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Book Review By Winston Lamb
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

    The narrator, Clay, comes home to Los Angeles for Christmas after having wasted his first year at a college in New Hampshire in a lifestyle of drugs and sex that is similar if not the same as the life he left behind in Los Angeles, so in the opening section of the novel we are presented with a futilistic outlook in which an inescapable moral decay has spread from coast to coast.

The novel is a journal of Clay's wanderings in the city and in the loop of wealthy teens who are bored with life. Clay feels a chill in the hot desert wind and counts down the days until he will be through with his Christmas vacation and leave his friends behind again. Clay's friends elite but interchangeable in that nobody stands out as a unique character. We are to glean from the novel that their lack of personality is a product of their lifestyle of excess. The party scene of these friends is appealing at first glance with the swarms of beautiful people eager to please and infinite ways to have a good time, but the party scene gets old after a while and boring to read. The novel is most upsetting with the depiction of eighteen year olds who can have anything that they desire but use this power in sole purpose of drug consumption and sex.

    Los Angeles is a scary city full of violence, which Clay witnesses firsthand with his friends. The city seems to numb their moral senses. The culture is saturated with pop songs, video games and pornography that is empty in content but sought after by teens driven crazy with it all. Los Angeles is a moral, mental and physical wasteland blasted by relentless, hot desert wind and sun.



Plot & Themes
Tone of book? - depressed
Time/era of story - 1980's-1999
Kids growing up/acting up? Yes
Is this an adult or child's book? - Adult or Young Adult Book
Age group of kid(s) in story: - college
Wild kid(s)? - druggie culture (& crime)
Loving/sexing? - girl chasing

Main Character
Gender - Male
Profession/status:
Age: - a teen
Ethnicity/Nationality
Unusual characteristics:

Main Adversary
Identity: - society
Age: - a teen
Profession/status:
Eccentric/Smart/Dumb: Yes
Eccentric:
How sensitive is this character?
Sense of humor - Cynical sense of humor
Intelligence - Average intelligence

Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings? - 7 ()
Desert? Yes
Desert: - funny heat-delusions
City? Yes
City: - Los Angeles
Misc setting

Writing Style
Sex in book? Yes
What kind of sex: - descript of kissing - touching of anatomy - orgies - impregnation/reproduction - lesbians! - actual description of hetero sex - Boob talk! - Vagia talk! - Weiner talk! - two guys doing it - rape/molest
Lot of foul language? Yes
Amount of dialog - roughly even amounts of descript and dialog
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