Vogue\u2019s Book Club is back, and for our third installment we\u2019ve got our Ray-Bans on, our Elvis Costello cued up, and we\u2019re afraid to merge.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right\u2014our pick is none other than Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s classic first novel, Less Than Zero, a book that burst onto the literary scene in 1986, when Ellis was just 21 and an undergraduate at Bennington College. Less Than Zero was his chilly, haunting debut about his Los Angeles teenage life, written in declarative, hypnotic sentences influenced by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway\u2014Ellis\u2019s two literary heroes\u2014and preoccupied with emotional numbness, drugs, partying, rich-kid culture, and meaningless sex.<\/p>\n
Does that sound like fun? Less Than Zero is definitely a disquieting read; rarely has Los Angeles seemed so ominous. And yet it has a mesmerizing specificity. Here are meetups at Du-par\u2019s and the Galleria, parties in Holmby Hills, drives along Wilshire and out to ghostly Palm Springs. The movies in the multiplexes are name-checked, so is the music on the radio, the cars Clay\u2019s friends drive, the things they wear. Clay is home in LA from an unnamed college in New Hampshire for Christmas and has four weeks to reconnect with friends, break up with his maybe girlfriend Blair, and find out what\u2019s going on with his friend Julian (nothing good).<\/p>\n
No less than the New York Times\u2019s indomitable book critic Michiko Kakutani proclaimed Less Than Zero \u201cone of the most disturbing novels I\u2019ve read in a long time,\u201d and the book became a bestseller, and Ellis a kind of celebrity, associated with the lifestyle he wrote about. More books followed: The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho (canceled by its first publisher pre-publication due to its horrific content; picked up by another and still a cult novel), Glamorama, Lunar Park, and others. In 2023, Ellis returned to the environs of Less Than Zero with The Shards, which is the subject of a buzzy Ryan Murphy adaptation coming in August from FX.<\/a><\/p>\n Ellis is a sly satirist and his detached view of California\u2019s darker side is as indelible as it was 40 years ago. \u201cPeople are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,\u201d it starts\u2026 and doesn\u2019t let up. So pick up a copy\u2014head to Bookshop.org<\/a> and use the code Vogue15 for a 15% discount!\u2014and follow along with us as we read and post stories about Less Than Zero on the Vogue app.<\/p>\n Reading Guide (based on the 1998 Vintage Contemporaries edition)<\/p>\n July 30\u2013August 6: pp. 9 (People are afraid\u2026) to pp. 118 (For some reason I believe this and unroll the window and we drive to After Hours.)<\/p>\n August 7\u2013August 13: pp. 119 (The girl I\u2019m sitting next to\u2026) to end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vogue\u2019s Book Club is back, and for our third installment we\u2019ve got our Ray-Bans on, our Elvis Costello…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,182957],"class_list":["post-555684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-vogue-book-club"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}