I Am Zero

Bret Easton Ellis

Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

John was talking to me about his car or maybe about his house with the new thing he’d bought and he was telling me all about the movie he saw last week and how it was bad. His girlfriend Kim had chosen it and she has the worst taste in everything. I said something and had a drink. John told me he didn’t know why he was still with Kim. He said she looked like a pig that day, anyway. It was good to sit in the dark for two hours and not to have to look at her, even if the film was terrible. John said that his mother’s health thing had come back and she was really scared. She wanted to call him up all day and all night and talk to him about it. He said he’d told her something last time she’d done it but I wasn’t really listening. I put a song on. It was something by Elvis Costello, who I was trying to get into because a girl I’d taken a vague interest in said I’d look better if I did. The sun was still shining even though the day was at an end. It hadn’t rained in a month.

Many people are alive who are too old or too young for the works of Bret Easton Ellis. Many people older than Ellis himself will say, if asked, what the older critics always said when his work first appeared. This is just empty nihilism, stories about excess and material culture and sad rich people. There’s nothing here at all. It’s junk. And younger people might put fingers to their mouths and cringe at all the sex and drugs and rock and roll (and laugh about people using cassette players to listen to new music). They might not understand that everyone’s youth is lived in the first person, and not as a confused and occluded memory.

What the critics of Ellis’s first books, especially Less than Zero, did not understand is that appearing to say nothing very simply is extraordinarily difficult. It’s hard not to clutter things up with adjectives, as I did in the example at the beginning of this review. It is very hard to have a speech as empty as the speech of Ellis’s characters. It’s very difficult to prove, even in a short book, that someone — no matter what happens to them, no matter what they face, no matter what they ought to have learnt — has nothing to say.

I’d add (if you will permit me to grow tedious and autobiographical) that for me, Less than Zero was one of the most important books I read as a teenager. There’s not much comparison. Maybe Huckleberry Finn, possibly A Moveable Feast, Atomised, Gatsby, at a push Lyrical Ballads — these were as influential. But really, that’s it.

Simplicity, that’s what most got me. Many books are simple because the authors or editors are stupid. But this one was simple because it was chiselled down from the indulgent third person work of grandiloquence that young men like to write. What was once a million-word monument to man’s vanity emerged from rewrites light and stark. Not for nothing did it provoke moral outrage. Not for nothing did so many old people say that it was not art, that it presaged only ill for society, that its author was a very bad man and people would listen to him at their peril.

It would be wrong, and it’s something many other people have done, anyway, to say that if not for Ellis, the modern celebrity world would have been unpredicted. J. G. Ballard, as much as anyone, foresaw that modern technology would turn our cities into dirty concrete panopticons. Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four showed us our world, one of ubiquitous mass surveillance, where being in the same room as a device is the same as being in prison under constant watch. What Orwell did not predict, and Ellis did not predict either, was that people would willingly turn the cameras on themselves all day, would sleep on livestream and do all manner of other things for an audience of millions, all for a few dollars.

Ellis is too much a moralist to be very bothered by the practicalities of all that. What Less than Zero is about and what The Rules of Attraction and The Informers are about is the need that modernity only partially sates: for distraction, for distraction from all the constant horrors of life.

Where American Psycho fails, in my view, is that it is all horrors. And boring: horrors that get dull. This is an interesting technique if it’s intentional, but it cannot stay interesting. What the film of American Psycho achieves that the novel does not is more than just being transferred into pop-culture ubiquity. (There is not a single quotable line in the book but the film, written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner, drips with them; even the lines in the film that come from the book are profoundly distilled, significantly rewritten.) Much of Ellis’s work is known for its terseness, its lack of fat and waste. American Psycho is all fat and waste. I don’t admire it.

In other Ellis novels, the horror is all around but it is mostly in inner space. This or that friend gets something terminal. Someone smacks into another car or a barrier while driving. Someone slits their wrists. But it’s a dull horror, the mounting horror of being, something most people can relate to.

You can put that cassette on. You can talk a little about where you’re going on holiday and where your tan comes from or what you’re going to buy later, but fate and tragedy will catch up with you whatever you do. Ellis’s characters know this, deep down they know it. They put the music on, they drink a little, they think about where they might get some drugs for later. It’s all they can do. It’s all they can do in the face of what’s coming.