L'étranger (1942), Ellis's narrator feels intensely alienated, a stranger even in familiar territory. Moreover, he feels compelled to confront and question the absurd; he becomes aware of the absurd in its existential sense as his month-long experience tells him that all the practices and values that he has previously accepted actually have no meaning. He is finally brought to the kind of awakening described in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) when "the stage sets collapse," and the "easily followed" path is questioned, when "… [O]ne day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement."

Ellis's protagonist also becomes painfully aware of the void or "nothingness" (Sartre's le néant), and the resulting anxiety brings him the burden of freedom and responsibility, a burden that is part of both Camus's and Sartre's existential schemes. At times, particularly in scenes with his own family, Ellis's narrator bears a fleeting resemblance to Kafka's characters, for whom life seems painfully absurd and whose very existence seems to them to be without value. For the most part, a reliance on the most familiar elements of existentialism—alienation and anxiety, increasing awareness of the absurd and of nothingness, then, more positively, the awakening to individual responsibility—serves as the best way to approach a novel that is consistently existential in its outlook without being highly sophisticated in a philosophical sense.

Ellis's narrator, Clay, is a third- or fourth-generation Hollywood adolescent, eighteen at the time of his return from a college in New Hampshire for Christmas break. Although the novel is not fully plotted—one might complain that it does indeed consist of an endless round of parties, clubs, and restaurants, with intervals grudgingly spent with family—its subplot shapes both chronology and theme. The novel's foreground reveals that Clay has nothing to gain from his family, his girlfriend Blair, his psychiatrist, the drugs he takes, or the Los Angeles milieu in general. The novel's darker subplot, in which Clay plays a kind of passive detective role in discovering what has become of his close friend Julian, lends a vague air of mystery and suspense, shows what could happen to Clay should he follow the same path, and adds to the novel's existential dimension, as Clay becomes aware of the power of nothingness in Julian's life.

Clay's sense of threat and menace, the dread he feels upon his return to Los Angeles, are not without identifiable roots. Though his feelings range from depression to existential despair and though he often stays up at night worrying, feels sick or tense, or lacks appetite, Clay is not portrayed as an oversensitive adolescent. His emotions are not a sign of self-indulgence but an indication that he is making a choice, whether or not he is yet aware of it. Indeed, Clay may be viewed as embarking on an involuntary existential quest, embodying Camus's "absurd man" who is keenly aware of the meaninglessness around him, while others go on acting as if everything makes sense. The rather anticlimactic resolution of the novel, Clay's decision to return to college in the East, is a natural manifestation of the will to survive, both physically and spiritually, after having endured a month-long revelation. The focus of the novel is on how even an initially passive perspective can yield to a kind of revelation; certainly the book is about more than a college kid's weary decision to return to classes. In analyzing Didion's Play It As It Lays, David J. Geherin makes an observation that applies just as well to Less Than Zero: "… [T]he novel is as much 'about' Hollywood as Heart of Darkness is 'about' Africa or The Stranger is 'about' Algeria." Indeed, Ellis's novel, like Didion's, is about man confronting the void. It is not a novel of initiation, for there is no society of substance into which Clay might reasonably expect to be initiated. His responsibility is to bear witness to the moment-to-moment absurdity of the place he had heretofore considered home.

Less Than Zero may be taken as a realistic novel only to a certain extent. Ellis has created a dense pattern of images and symbolic events that often bear more resemblance to Gothic than to realistic fiction. The descriptions of Los Angeles and its surroundings are surrealistic in their intensity. As a backdrop for the novel's events, Los Angeles is given an air of menace, with destruction or disaster constantly on the horizon. Clay's first sight upon his return home is of "remains of palm trees that have fallen during the winds." The sounds of nature here are not peaceful but consist of "coyotes howling and dogs barking and palm trees shaking in the wind up in the hills" (62-63). Earthquakes, rainstorms, and mudslides are also part of the picture. Most ominous is the sun itself, described variously as an "orange monster" (172) or a "gigantic … ball of fire" that rises over a "smog-soaked, baking Valley" while dust swirls at Clay's feet (195). The wasteland imagery, reminiscent of Fitzgerald's "valley of ashes," is unmistakable. A tee-shirt Clay notices bears the phrase "Under the Big Black Sun" (185). In Less Than Zero, the Los Angeles sun is not a life force but a destructive power.

Unlike Nathanael West or Raymond Chandler, but like Joan Didion, Ellis has chosen to focus not so much on the superficial and deceptive glitter of Hollywood as on its more telling geographical features. The claustrophobic, windy, overheated atmosphere is anxiety provoking for Clay and Gothic in its threat of entrapment. When Clay has nightmares, the horror arises from the California earth itself, the mud filling his mouth, nose, and eyes and finally burying him (114); the image of live burial is another familiar Gothic element, reminiscent of Poe's "The Premature Burial." The image reinforces the pervasive feelings of menace and dread while also showing symbolically that Clay's way of life is directed toward death. The real horror for Clay is not Gothic, however, but existential. The mud of his nightmare is also a reminder of the Bouville or "Mudville" of Sartre's La Nausée (1938), suggesting that Clay, like Roquentin, must confront horrors to which his unquestioning companions remain blind.

