Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero is the debut novel of American writer Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1985 and a bestseller. Ellis wrote it while still a student at Bennington College, though he later said he had begun sketching the material years earlier, during his high school years. The title comes from an Elvis Costello song of the same name.

The novel follows Clay, a wealthy college student who returns to Los Angeles for the 1984 winter break. Narrated in the first person, the story traces his reunions with old friends and his former girlfriend Blair, and a run of nights filled with parties, drug use and casual sex. Clay sets out to find Julian, a childhood friend from high school with whom he has lost touch and who, he gradually learns, has fallen into heroin addiction and prostitution to pay off debts. Across the book Clay grows disillusioned with his surroundings as he sees his friends' indifference to suffering, a detachment that becomes starker in the book's most brutal episodes.

The novel is often read as a portrait of affluent young people of its era and of the emptiness of the city's party culture. Its spare, minimalist prose, which Ellis refined on the advice of his teacher, the novelist Joe McGinniss, is associated with Joan Didion and with Los Angeles noir films.

Critical reception was largely negative. Reviewers faulted its sensationalism, its cold style and the difficulty of telling its characters apart, all marked by a similar lack of purpose. Others praised its generational portrait and its lasting influence on American fiction, and it proved especially popular with young readers of the 1980s. A 1987 film loosely based on the novel took a far more moralistic tone. The book has also left traces in popular culture: the Bloc Party song «Song for Clay (Disappear Here)» was inspired by it, and the Norwegian band Zeromancer's name is also linked to its influence.