Ransom.

Less than Zero Ransom

EVER SINCE the unexpected success of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City last year, Clever Young Novelists (also known as Voices of a Generation) have been extremely hot among New York publishers. The latest model, discovered by Simon & Schuster editor Bob Asahina, is a 21-year-old student at Bennington named Bret Easton Ellis, whose first novel, Less than Zero, opened on the New York Times best-seller list at 13 and is doubtless headed straight for Hollywood, whence its youthful author came.

Less than Zero, which runs the gamut from snuff movies to homosexual prostitution in a quick and dirty two hundred pages, is guaranteed to give anxiety attacks to any California mother who happens to read it. The plot, such as it is, deals with the return of Clay, a well-heeled college freshman, to Los Angeles for his first Christmas break, in the course of which he consumes several tons of controlled substances, has several orgasms in the company of various young men and women, decides that he wants to witness the ultimate in depravity and does so, and (one assumes) keeps an elaborate diary every night so that he can write the whole sordid story up for his Creative Writing class as soon as he returns to--well, to what is all too obviously Bennington, just as Clay is all too obviously Bret Easton Ellis himself.

The book consists of a choppy series of "shots' ranging in length from a paragraph to three or four pages, a quasi-cinematic technique that Mr. Ellis claims to have gleaned from his assiduous viewing of MTV but which Truman Capote actually originated two decades ago with In Cold Blood. The tone is flat and objective, a mode of discourse appropriate to the generally stunned demeanor of Mr. Ellis's fictional alter ego and to the eerily mechanical quality of the compulsive search for sensual thrills in which the teenage nihilists of Less than Zero engage. ("I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.')

Though the actual writing is quite accomplished, the overall effect of Less than Zero is relentlessly adolescent. Younger readers will be amused to note that one of Mr. Ellis's epigraphs comes from the Led Zeppelin song "Stairway to Heaven,' a notorious prom-night specialty; older readers will be equally amused to discover that Mr. Ellis is the kind of author who draws cosmic significance from chance encounters with billboards. All it says is "Disappear Here' and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little. . . . As I pull onto Sunset I pass the billboard I saw this morning that read "Disappear Here' and I look away and kind of try to get it out of my mind. . . . I think about Blair alone in her bed stroking that stupid black cat and the billboard that says "Disappear Here' and Julian's eyes and wonder if he's for sale and people are afraid to merge. . . . You can disappear here without knowing it.

As a novel, Less than Zero is less than satisfactory. As a piece of journalism, though, it is provocative and disturbing, even valuable. Granted, it is hard to expect much out of an author who follows up the success of his first novel by posing for a Vanity Fair photo spread called "Looking for Cool in L.A.' But Bret Easton Ellis is remarkably successful at illuminating the glitzy facade of Hotel California, a Woody Allen nightmare where nobody reads books or watches the news, Variety and People and MTV represent the uttermost limits of culture, and sex is something mildly amusing that one does between snorts of coke. At its best, Less than Zero puts the reader in mind of Somerset Maugham's irritable remark about Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim: "Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned.' Anyone convinced that America's youth are lining up squarely and unanimously behind the Reagan Revolution should read this book and shudder.*

* It's worth mentioning that Bob Asahina, the editorial midwife of Less than Zero, is a neconservative who came to Simon & Schuster after a stretch at The Public Interest and whose other recent projects include books by James Watt and Jeane Kirkpatrick. That's more frightening than anything in Less than Zero.

While Bret Easton Ellis reaps the transient rewards of precocity, Jay McInerney is currently at work on the screenplay of Bright Lights, Big City, reviewing first novels by other Clever Young Novelists, and sweating out the reviews of his own second novel, a book called Ransom, which is not exactly knocking the critics dead.

Mr. McInerney's sense of humor, arguably his strongest point, has been put on hold for the duration of this grim, self-conscious tale about an American expatriate whose elected penance for a wasted youth is a life of austerity in Kyoto, with the intensive study of karate his chosen means of mortifying the flesh. Overripe bursts of bathetic disillusion litter the pages of Ransom. ("He turned his back on things he used to believe in, and now he likes to badmouth those things and pretend they don't exist. . . . He wondered if his father had deliberately tried to prove there is no escape, that there are no real quests.') And the plot itself is strictly from hunger, The Razor's Edge recycled for yuppies.

The real problem here is very likely one of peer pressure. Forty years ago, when standards were higher and blockbuster novels were written by people like John P. Marquand instead of people like Danielle Steel, Jay McInerney would have been properly lauded as a charming popular novelist with a deft hand at satire. Nowadays Bright Lights, Big City is brought out in the Vintage Contemporaries series and inappropriately praised by people who should know better. Turgid second novels like Ransom--not to mention premature first novels like Less than Zero--are the predictable result of this revolution of rising expectations.