Published in 1985, Less Than Zero is the first novel of Bret Easton Ellis and was published when the author was twenty-one and still a student at the private liberal arts Bennington College, home to a lot of notable alumni. The novel scandalized America when it first came out and received a good amount of mixed reviews; the public either loved Less Than Zero or hated it. It didn't stop it from becoming an internationally notorious roman-à-clef, a timeless classic that can't help but mesmerize the readers. Bret Easton Ellis became overnight a star of American literature, and he has since then, published a sequel to his controversial debut called Imperial Bedrooms.
Ellis wrote the first draft of Less Than Zero in less than eight weeks, third-person style. He was advised later-on by Joe McGinnis, his creative writing teacher, to return to the first-person, which gave birth to the minimalist style Brett Easton Ellis is so famous for today. The novel was edited for two years after that, mostly to polish earlier drafts which were more like "autobiographical teen diary entries," according to Ellis himself. It is clear that a lot of Less Than Zero was inspired by the author's surroundings, it is after all a novel about real life written with a facade of fiction. However, Ellis did say that it was in no way autobiographical and shouldn't be considered as such.
The story follows the so-called American jeunesse dorée, where eighteen-year-old Clay returns to Los Angeles for Christmas and gets to meet his old friends. Bret Easton Ellis describes, without judgment, as a simple observer, the rich and helpless youth of the 1980s, a society to which he belongs to an extent. The book deals with themes of drug addiction, eating disorders and child abuse. A book that is both elusive and mesmerizing, haunting in its horror, truly unforgettable.
