Zero Added

2021

22 June, Tuesday

It’s late and there’s been a light rain for hours and I suspect after seventy pages of Less Than Zero that I won’t have anything to add to what I wrote on the second reading twenty years ago.

2001

19 August, Sunday

Finished Less Than Zero (again) tonight, fifteen years on (almost exactly). Some of the products have vanished (e.g. Betamax, Tab), some are absent because their time had yet to come (e.g. CDs, mobile phones). I remembered the name of the girl (Blair), the suntan lotion, the snuff film, the twelve-year-old girl tied to the bed, the turning on of MTV (with the sound turned down), the elusive ‘friend’ and the dead body in the alley with a cigarette left in its mouth. Certain phrases and lines came back to me too as I read and it was funnier* than I remembered, deadpan funny, but I don’t think there really was anywhere to go (for Ellis) after that. I’d forgotten that he goes back to his old elementary school near the end. It [i.e. the cumulative effect] remains numbing; an extreme on a spectrum against which one can measure other ways of life.** Serial killing isn’t a way of life, no matter if the protagonist is a yuppie.

*Two examples are the photographer and the psychiatrist.

** One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and everything in between. I wouldn’t include Auschwitz, where, as Primo Levi observed, “mental illnesses were healed” (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 65).