Book rewind: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)

Less Than Zero
by Bret Easton Ellis
Simon & Schuster

American author Bret Easton Ellis, who began writing Less Than Zero during his sophomore year at college in Vermont, has said the debut novel is autobiographical and "reads like teen diaries or journal entries - lots of stuff about the bands I liked, the beach, clubs, driving around, doing drugs, partying".

Some critics and fans hailed it as satire, others as a smart indictment of 1980s excess, but there was also a sense that the novel was just an indulgent portrait of a high-end brand of adolescent misbehaviour. It also wasn't well written (which proper satire tends, and needs, to be), making it ultimately as glib as its subject matter.

The novel follows a group of characters who spend their days driving around Los Angeles and nights at lavish parties where they stand around talking about what many rich white college students probably liked to talk about in that era: where to score cocaine and who in the room may or may not be gay. Despite the finger-pointing, Ellis seemed to revel in this world.

Clay, the protagonist, returns home to Los Angeles and its fabled party scene only to find that the debauchery that was once delectable has turned destructive. His friend Julian has become a heroin addict and a rent-boy, while his drug dealer, Rip, has enslaved a 12-year-old girl in his apartment. This is Reagan-era America where both ends of the social scale are getting high, getting lost, and getting messed up.

The main bugbear with Less Than Zero, which contains little of the humour or psychological exploration of Ellis' brilliant third novel, American Psycho, is that it's hard to empathise with any of the characters. Clay may question his old life, but in the end he maintains a cool distance that obscures whether he has indeed had the Damascene conversion the author likes to portray.