Less Than Zero

Premier roman de Bret Easton Ellis, déjà dans la description d'un monde ultra-artificiel et dérangeant (celui de la richesse et de la célébrité) où des personnages sont tellement désabusés et déconnectés de la réalité que même le sexe et la drogue ne suffisent plus à masquer le vide qui les entoure. Et quand ce vide prend trop de place, ils finissent immanquablement par sortir du matérialisme qui les définit (on jauge les autres selon la qualité de leur bronzage, ou la marque de leur pantalon) pour basculer soit dans la dépression, soit dans l'ultra-violence.

Cette violence caractéristique des romans suivants de Bret Easton Ellis, crue, à la limite du supportable, semble être le dernier souffle d'une classe aisée (ici des enfants favorisés des quartiers riches de Los Angeles) pour assouvir un besoin de contrôle, de pouvoir (on parle de torture et de viol), comme si c'était la dernière chose qui permettait de donner un sens à leur vie.

Des adolescents sans parents, mais avec tous les moyens matériels et financiers d'adultes, qui errent d'une maison à l'autre, d'une soirée à l'autre, d'un restaurant à un centre commercial, en se lançant "Tu fais quoi ?" sans que personne n'ait jamais quoi que ce soit de concret à répondre, parce qu'il n'y a pas de plan, pas d'objectif qui vaille la peine, juste quelques instants à grappiller à droite et à gauche sans trop savoir quoi en tirer. Des gens dont la peur principale serait de se perdre (dans Los Angeles, mais on comprend vite que c'est plus un sentiment global).

Le personnage principal, Clay, traverse moments intimes et scènes d'horreur avec quasi la même absence de réaction. Tout lui coule dessus, ou presque, ce qui donne une importance cruciale à ces quelques moments où l'empathie semble se réveiller en lui, avant de s'éteindre à nouveau.

Ce sont ces quelques moments qui font qu'on arrive à s'attacher un tant soit peu à ce personnage, qui lui redonnent un peu de consistance et d'humanité, dans ce roman très noir où on oscille facilement entre détestation et peine pour ces gens qui ont tout et qui n'en font rien.

I read Less Than Zero after reading American Psycho about a year ago. This is an incredibly powerful book with solid motifs and themes - it almost feels like a prototype of Ellis's future work. Clay's lifestyle, as described, is completely alien to me, personally. Still, Ellis is so effective at conveying the emptiness and the disconnect at the core of these youths' psyche that I cannot help but feel for them despite their overwhelming privilege. The plot isn't exactly linear, but Ellis manages to gets his point across nonetheless. Overall, Less Than Zero is an impressive endeavour for such a young author that I greatly enjoyed reading.

1) "All it comes down to is that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge."

2) "My mother and I are siting in a restaurant on Melrose, and she's drinking white wine and still has her sunglasses on and she keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they're shaking. She tries to smile when she asks me what I want for Christmas. I'm surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her. 'Nothing,' I say. There's a pause and then I ask her, 'What do you want?' She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands and she sips her wine. 'I don't know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.'"

3) "A truck with video games strapped in the back passes by and my sisters are driven into some sort of frenzy. 'Follow that video game!' one of them commands. 'Mom, do you think if I asked Dad he'd get me Galaga for Christmas?' the other one asks brushing her short blond hair. I think she's thirteen, maybe. 'What is a Galaga?' my mother asks 'A video game,' one of them says 'You have Atari though,' my mother says."

4) "During the day I'd sit in the living room and try to read the San Francisco Chronicle and she'd walk along the beach and collect seashells, and before too long we started going to bed sometime before dawn and then waking up in the midafternoon, and then we'd open another bottle. One day we took the convertible and drove to a secluded part of the beach. We ate caviar and Blair had chopped up some onions and eggs and cheese, and we brought fruit and these cinnamon cookies Blair was really into, and a six-pack of Tab, because that and the champagne were all Blair would drink, and we'd either jog on the empty shore or try to swim in the rough surf."

5) "'Girls are fucked. Especially this girl. She is so fucked up. On cocaine. On this drug called Preludin, on speed. Jesus.' Trent takes another drag, hands it to me, and then unrolls the window and stares at the sky. We park and then walk through the empty, bright Beverly Center. All the stores are closed and as we walk up to the top floor, where the movies are playing, the whiteness of the floors and the ceilings and the walls is overpowering and we walk quickly through the empty mall and don't see one other person until we get to the theaters. There are a couple of people milling around the ticket booth. We buy our tickets and walk down the hall to theater thirteen and Trent and I are the only persons in it and we share another joint inside the small, hollow room.'"

6) "I get a message that Trent stopped by. He was wearing a really expensive suit, my sisters said, and driving some-one else's Mercedes. 'Friend of mine's,' Trent told them. He also told them to tell me that Scott O.D.'d. I don't know who Scott is. It keeps raining. And that night, after I get three of the weird silent phone calls, I break a glass by throwing it against the wall. No one comes in to see what the sound was. Then I lie on the bed, awake, take twenty milligrams of Valium to come off the coke, but it doesn't get me to sleep. I turn MTV off and the radio on, but KNAC won't come in so I turn the radio off and stare out across the Valley and look at the canvas of neon and fluorescent lights lying beneath the purple night sky and I stand there, nude, by the window, watching the clouds pass and then I lie on my bed and try to remember how many days I've been home and then I get up and pace the room and light another cigarette and then the phone will ring. This is how the nights are when it rains."

7) "'Why?' is all I ask Rip. 'What?' 'Why, Rip?' Rip looks confused. 'Why that? You mean in there?' I try to nod. 'Why not? What the hell?' 'Oh God, Rip, come on, she's eleven.' 'Twelve,' Rip corrects. 'Yeah, twelve,' I say, thinking about it for a moment. 'Hey, don't look at me like I'm some sort of scumbag or something. I'm not.' 'It's...' my voice trails off. 'It's what?' Rip wants to know. 'It's... I don't think it's right.' 'What's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.' I lean up against the wall. I can hear Spin moaning in the bedroom and then the sound of a hand slapping maybe a face. 'But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No. I don't.' 'What?' 'No, I don't.' There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, what don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to lose.'"

7) "Rip told me that, on some quiet nights, late, you can hear the screeching of tires and then a long silence; a whoosh and then, barely audible, an impact. And sometimes, if one listens very carefully, there are screams in the night that don't last too long. Rip said he doubted that they'll ever get the cars out of there, that they'll probably wait until it gets full of cars and use it as an example and then bury it. And standing there on the hill, overlooking the smog-soaked, baking Valley and feeling the hot winds returning and the dust swirling at my feet and the sun, gigantic, a ball of fire, rising over it, I believed him. And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. 'Where are we going?' I asked. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Just driving.' 'But this road doesn't go anywhere,' I told him. 'That doesn't matter.' 'What does?' I asked, after a little while. 'Just that we're on it, dude,' he said."

8) "Later, in the video arcade, Trent plays a game called Burger Time in which there are all these video hot dogs and eggs that chase around a short, bearded chef and Trent wants to teach me how to play, but I don't want to. I just keep staring at the maniacal wiggling hot dogs and for some reason it's just too much to take and I walk away, looking for something else to play. But all the games seem to deal with beetles and bees and moths and snakes and mosquitoes and frogs drowning and mad spiders eating large purple video flies and the music that goes along with the games makes me feel dizzy and gives me a headache and the images are hard to shake off, even after I leave the arcade."