Dispensing entirely with Hollywood glamour, Ellis suggests through nearly every scene in the novel that in reaching the edge of the continent, one also approaches the abyss. Anxiety, meaninglessness, and nothingness become themes that combine toward an existential effect. Each of these themes is developed by means of events, symbols, and a variety of minor emblems or leitmotifs that consistently echo the larger themes. Anxiety and meaninglessness begin in the shambles that is left of family structure, and the drugs that offer escape add instead to the feelings of panic and purposelessness. The nothingness theme extends to outright fears of nonbeing, with a number of references to darkness or disappearing. Considerable emphasis is given to the word "nothing," which often translates as "nothingness."

Ellis's portrayal of the anxiety integral to the Hollywood family ranges from the pathetic to the bizarre. The sense of nonbeing begins at home. The parents' failure to provide a firm foundation establishes visible sources, if not excuses, for the younger generation's shortcomings. That these characters are virtually abandoned by their parents, while hardly registering the fact consciously, accounts for some of their more generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise. Stereotypically spoiled in material terms, they are nevertheless neglected emotionally.

Clay's first encounter with his family after an entire semester away at college is with a note, for "Nobody's home" (10). Practically speaking, the absence is understandable—his mother and sisters are Christmas shopping—but it is emblematic of how unimportant Clay's return is to them. For most of Clay's friends, Christmas is a time not of traditional family gatherings but of abandonment and depersonalization. Keeping in mind that the characters are eighteen or nineteen years old, one might consider their possible responses to the question, "It's Christmas. Do you know where your parents are?" Griffin invites Clay to come to his house after a party because his parents are in Rome for Christmas (37). Daniel thinks his parents are in Japan, "Shopping,'" or maybe in Aspen. "'Does it make any difference?'" (55), he asks, meaning that he is alone in either case. Daniel's is the kind of rhetorical question often asked by Clay's friends, and its message is hopelessness, a defensive nihilism posing as sophisticated indifference. Kim gives a New Year's Eve party in an unfurnished house while her mother is away in England with someone named Milo. "'At least that's what I read in Variety'" (82), she explains, apparently unaware of the irony that she must consult a publication, for lack of personal communication, to determine her mother's whereabouts.

When Blair gives a Christmas party, both parents are present, as is Blair's father's boyfriend. Blair's friend Alana, in a fine bit of role reversal, expresses her concern about how drunk Blair's mother is becoming and engages the other young people in a solemn discussion about how much better it would have been had Blair's father waited until the next week and seen "Jared"on location (16-17). Clearly, the holiday activities of Blair's parents constitute another form of abandonment. On Christmas morning, Clay's father is present but impersonal, looking "neat and hard" (72) as he writes out checks while Clay wonders why he couldn't have prepared them beforehand. The message conveyed is that family ties are no more than financial, even on holidays. One would expect Christmas in Hollywood to lack religious connotations; Ellis portrays it as devoid of all tradition and emotion, the holiday season itself a symbol of an existential world completely lacking in values.

The depiction of Clay's family covers three generations, his grandparents being portrayed in some of the italicized flashbacks that appear periodically throughout the novel. The function of the extended family picture seems to be not to create nostalgia for better times but rather to show how deeply alienated the family members are from each other. Because his family has been in the movie industry for several generations, the Hollywood setting is for Clay not a place of dreams but an ordinary home base lacking in glamour. His grandfather is portrayed not as a source of warmth or security but as a dubious character, forming a memorable image as he sits by a pool, wearing only a straw hat and a jock strap, opening his fifth beer (123-24). That Clay has counted the beers is perhaps meant to show his lack of any deep trust for his family, a lack of roots in anything but a family history of anxiety and alienation. Certainly this is a world without values.

Clay's parents are separated, and their approach is not so much to ignore him totally as to ignore selectively the areas in which he most needs guidance. Clay's father gives the appearance of expressing concern when he tells his son that he looks thin and pale, but when Clay mumbles, "It's the drugs,'" his father replies, "'I didn't quite hear that'" (43), an obvious way of conveying that he does not want to hear it, that he won't address any serious problems of Clay's. Seemingly bland and harmless in the way they communicate, both of Clay's parents abdicate their responsibilities to their children.

