“But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere’’: The Existential Dilemma in Less Than Zero NICKI SAHLIN Th Less Than Zero (1985), Bret Easton Ellis joins the tradition of Hollywood writers who have been capitalizing on southern California, its landscape, and its lifestyle for more than fifty years. That group includes writers such as Nathanael West, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and, more recently, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Hollywood has long served as a set- ting for fiction that reveals the corruption lurking behind glamorous lifestyles or, in the case of crime and detective novels, the intrigue and masquerade so suited to a city whose business is a form of deception. By the time Joan Di- dion published Play It As It Lays (1970), the Hollywood tradition had dis- pensed with a large portion of the glitter, moving toward heavier doses of cynicism, which Didion parlayed into her own brand of existentialism or even nihilisi ‘et even as early as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), “the absurdist tradition” was putting down roots in Hollywood, and, for the next few decades, major novelists hired as screenwriters were express- ing their disillusionment in ‘“‘nihilistic novels which bse aaa the Hollywood antimyth a permanent part of our national folklore. By now, Hollywood has a fifty-year history as a setting for varying levels of disillusionment and various kinds of revelation, and existentialist readings of Hollywood novels are to some degree inevitable. Less Than Zero, narrated in deadpan style by an eighteen-year-old named Clay, takes its place in the Hollywood scenario so naturally, with the book’s overprivileged cast of characters playing their roles so‘ convincingly, that re- viewers have regarded the book as no more than an adolescent novel, an up- dated version of The Catcher in the Rye that just happens to take place on the West Coast rather than the East. Perhaps because of the author’s youth—El- lis was just twenty-one at the time of the novel’s publication—reviewers have treated the book as if it were a quasi-fictional rendition of Ellis’s personal history and have labeled its author a member of the ‘‘brat pack,” a specialist FALL 1991, VOL. XXXill, NO. 1 23in “the lifestyles of the young and naughty.’”? That these lifestyles might have been consciously shaped by the author and might have symbolic or philo- sophical implications are possibilities that were hardly considered by review- ers of the novel. Ellis’s writing is most often viewed as a kind of effortless self-indulgence. . . [¥Jou sometimes get the feeling that chunks of this book were lifted whole from the high melodrama and adolescent angst of Ellis’s diary,’’ com- ments one reviewer.‘ Moreover, Ellis’s fiction is not generally regarded as a genuinely fictional, or even fictitious, creation. “Less Than Zero is almost more interesting as a cultural document than as a novel,’’* observes one re- viewer, whereas another, admitting that Ellis ‘clearly possesses talent,” claims that Less Than Zero “‘. . . ends up feeling more like a ‘60 Minutes’ documentary on desperate youth than a full-fledged novel.’’* A critic less responsive to the inherent interest of Ellis’s material characterizes the novel as “a rather juvenile attempt to capture the sense of purposelessness that seems to afflict so many young people these days.””” Reviewers accuse Ellis, on the one hand, of owing too large a literary debt—‘‘. . . his descriptions of Los Angeles carry a few too many echoes of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and Nathanael West’”*—or, on the other, of possessing no literary ties at all—‘‘Reading [the novel] is like watching MTV.” One reviewer finds that the novel’s tone is marked by ‘an obvious indebtedness to . . . Hemingway’; another maintains that it is ‘‘[w]ritten in the inarticulate style of a petulant suburban punk.’’" A reviewer who feels that Ellis draws his material too directly from reality wishes the young novel- ist would ‘‘write a story that doesn’t merely depress us with sociological re- ports’; another suggests that his characters seem too little in touch with reality: ‘Prematurely world-weary, these martyrs of anomie and non- existential alienation go from party to party looking for cheap thrills. . . .””” In one way or another, all of these critics use Ellis’s youth as a basis for their complaints, dismissing his clean style as inarticulate and his philosophical ef- fects as ‘‘non-existential,”’ or, at best, strictly “‘documentary.’’ One wonders whether an identical first novel by a middle-aged author might not have re- ceived more credit for its art and fewer accusations of artifice. In any case, after the rash of reviews that appeared when it hit the best- seller list, Less Than Zero never received further critical attention. A factor contributing to the neglect may have been the failure of Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), to live up to the promise of the first. A medi- ocre, if technically accomplished novel, based too much in the trivia of col- lege life, The Rules of Attraction should not detract from the power of Ellis’s first work. Firmly in the Hollywood tradition, Less Than Zero is far from be- ing a random, diary-style pastische of minutiae drawn from the decadent life- styles of Los Angeles youth; it is stylistically accomplished, carefully crafted, close to the bone in its use of telling detail. First acting on the advice of his 24 CRITIQUEBennington teacher, Joe McGinnis, and then under the supervision of his edi- tor, Ellis spent between two-and-a-half and three years revising and paring down the original version of his novel.'* The patterns of symbolism and im- agery in Less Than Zero are remarkably consistent, contributing to the over- whelming sense of dread that pervades the book and finally giving it an ex- istential dimension that goes beyond the limits of verisimilitude. It is unlikely that Ellis was writing as a disciple of any specific existentialist philosophy; it is highly probable that his unsparing portrayals of absurdity and nothingness in the Hollywood setting owe a great deal to American liter- ary influences. Ellis has acknowledged his indebtedness to Nathanael wy Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway!!-’ There can be little doubt that within the usual purview of a liberal arts educa- tion and within the range of influences available in writing workshops, Ellis would also have been exposed to more explicit existentialist outlooks on life. Whatever the immediate influences, the elements of existentialism evident in Less Than Zero are most readily seen as a mixture stemming from both Camus and Sartre. Like the ‘‘stranger’’ or “‘outsider’? portrayed in Camus’s L’étranger (1942), Ellis’s narrator feels intensely alienated, a stranger even in familiar territory. Moreover, he feels compelled to con- front and question the absurd; he becomes aware of the absurd in its ex- istential sense as his month-long experience tells him that all the practices and values that he has previously accepted actually have no meaning. He is finally brought to the kind of awakening described in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) when ‘‘the stage sets collapse,’”” and the ‘“‘easily followed’’ path is questioned, when “‘. . . [OJne day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.’?’'® ~ Ellis’s protagonist also becomes painfully aware of the void or ‘“‘nothing- ness’’ (Sartre’s /e néant), and the resulting anxiety brings him the burden of freedom and responsibility, a burden that is part of both Camus’s and Sar- tre’s existential schemes. At times, particularly in scenes with his own fami- ly, Ellis’s narrator bears a fleeting resemblance to Kafka’s characters, for whom life seems painfully absurd and whose very existence seems to them to be without value. For the most part, a reliance on the most familiar elements of existentialism—alienation and anxiety, increasing awareness of the absurd and of nothingness, then, more positively, the awakening to in- dividual responsibility—serves as the best way to approach a novel that is consistently existential in its outlook without being highly sophisticated in a philosophical sense. Ellis’s narrator, Clay, is a third- or fourth-generation Hollywood adoles- cent, eighteen at the time of his return from a college in New Hampshire for Christmas break. Although the novel is not fully plotted—one might com- plain that it does indeed consist of an endless round of parties, clubs, and restaurants, with intervals grudgingly spent with family—its subplot shapes FALL 1991, VOL. XXIII, NO. 1 25