Less Than Zero would eventually sell millions of copies around the world and make Bret Easton Ellis one of the youngest literary stars in American history. In the words of one editor, as Ellis was later told, “If there’s an audience for a novel about coke-snorting, cock-socking zombies, then by all means let’s publish the damn thing.” It turned out there was a audience for it. Not everyone at Simon and Schuster loved the book.
It’s funny, creepy, and vaguely gothic, with coyotes howling in the Hollywood Hills, lizards crawling out of glove compartments, and rumors about a werewolf preying on people in Bel Air. The book is about a group of burned-out rich kids in L.A., with names like Clay and Rip and Blair and Spin, who do almost nothing (other than have sex, do drugs, watch MTV, play video games, and drive around the city looking for one another) for two hundred pages. Most of my friends lived in bigger houses in better neighborhoods and drove nicer cars.”Īt the age of twenty, while a junior at Bennington, Ellis sold his first novel, Less Than Zero, to Simon and Schuster for five thousand dollars. “But at the time, I didn’t feel that way. “In retrospect, we were pretty well-off,” he told me. Instead, it imposes homogeneity on social relations, pushing the characters to the brink of invisibility and nothingness.Bret Easton Ellis was born in 1964 in Los Angeles, grew up in the San Fernando Valley, went to a local private school called Buckley, and drove his parents’ hand-me-down Mercedes 450SL. The present study argues that abstract space numbs the potentials for difference and heterogeneity in Ellis's novel. In this paper, the role abstract space plays in Ellis's novel is analyzed in the light of Henri Lefebvre's theory of space. In Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, abstract space, by homogenizing and fragmenting the body and lived experience, makes the characters comply with the consumer culture and suppresses the potentials for the difference and the emergence of alternative spaces. This process of homogenization acts as a mechanism of control to preserve the current status quo.
Prevalent in the late capitalist society is abstract space that homogenizes and flattens out the differences, conflicts and contradictions on the social scene. The consumer culture of late capitalism is more than ever associated with the concept of urban space.
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