Clay's father is portrayed with an irony that is humorous at times. His appearance—"My father looks pretty healthy if you don't look at him for too long" (42)—is emblematic of all the families portrayed in Less Than Zero: don't give them more than a glance, or you will see that they aren't healthy. Of course, Clay's father's tan, face-lift, and hair transplant also indicate a nearly adolescent concern with his appearance. The father has a way of shaking Clay's sense of identity, introducing him to one business acquaintance after another only as "'my son'" (42), as if he had no name. The character who should be Clay's strongest source of identity is instead a depersonalizing force. Like some of Kafka's characters, Clay accepts the situation rather passively. "It doesn't bother me that my father leaves me waiting … for thirty minutes while he's in some meeting and then asks me why I'm late" (41), he comments, also claiming that his father's treating him as if he were nameless "doesn't really make me angry" (42).

At another lunch with Clay, his father appears in a new Ferrari, wearing a cowboy hat that, to Clay's relief, he does not wear into the restaurant. Once again, the father's concern with material things is shown; he doesn't say much to Clay but "keeps looking out the window, eyeing the fire-hydrant-red Ferrari" (145). This is the only scene in which Clay's father, or any parent in the novel, for that matter, offers his child direct advice and guidance: "He wants me to see his astrologer and advises me to buy the Leo Astroscope for the upcoming year … 'Those planetary vibes work on your body in weird ways'" (144). As advice, this bit of father-knows-best wisdom is pathetic and absurd, yet Clay has no choice but to receive it politely. The values presented by his father are patently transient, and Clay clearly must look elsewhere for any meaning in his life.

Occasionally, Ellis uses humor to convey the sense of confusion and anxiety that his characters absorb from their own parents, as in the following exchange:

"Jesus, Clay, you look like you're on acid or something," Blair says, lighting another cigarette.

"I just had dinner with my mother," I tell her.

Contact with one's mother or father is not a stabilizing factor for Clay and his friends; it is disorienting, a "trip" in itself. Without saying so explicitly, Ellis shows that Clay's parental encounters are at best empty of useable values and at worst more like confrontations with the existential void.

Whether or not most Hollywood parents are emotional adolescents who neglect their children is not the issue at hand. The point is that through a stylized portrayal of estranged parents and children, Ellis has established a clear source of the intimations of nonbeing that haunt the novel's young characters. Taking the place of the parents so ready to abandon their offspring both physically and emotionally is an array of ironic surrogates who appear to compensate for parental shortcomings while actually exploiting the young.

Clay's parents have provided him with a young psychiatrist who, rather than helping Clay asks for his help in writing a screenplay (109). When Clay finally admits that he has problems with his parents, his friends, and drugs, the doctor's response is to start an aimless conversation about Elvis Costello (122-23). When Clay finally asks, three times, the desperate question, "What about me?" the psychiatrist's response is "'Come on, Clay … Don't be so … mundane'" (123). The caretaker assigned to Clay's emotional well-being is so indifferent that he considers Clay's fears and anxiety boring and treats his survival instinct as a kind of absurdity. As with the indifference of the parents, the effect here is negation of the self, the brief scene reinforcing the fact that Clay is totally alone in his quest for meaning.

Parent surrogates are presented with darker irony in the subplot involving Clay's friend Julian, who embodies what could become of Clay should he remain in Los Angeles. Finn, the drug dealer to whom Julian is in debt, has him paying off the debt by serving as a male prostitute. Finn asks Julian how his parents are (170), as if to emphasize their inaccessibility, and as he injects him with heroin croons, "'Now, you know that you're my best boy and you know that I care for you. Just like my own kid. Just like my own son …'" (171). Finn's gentle words are a mockery, in view of his predatory nature. His name evokes the image of a shark's fin; he is in fact a particularly vicious loan shark.

Finn hires Julian out to a businessman from Indiana who calls him "son" (173-74), an especially ironic label, given the nature of their interaction. It is when the established order uses endearments in the interest of destruction and perversion that Ellis's writing most resembles Kafka's, for here the sense of menace becomes nearly surrealistic. Clay's last encounter with Finn is a chance meeting in a supermarket, and Finn's seemingly friendly farewell is "'Catch ya later,'" which he says while "cocking his fingers as if they were a gun" (197). Here, near the end of the novel, the sense of menace has become so palpable that without any explanation from Clay, the reader senses the feeling of threat that the commonplace, normally affectionate gesture conveys. The surreal quality is in familiar mannerisms taking on heightened connotations; momentarily, the mock gun becomes real.

The novel's young characters have absorbed from their families the idea that their own existence and actions are of very little import. The only value system that has been handed down to them is materialism, and they apply the ethic freely, sometimes viewing even themselves as material goods. A refrain that is repeated several times in the course of the novel is "Wonder if he's for sale." The question comes up twice with regard to Julian (176, 183), who has literally done just that. As the businessman from Indiana tells Julian, "'Yes, you're a very beautiful boy … and here, that's all that matters'" (175). An obsession with physical appearance is normal for adolescents, but these characters are learning from adults that appearance, the self as raw material, is "all that matters."

