![]() ![]() ![]() He continued to press the limits of fiction and its moral order until the reckless, disaffected, anesthetized lifestyles of a bunch of rich 18-year-old Hollywood kids seemed almost like a warm-up for the horrors to come: The Rules of Attraction (1987), American Psycho (1991), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998), and Lunar Park (2005). But in the intervening 25 years, Ellis has refused to ride the shock waves of his auspicious debut. Less Than Zero turned Ellis into an instant literary sensation, and for a while the author lived in New York City as one of the princes of a cool new beautiful MTV-generation literati. ” The reason that Less Than Zero is so unforgettable is that few books in recent decades have managed to so utterly ransack all accepted notions and conceits-of youth, of the West Coast mentality, of what it means not so much to get to the land of the rich and famous but to actually be there, having already arrived. The first sentence of the book reads like a travel warning of destruction ahead: “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. It isn’t difficult to see why Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero-by a then unknown 21-year-old Bennington College student with a name that sounded like it was copied from a cotillion guest list-created so much shock, anxiety, and nihilistic glee within the literary and cultural community. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |