Less than Zero
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
4mentions
4people
2013–2025years
75% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Silicon Valley meets Bret Easton Ellis and Less than Zero.
- To make a prediction: bitcoin will only be successful as a currency, if we get fractional reserve bitcoins and other forms of book / paper bitcoins.
The futures market is one step in that direction. The balances held at exchanges are another one. See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136283.Less_Than_Zero for a historic comparison.
- -- Read --
Don Delillo: End Zone
Luc Ferry: A Brief History of Thought
Brett Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero
-- Working on --
Don Delillo: Libra
Hubert Dreyfuss: Being in the World (it's taking me a long time...)
- No, I don't think so. Or if so, it was ancillary. He wasn't saying "I should have done things differently" -- instead he was trying to show how depraved, spoiled, and inadequate people are inside the ivory tower. Much as in "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, we are supposed to be shocked at how the privileged elite are venal, cruel, phony, unworthy, and get away with it too.
You may or may not find that persuasive. But just as with "Less Than Zero" (a terrible, terrible book) and much of the similarly themed failure memoir genre, you get the sense that it is wildly exaggerated fabulism with a hysterical moral tone that is supposed to ensnare the reader in outrage.