Young boys who all look the same—"thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices"—are an everpresent commodity, and Clay begins to fear that he might "look exactly like them" (152). In sharing the commonly acceptable appearance associated with membership in a privileged class, Clay actually becomes part of a minority, and an exploitable minority at that. His fear is existential as well as pragmatic, for he sees no evidence that he has an identity distinct from any of the tan, blond others. His state of anxiety seems close to that described by Camus, who points out that when "… fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man 'in whom existence is concentrated.'" From this perspective, Clay's frequent anxiety is an admirable trait, a milestone on the existential quest that is making him a "lucid man."

By contrast, most of the other characters in the novel seem free of fear and anxiety even though they face possible destruction. The actual agents of destruction are nearly always drugs and alcohol, indulged in due to limitless leisure and wealth. It is worth noting that Ellis rarely depicts these substances as giving pleasure or even as relieving anxiety. When Blair meets Daniel at a party that he is giving, her question is "'Is he alive?'" (56), and the next day Daniel tells Clay that the reason for his stuporous condition was "a bad Quaalude" (63). A character named Sophie mentions that she slept through a concert because "her brother slipped her a bad lude before the show" (136). (The unthinking use of the word "bad" here implies that there are "good" Quaaludes that have benevolent effects. This is an example of the subtle irony Ellis employs to show his characters accepting an absurd value-system.) Another minor character named Dmitri sticks his hand through a window, cutting it so badly he has to go to an emergency room (139-40), an event that occurs only because he is drunk. A death caused by a drug overdose is depicted when the body of an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boy is discovered behind a nightclub (185-86).

Ellis's intention seems to be to portray drugs and alcohol as anywhere from partially to absolutely destructive, as pathways to oblivion, and certainly not as aids to having a good time. Yet the message is more existential than it is corrective, for the characters operate in a sort of vacuum where there seems to be no alternative but to continue with the destructive behavior. Even the names of the clubs that they frequent are suggestive of risk or impending doom: The Wire, Nowhere Club, Land's End, the Edge (106).

Two characters in particular, Julian and Muriel, epitomize the devastating effects of drugs, for the two have in effect ceased to struggle and have submitted to a state of nonbeing. Clay confronts nothingness or the void partly through his interactions with these characters. When Clay responds to a message to meet Julian, finding him only after missing him a couple of times, Julian looks "almost dead" (91), obviously an effect of his drug addiction. Julian's only use for Clay now is to borrow money from him, purportedly for someone's abortion. The image most clearly connecting Julian to death is a paperweight Clay sees in Finn's office:

… [S]itting on the desk is this glass paperweight with a small fish trapped in it, its eyes staring out helplessly, almost as if it was begging to be freed, and I start to wonder, If the fish is already dead, does it even matter?

Julian, of course, is the fish; his wish to be released unvoiced; and the concern that Clay expresses as to whether or not this dilemma matters is existential. In this milieu, the degree to which anything matters becomes reductionistic. If appearance is "all that matters," the question must be whether Julian—or anyone else—and his plight "even matter." It is because Clay is already engaged in an existential quest that he cannot ignore such questions and cannot remain content with seeking oblivion himself.

Muriel's dilemma also involves a rather dramatic cluster of themes. Clay visits her at Cedars-Sinai, where she has been hospitalized for anorexia, and sees issues of Glamour and Vogue lying by her bed (45). The obsessive concern with appearance commonly acknowledged to be a factor in anorexia is embodied in these magazines, while Muriel herself is, ironically, pale white with dark circles under her eyes. Later on, at her New Year's Eve party, Kim tells Clay and Blair that Muriel's mother has just given her "a fifty-five-thousand-dollar Porsche" (80), a material "fix" for problems that are not material in nature. It would seem that in addition to her anorexia, Muriel also has an alcohol problem; Kim confides, "'… [O]nce she gets drunk, she's fine. She's just a little strung out'" (80). Muriel may have a death fixation, as is apparent in her begging to wear Clay's vest, which is gray and white with just one dark red triangle: "'It looks as if you got stabbed or something. Please let me wear it,' Muriel pleads …" (82). As if all this were not enough, Muriel has a heroin habit, and, at this party, Clay watches her shoot up, witnessing the immediate aftereffects:

Muriel begins to cry and Kim strokes her head, but Muriel keeps crying and drooling all over, looking like she's laughing really and her lipstick's smeared all over her lips and nose and her mascara's running down her cheeks.

