Less Than Zero

At first, I was skeptical that Ellis could write and publish such an acclaimed book at the age of nineteen. Then, I totally bought into the idea. Then, I actually read the book.

The story centers on Clay, a college student returning home to Los Angeles during his winter break. At first, his biggest problem is resolving his relationship with ex-girlfriend Blair. His hometown is unromanticized, and crawling with characters who are darkly apathetic at best and downright evil at their worst. At first, his friends' depravity seems harmless enough - the typical mischief one would expect of inherently wealthy young adults taking designer drugs. Soon, though, Clay is describing cocaine causing blood to come out of his nose, a torture porn viewing which the other characters discuss with vague disinterest, and ultimately a dead body and a young girl being raped by his friends.

The core plot outlines Clay's attempt to find his friend Julian, who disappears after Clay loans him a large sum of money to ostensibly pay for an abortion. Clay tries to track him down, with many suggesting that Julian has died. When he does finally locate him, Clay finds out that Julian has a major heroin problem and has taken to whoring himself out - literally - to get himself out of debt. Julian's problem is like quicksand, though, and Clay sees how the more Julian struggles against it, the further in he sinks.

Through all of this, Clay's narrative occasionally provides us glimpses into his privileged past as he tries to pinpoint the moment he lost all passion for life. He suggests a summer spent at his grandparents' mansion in Palm Springs may have been the turning point, after which his grandmother died and things began to decay.

Ellis's prose is cold and crisp to the point of harshness, which aptly fitting of the apathetic characters in the novel. As the novel is told through Clay's perspective, everything is viewed through his disinterested and disaffected lens. The novel itself feels very episodic, which could be a flaw if it did not feel intentional. (Wouldn't a life with limitless time and money and lacking any obligation seem like a random string of events connected only by recurring locations and characters? It would to me. But, then again, I'm poor in money and imagination.)

Aside from its brutality and bluntness and the look-what-he-did-at-nineteen factor, the book has some features of literary merit. For example, the theme of individual insignificance in the face of such a cold and cruel city is hammered home in some interesting ways. The punk group X repeatedly pops up which (aside from hopefully inspiring people to go out and buy their music) suggests an anonymity and facelessness to the background noise of these characters lives - the band doesn't even have a real name, just the mathematical variable "X" which could be anything. There is also the not-so-subtle "You could disappear here" billboard which haunts Clay at various intersections in Los Angeles, vaguely reminiscent of the "Eyes of T. J. Eckleburg" in "The Great Gatsby."

I'd recommend this book with one caveat: there are some moments of gruesome brutality which are hard to read. Given the anhedonia of the characters, though, it's hard to tell whether or not the reader is supposed to feel anything in these scenes. And that may be the most disturbing feature of the book.

Blood Meridian

It took me a while to slug through it, but I finally finished reading Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel "Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West." It was a brutal read, both in regards to the text and the mental energy expended to read it, but I finish it with a sense of smugness that I have tackled some literary monster.

The book loosely follows the journeys of a character known only as "the kid" and traces his life around his encounters with the antagonist character - Judge Holden (almost exclusively referred to as "the judge"). The two characters' fates are irreversibly intertwined after the judge rescues the kid from a Mexican prison in return for the kid joining the judge's band of scalp-hunters. Most of the novel then follows the scalp-hunters killing sprees, until they are finally ambushed and mostly killed. The few survivors are hunted down, one-by-one, by the judge, until the kid is the only one left. (At this point, the kid is suddenly referred to as "the man" - suggesting that he is beyond the edge of innocence.) In the final scene, the judge has tracked down the kid / the man down in Texas and, although the kid's fate is left unknown and ambiguous, we are left with the impression that the judge has slaughtered him too.

To me, "Blood Meridian" hearkens back to an earlier era of writing - to the era of Herman Melville and (to an extent) Joseph Conrad. Much of the writing is consumed by descriptions of the landscape and weather, with the characters merely traversing these settings. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, with most of the conversations being short and consisting of questions and responses. Yet, eventually, we learn about our characters, even though they are not necessarily the foreground of the picture much of the time. Extended metaphors are also a rarity (which fits with the characters of the novel who are mostly uneducated grunts). The book has a few "extended monologues" though, which remind me of Conrad's regular narrator of Marlowe. This style, then, is well-crafted and exhibits McCarthy's fantastic ability to manipulate the written word to serve his purpose, and it is evident why many critics view "Blood Meridian" as his masterpiece.

The character of Judge Holden was brutal but beautifully created. He is, among all the characters, the one who transcends the intelligence of all the others. He keeps a journal where he documents everything he comes across, trying to learn as much as he can about everything he can. He uses logic and reasoning with the rest of the gang, who are often confused by his statements. Yet, he is also an inherently evil character. It is implied repeatedly (including through his relationship with the kid) that he is a pedophile, and it is explicit that he is a child murderer and a calculated homicidal maniac. He repeatedly refers to the pervasiveness of violence throughout culture, claiming at one point (in essence) that men are not men if they have not been to war and drawn blood. To me, he represents the devil in all his deception and violence. There is even a moment when, while explaining why he documents everything he sees and does, the judge declares that the fact that anything exists without his permission and beyond his control is an insult to him - which reminds me of a passage from Milton's "Paradise Lost" (although I cannot recall the line verbatim).

The novel's ambiguous ending - with the kid's fate left unresolved - was quite a shock to me. Although much of the action of the book had been left ambiguous, I suppose I was expecting some kind of secure resolution, some sense of closure. Yet, the lack of clarity is also a fitting ending to a book which moves through a haze of uncertainty - we're never quite sure where exactly the kid came from, why he was chosen by the judge, what happens to many of the characters. The only thing we know for certain at the end is that the judge survives in all his madness (perhaps still survives, the last line suggests - adding to the impression that he is an evil beyond the earth).

One final note: although much of the action of the book is implied, most of the descriptions of locations and scenes of the book are incredibly explicit. This detail includes the slaughter, dismemberment, and scalping of several people. McCarthy's prose leaves nothing to the imagination in regards to the brutality of these based-on-reality events. This novel is not for the feint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach. I found this brutality interesting, though, in contrast with the way death is treated in most westerns (especially in film). More often than not, someone is shot with a puff of smoke and falls over stiffly. In reality, though, bodies were disfigured, ears and scalps kept as souvenirs, and conflicts were bloody and messy. McCarthy does not stray from reality, and the reader is left with a few horrific images to think about.