Bret Easton Ellis
Meno Di Zero

Like many successful writers, Bret Easton Ellis attended a creative writing course; after completing it, he published his debut novel.

It's 1985 and Ellis is twenty-one years old when he publishes this short novel (one hundred eighty-five pages) featuring as protagonists some young WASP teenagers from Los Angeles.
Clay, the narrator, is eighteen and has returned home for Christmas break: he will go from one party to another, consuming drugs, engaging in casual sex (boys or girls don't make a difference to him), and trying to understand what happened to his childhood friend Julien.

This edition is from 2006, for Einaudi's ET series and is translated by Marisa Caramella.
The first Italian edition, published by Pironti, contained an extensive essay, unfortunately missing here, on American minimalism written by Fernanda Pivano.
For those interested, it can be found in the aforementioned edition or in some collection by Pivano.

Ellis belongs, alongside David Leavitt (1961) and Jay McInerney (1955), to a group of young authors who in the 1980s continued the path started by authors such as Cheever and Carver (and before them Richard Yates), though shifting their poetics towards the upper middle-class world.
To be precise, Cheever also wrote about the affluent class, but these young authors pushed the boundaries further: dwelling (and subsequently getting bogged down) on the cynicism and immorality of the rich, and focusing even more on linguistic essentiality.
The literary minimalism emerged around 1976 as a reaction to the postmodernists who focused solely on stylistic research, experimentation, and an art-for-art's-sake approach.
The minimalist movement was a return to origins: they adhered to realism by discussing the economic or emotional problems of ordinary people, without rhetoric and frills.
They drew directly from Hemingway to a greater extent, Fitzgerald to a lesser, and indirectly from Flaubert, with his anti-romanticism and obsessive technical precision.
Essentiality was a necessary condition.

If we were to compare this book by Ellis to a movement of the visual arts, we might talk about the hyperrealists.
Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, and Richard Estes were the main founders of the original movement.
The movement, born towards the late sixties, involved the mimetic reproduction of the symbols and icons of the American Dream.
The paintings, which looked like photographs but were generally hand-painted and copied from real photos, depicted football players, anonymous diners, or pick-up trucks, and ended up appearing as a crafted style exercise aimed at ironically alluding to the leading symbols of a culture.
Likewise, Ellis's writing, using the technique of estrangement and impersonality (another typical feature of Minimalism, inherited from naturalism and also present in Verga), introduces us to the society of wealthy heirs, showing us with exhibited impassivity their vices, dependencies, and moral emptiness.
The text is presented in separate paragraphs, rapid and dense episodes of Clay's life.
The dialogues, dry, useless, emotionless and repeated without conviction, serve only to underline the illogicality and unreality, made of excessive well-being, in which the protagonists live their daily lives.
Unfortunately, though, lacking a genuine story, an evolution, the book ends up seeming a bit flat.
But it should also be remembered that this is due to the technique of anticlimax, also widely used by minimalists.
As far as the story itself is concerned, one must acknowledge that its specificity lies not so much in telling something but rather in summarizing a mood.
The languor, the spleen, the insensitivity, and the missed adolescence of the protagonists, raised in a society where opulence has stifled the will to live and rendered all prospects barren.
"Less Than Zero" is essentially a criticism, somewhat prudish and simplistic, of the cynicism of consumer society.

But without seeking intellectual sophistication, one can say that this novel truly has the rhythm of a music video, all in the first person, taking us around that iconic Los Angeles that has been mythologized for years, showing us with voyeurism its most debauched side.
Personally, I find it better than the following "The Rules of Attraction," but the perpetually over-the-top tone risks tiring, due to the story's lack of original ideas and the monotonous narration.
In fact, Ellis, perhaps a youthful folly, seems to address the reader seeking to astonish at all costs.
Trite is the solution of justifying the protagonists' moral drift also, but not only, with the usual absent, divorced, and even insensitive parents.
This is an overused motivation that has fostered a certain superficiality in many novels or films.

Still, flaws aside, "Less Than Zero" is a slightly overrated debut work by a writer with mixed results.
Time has already softened certain social harshness, shedding light on its real value; however, the doubt remains whether Ellis's propensity to show us every scandalous aspect is the result of his critique or his desire to magnetize the audience.
In any case, if read consciously, it can return some of that emotion and energy it evoked at the time of its release, twenty years ago by now.

-To read strictly while listening to: Bad Religion, Black Flag, Adolescents as a counterpoint to the dazzling world of yuppies.