Hardly a picture out of Vogue or Glamour: Ellis's ironic portrayal of Muriel's clown-like state and of her incredible gamut of problems may be heavy-handed, but it serves as a paradigm of the "bad faith" of Sartre's existential philosophy, the meaningless life that results when one abdicates personal responsibility and carries an array of false values to their logical limits. Obsession with appearance and material acquisitions, addiction to chemical substances, and an un-reflective attraction to death combine in Muriel to form a picture of existence devoted to, rather than questioning, the absurd. In sum, both Julian and Muriel are symbols of the death-in-life that Clay is beginning to recognize. He alone seems to see this absurdity: his friends accept as paths to pleasure practices that are actually paths to destruction. The conventional values of this milieu are potentially fatal; Clay is up against more than just the petty values of an unthinking bourgeoisie.

When one's family has not given one an adequate sense of personal identity, when one's goal in life is to achieve not so much pleasure as a kind of numbness, one is not so much living as courting death, Ellis suggests. The potential for self-destruction that lies insidiously at the heart of the Hollywood value-system gives Clay's existential quest a believable urgency. Within this perspective, the frequency of references to death in Less Than Zero—perhaps fifty, roughly one every four pages—appears thematically logical. The references range from the oblique to the graphic, with a noticeable increase in both frequency and intensity in the second half of the novel. The death images make general thematic sense, but they also function to define the narrator's sensibility. Clay's sense of existential dread builds with his increasing sensitivity to suggestions of death all around him; as his anxiety deepens, the images of death intensify. His reportorial manner of noting death images and actual deaths may at first seem obsessive and ritualistic, but it also may be seen as part of the existential quest. One of Ellis's primary influences, Hemingway, has been analyzed in an existential context as a writer who "has been more ritualistic about death-seeking than almost any other figure in the modern world," creating heroes who "have seen real life, vital, authentic life, through the trauma of death, and they must continually recreate it."

Many of Ellis's images are not tied to death in a literal sense but are merely suggestive of death. These include, to mention a few, Death Valley (16); Cliff Notes to As I Lay Dying (22); a skull earring (79); a movie "about this group of young pretty sorority girls who get their throats slit" (97); a billboard showing a "huge green skull" (106); a dealer Clay thinks is named Ed but whose name turns out to be "Dead" (127); a song called "Somebody Got Murdered" (181); a song called "Sex and Dying in High Society" (184); and games played by Clay's sisters, in which they compete to see who "can look dead the longest" and "who can look drowned the longest" (198). The movie's subject, the choice of a nickname, the popular song titles, and most of all the sisters' "games" are all suggestive of numbed sensibilities attracted to death as the only stimulating concept. In the cumulative effect of such images, the novel's death theme gathers force.

References to actual deaths are also numerous, and the collective impact of these deaths on Clay's state of mind is substantial. He is told that the family of Trent's maid "was killed in El Salvador" (52); Clay's father "mentions that one of his business associates died of pancreatic cancer recently" (66); a checkout clerk happens to be "talking about murder statistics" (74); Clay hears on the news that "four people were beaten to death in the hills" (78); Clay is shown a snuff film, in which two young people are killed at a party in Malibu (153-54); he remembers the deaths of his own grandmother (163) and great-grandfather (173); and he remembers learning of the brutal murder and mutilation of a young girl one summer (190-91). Just before Clay leaves Los Angeles, he hears of a series of recent deaths:

Before I left, a woman had her throat slit and was thrown from a moving car in Venice … a man in Encino killed his wife and two children. Four teenagers, none of whom I knew, died in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway…. A guy, nicknamed Conan, killed himself at a fraternity party at U.C.L.A.

Few of the deaths mentioned involve natural causes, and a disproportionate number of the dead are young people; Clay has developed a morbid obsession that is more a warning than it is a neurotic symptom.

In one of the novel's dozen flashbacks, Clay remembers when he was fifteen years old:

… collecting all these newspaper clippings: one about some twelve-year-old kid who accidentally shot his brother in China; another about a guy in Indio who nailed his kid to a wall, or a door, I can't remember, and then shot him, point-blank in the face, and one about a fire at a home for the elderly that killed twenty and one about a housewife who while driving her children home from school flew off this eighty-foot embankment near San Diego, instantly killing herself and the three kids and one about a man who calmly and purposefully ran over his ex-wife somewhere near Reno, paralyzing her below the neck. I collected a lot of clippings during that time because, I guess, there were a lot to be collected.

Clay's rationale for collecting the clippings cannot cover up the fact that his own frame of mind attracts him to the activity. The enumeration of these deaths has a ritualistic quality more reminiscent of Didion than of Hemingway; the confrontation with nothingness is more meditative than aggressive, and the deaths after all were at a safe distance. It is worth nothing that most of these deaths involve not random violence but rather one family member killing another. The death theme in Less Than Zero thus dovetails with the theme of parental neglect. A man's crucifying his own child or a housewife's driving her children to their deaths may be viewed as carrying to extremes the parental neglect and abandonment with which Clay's circle of friends is already so familiar.

At the novel's end, in a scene that is sheerly thematic, Clay discusses the images that a song called "Los Angeles" creates for him:

The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.

A large part of the psychic horror forming a strong undercurrent in the novel is the tendency of those who should be protectors and caretakers to act instead as predators and destroyers. The sensationalistic, "fast-lane" qualities of Less Than Zero are in fact subordinate to the crucial pattern of the strong turning on the weak. The characters in the novel are barely past childhood, still dependent upon the adults in their lives. This aspect of the book more than any of its shocking events gives the novel a valid claim to its atmosphere of existential dread and despair. The future awaiting these young characters is itself an absurdity; their use of drugs only postpones their awareness of the void before them. Rip "keeps screaming happily" while using cocaine, "'What's gonna happen to all of us?'" (128), but within the context of the novel, his question is rhetorical. Spin's repeated reply, "'All of who, dude? All of who?'" (128) is not so much a question as an answer, showing that most of these characters have given so little attention to their own identities that they are already in a vacuum of nonbeing.

The theme that forms the understructure of the novel is the theme of caretakers as predators, a pattern that increases the young characters' readiness to abandon any search for identity. At times the parental abdication of responsibility lends a poignancy to the tough cynicism of the young and wealthy in the novel. In Blair's room, for instance, Clay notices "all these stuffed animals on the floor and at the foot of the bed" (58), reminders that Blair is still really a child. With parental affection unavailable, Blair turns to inanimate surrogates for comfort. While watching Julian begin his session with the Indiana businessman, Clay calls to mind "[a]n image of Julian in fifth grade, kicking a soccer ball across a green field" (175). This simple image has a freshness and innocence that evoke in the reader Clay's unvoiced questions as to how such horror and despair have arisen out of such promising, hopeful beginnings.

The adult world's readiness to utilize beautiful youth as a commodity has no limits and in fact is imitated by the young themselves. Late in the novel, just after Clay has been shown the corpse of the eighteen-or nineteen-year-old boy, Rip announces, "'I've got something at my place that will blow your mind'" (188). The dehumanizing attitude of the characters is clear when the "something" turns out to be a twelve-year-old girl who has been sexually abused by both Spin and Rip while drugged and tied to a bed. When Clay objects, "'Oh God, Rip, come on, she's eleven'" (189), Rip responds, "'Twelve,'" as if the added year would justify his actions. Clay argues, in what may be the only statement of any kind of morality in the novel, "'It's … I don't think it's right,'" provoking from Rip a statement encapsulating the principles of his group of friends: "'What's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it'" (189). To Clay, "right" has moral connotations; to Rip, the word connotes only privilege or demand. While Clay is at least tentatively searching for values, most of his friends are openly nihilistic.

It must be noted, however, that Clay does not finally emerge as a moral protagonist who is repulsed by the immorality of his friends. The snuff film revolts him; the abuse of the young girl sickens him; but to a degree he is also fascinated by violence and cruelty. He shares with the others the symptom of having emotions so anesthetized that it takes something extreme to interest him or to reawaken his feelings. Thus, when he goes to the movie in which sorority girls are killed, he watches "just the gory parts" (97). The only sex scene with Blair occurs just after she has run over a coyote, and Clay watches it die (142-43). Although Clay's admitting "I've never wanted her more" (143) is not overtly connected to the coyote's violent death, it is clear that the juxtaposition of the animal's gruesomely depicted last moments with the lovemaking scene is not accidental. Clay's sudden desire has been prompted by witnessing a death, which makes him temporarily capable of strong feelings.

While the reader may have been aware of Clay's distorted perceptions for some time, Clay himself shows an increase in self-awareness only after going with Julian to meet Finn and agreeing to accompany Julian to an assignment:

… [I]n the elevator on the way down to Julian's car, I say, "Why didn't you tell me the money was for this?" and Julian, his eyes all glassy, sad grin on his face, says, "Who cares? Do you? Do you really care?" and I don't say anything and realize that I really don't care and suddenly feel foolish, stupid. I also realize that I'll go with Julian to the Saint Marquis. That I want to see if things like this can actually happen. And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.

The elevator's movement seems intended, perhaps too didactically, as a symbolic descent into hell; a valid part of this "hell" is Clay's encounter with his own twisted emotions. Julian's situation has brought Clay to a realization in several stages. He realizes that he lacks feelings for even his closest friend, that his curiosity outweighs any concern he might feel, and that he has developed an appetite for depravity. One might question the logic behind "all that [matters] is that I want to see the worst," and Clay is not a narrator who provides answers or analysis. At the moment of this realization, he is of two minds, witnessing and appalled by his immediate impulses, yet not ready to pull away from the situation that excites his warped sensibility. What "matters" is not that he must immediately get the morbid thrill he is seeking—though this will happen—but rather that he must register and eventually act upon the epiphany he has just experienced. Usually a passive observer, he cannot avoid the implications of the active "I want." He cannot pretend to be unaffected by the devastating events he sees; what he had perceived all along as disgust or boredom suddenly takes on larger proportions. In existential terms, he has realized that everything that happens matters, that even observing is not a passive activity, that man is defined by the events of his life.

Clay's experience, rooted though it may be in parental neglect and chemical dependency, consists more basically of a confrontation with the absurd and nothingness. The problem with nothingness, for Clay, is that it is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, seductive and repulsive. In the context of his encounter with the void, many of the seemingly vacant or random comments earlier in the novel make thematic sense. One sees that the existential dilemma has been foreshadowed from the opening scenes, when Blair, dropping Clay off at home, asks, "'What's wrong?'" and he says, "'Nothing'" (10). What is wrong is "nothingness," the sense Clay has immediately upon returning to Los Angeles that spiritual annihilation is at hand. Camus's interpretation of "nothing" seems applicable:

In certain situations, replying 'nothing' when asked what one is thinking about may well be pretense in a man…. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity.

The same double meaning of the word may be read into a flashback to Christmases spent with the family at Palm Springs, when Clay's grandfather would tell Clay "that he heard strange things at night" and when asked what he heard would "finally say that it must have been his imagination, probably nothing" (70). Perhaps there are strange noises to be heard in the "insane heat" (69) of the desert nights, but it is more likely that Clay's grandfather also had intimations of what was "probably" nothingness. One is reminded of the "nada" experienced by the older waiter in Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

For someone as young as Clay, existential dread has a personal immediacy. Thus, when Clay sees a new billboard bearing the invitation, "'Disappear Here,'" he overreacts: "even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard …" (38). Other incidents that would seem like random diary entries make sense when informed by Camus's concept of nothing:

On Beverly Glen I'm behind a red Jaguar with a license plate that reads DECLINE and I have to pull over.

"What's wrong, Clay?" Trent asks me, this edge in his voice.

"Nothing," I manage to say.

Again, the problem is "nothingness," Clay's awareness that he is confronting the void. By this point in the novel, he is oversensitized to the degree that the slightest reminder makes him nearly sick with awareness of the dilemma.

Julian recalls, and sings, a song he and Clay used to listen to: "'Straight into darkness, we went straight into darkness, out over that line, yeah straight into darkness, straight into night'" (48). "'Love that song,'" he remarks, and because Clay agrees with him in the past tense, "'Yeah, so did I'" (49), one sees that it is only Julian, and no longer Clay himself, who finds oblivion a seductive idea. The danger Julian embodies is not of growing up too fast but of passing from childhood straight into nothingness. All of these characters are walking a thin line, in the sense that death itself may overtake them before they have any chance to contemplate the more philosophical connotations of nothingness. The novel's existential dimension lies in the condition embodied by Julian and to a degree even by Clay himself, a condition in which spiritual death precedes physical death. Clay might be said to have flirted with nothingness from the novel's beginning. Asked by both his mother and then his father what he wants for Christmas, his answer is the same, "'Nothing'" (18, 43). During the course of his Christmas vacation, he does indeed "get" Nothing, in the sense that he finally grasps the concept.

Indeed, the title of the novel, taken from an Elvis Costello song title, suggests that the real subject of the book is the confrontation with absolute nothingness. The refrain of the song "Less Than Zero" mentions a "mother" and a "father" and states, "They think that I got no respect, but / Everything means less than zero." The claim is certainly reminiscent of Clay's situation. Although he would appear on the surface to have a disrespectful attitude and a questionable lifestyle, he is actually grappling with his deep sense of the meaninglessness of life.

A religious program that Clay watches promises deliverance from the whole dilemma. Clay listens to a man declare: "'You feel confused. You feel frustrated … You don't know what's going on. That's why you feel hopeless, helpless. That's why you feel there is no way out of the situation. But Jesus will come'" (140). The man talks on and on, promising "'Deliverance,'" and Clay's desperation is shown by his waiting for "close to an hour" for "something to happen." The outcome is put simply: "Nothing does" (140). In the only instance in the novel where the actual promise of an answer is made, the answer that arrives is nothingness. The absence of God is a factor in most existential literature; it is fitting that in Less Than Zero, with the parents conveying no values, God's absence becomes clearest through that ubiquitous babysitter and parent-substitute, TV.

After receiving "nothing" from the religious program, Clay's reaction is to avoid the message by taking cocaine. It is only after the crucial episode with Julian that the implications of nothingness begin to distress Clay. The two of them meet the Indiana businessman in the San Marquis in "room 001" (173), as close to nothing as a room number can get. The realization that emerges from the scene is found in its last line, in Clay's understanding that "You can disappear here without knowing it" (176). Clay is beginning to understand that the power of nothingness is insidious; the same thing that has happened to Julian could happen to him "without [his] knowing it." Though Clay feels pity for Julian, he is unable to intervene and save Julian. He does, however, feel the burden of his own freedom; having seen the destructive direction of Julian's life, he cannot accept it for himself.

During Clay's last week at home, his dealer, Rip, takes him for a ride and stops to show him a scene:

He pointed out the number of wrecked cars at the bottom of the hill. Some were rusted and burnt, some new and crushed, their bright colors almost obscene in the glittering sunshine. I tried to count the cars; there must have been twenty or thirty cars down there. Rip told me about friends of his who died on that curve; people who misunderstood the road. People who made a mistake late in the night and who sailed off into nothingness.

It is obvious that driving off the road is not the only "mistake" possible in Less Than Zero; symbolically, the "people who misunderstood the road" could be any of Clay's acquaintances. Some, like Muriel, are courting death, while others, like Julian, have already made their fatal mistakes. Still others, perhaps Blair for one, are headed for a meaningless existence while believing themselves to be pursuing pleasure. When they begin to drive again, Clay warns Rip that he may be heading down a dead-end street, provoking a symbolic exchange:

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Just driving."

"But this road doesn't go anywhere," I told him.

"That doesn't matter."

"What does?" I asked, after a little while.

"Just that we're on it, dude," he said.

For Clay, the critical question is always what matters, and Rip's seemingly existential answer is unsatisfactory and in fact nihilistic. Clay has already tacitly concluded that to exist without regard for the quality of life is not enough. Once having become aware of the void, Clay must fight its attraction and exert force of will to recoil from it. Time and again, the signs that he must get off the directionless road are offered by those who are content just to be on that road, headed either nowhere or to their own destruction.

How deeply the nothingness of the Hollywood environment has affected Clay is apparent in the final scene with Blair. She is the character with whom he should be having the most meaningful relationship, but he avoids her the most; even her name suggests that communication between loved ones has become nothing more than a meaningless "blare." Their final face-to-face encounter at a restaurant resonates with nothingness. Blair asks Clay about his weekend, and he replies, "'I don't remember. Nothing'" (203). In justifying going back to school, he reasons, "'There's nothing here'" (203), quite possibly a reference to the nothingness he has encountered in Los Angeles. The simple statement encapsulates the state of awareness he has reached. While his companions remain prey to their dangerous way of life, he has become "a prey to his truths," having reached the state described by Camus: "A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it."

The ensuing conversation revolves around Blair's question as to whether Clay has ever loved her, a question he evades, and her repeated accusation, "'You were never there'" (204). At this moment, Clay thinks of the billboard refrain, "Disappear Here." Clay has been even closer to nothingness than he imagined, and the emotional absence about which Blair complains reflects how close he has come to losing himself. Blair adds, in what is probably meant as reassurance, "'You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it'" (204), a particularly ill-timed echo of the businessman's words to Julian, a suggestion that Clay, too, could become nothing but a commodity.

Near the end of their conversation, in response to Blair's "'What makes you happy?'" (205), Clay declares, "'Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing.'" (205). Such a statement is not merely an indication of a negative attitude but is more like a triple affirmation of nothingness. Syntactically, "I like nothing" is not a statement anyone would naturally utter; it reads more clearly as "I like nothingness" and might be seen as further testimony to Clay's long-standing attraction to oblivion. In the aftermath of his epiphany, though, the statement acquires more depth. "Nothing" makes Clay "happy" in the sense that it has satisfied him by making him an absurd man, finally self-aware if by no means content. The revelation of nothingness in the Hollywood way of life has both enlightened and freed him; it has also given him the responsibility to leave when it might be easier to stay.

The novel's last section consists of Clay's free association with the lyrics of the song "Los Angeles"; the book ends, "These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left" (208). The existential solution to Clay's dilemma is not far-reaching. His answer, after having seen the horror and emptiness around him, is to leave the scene. He has no ability to change the lives of others and no particular plans for the future. Clay has, however, taken the clearest possible look at what life at home offers him, found that the answer is nothing, and taken the step that is his only honest reaction to an unanswerable problem.

By making Clay's final choice survival rather than oblivion, Ellis offers redemption in a nearly hopeless situation. For some readers, the circumstances surrounding Clay's confrontation with the void may strike a dismayingly minor note in terms of existential possibilities, but given the nihilistic alternatives, Less Than Zero holds its own. Ellis has created a character who is in realistic terms no hero but who has nevertheless grappled with a fundamental question. Clay has become aware of his own anxiety and alienation, as well as the meaninglessness around him; and though he has found no solution, he has found the courage to continue to live. In having faced the absurd as he finds it, Clay takes on the proportions of an existential hero.