“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of magic”
-Carl Sagan
Review: Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Genre: Coming-of-age, contemporary, young adult
My Rating: ★★★★ (3.5/5 stars)___
Whenever I feel the need to visit literature’s moral badlands, get a hefty dose of realistic grit, or just watch in-your-face messages bleeding through un-sugarcoated storylines, I always crack open a Chuck Palahniuk book. Spinning tales with all these ingredients is his specialty. However, even if I do like his works, I’m averse to not sprinkling a little spice onto my reading list. I sought for other authors who play with the same elements in a completely different way, and luckily, I stumbled upon Bret Easton Ellis and his first work, Less Than Zero.
To a complete tenderfoot in Ellis’ works (like me), Less Than Zero does seem to emit a little vibe similar to Palahniuk’s themes… but that ends at the period of the book’s blurb. The first page would instantly give you the feeling that you’re in for a different kind of read. The narration, characters, and dialogues weave together a tale with a gloomy overall ambiance that I haven’t seen in the fictional works I’ve encountered before.
Considered by many as a cult classic, Less Than Zero is Ellis’ unflinching dark portrait of the MTV generation—rich kids of Los Angeles caught in a string of drug-driven bashes, big C’s buy-and-sell sessions, casual sex, prostitution, and practically everything that falls under the category of self-destructive hedonism. It zeroes in on the story of Clay, an eighteen-year-old boy who comes back to LA for a four-week Christmas vacation. Instead of rest, what he finds himself facing is the inner demon of apathy that resides in all his friends—and in himself as well.
Having a penchant for characters with four-dimensional complexity, I found myself on the brink of disappointment when my attempts to connect with Clay became more and more exhausting to establish. I always believe that in order for a book to be more enjoyable, its main character must have the ability to “click” with the reader. The narrator feels more alive to me that way. He/she must move on the borderlines of his/her world without exactly breaking a fourth wall, extending his/her reaches past the physical restrictions of the paper to latch onto the hearts of the readers using sympathy, relatable experiences, loneliness, love, or even rage. In short, I believe the speaker must make me feel things, regardless if these things were negative or not. For the most part, Clay failed in this department. He’s detached from the world, wallowing in cold cynicism, moving like a trembling marionette with strings that are all too tangled that it was no use to track where they originated. I tried to dismiss it as an effect of his drug addiction, but his coke-reliant friends appear to be more fleshed out than him sometimes. That’s saying something, since he’s already given the fact that no character in the novel has depth of a remarkable kind.
It was only near the end that Clay finally made me feel something, proving that he is not the drug-fueled automaton that I initially think he is. I was irritated for the slow responsiveness, but I found myself wanting to pat him on the back when he begins to become disillusioned with his friends’ extreme self-indulgences. Vivid episodes from his pasts, which include dysfunctional families and fractured relationships, stand in stark contrast with his bleak present. This explains a little about his behavior.
In almost every book, there is at least one character that you would want to wrap in a hug, cradle against you, and whisper that everything will be okay. I was almost surprised when someone like this popped out of the book’s vapid cast of characters: Julian. Clay’s relation does not give away too much about Julian’s situation, but it’s adequate to guess how the boy just got his life’s compass haywire. He is plunging headfirst into his own destruction and he knows it.
Plot-wise, there is nothing much to say about the novel. I must admit that the story’s lack of conventional structure comes off as a strength rather than a weakness, portraying a gritty world as it should be through the eyes of a rather unreliable narrator. No frills and no embellishments, raw and stripped of sweet euphemisms.
Despite the book just basically being a peek into the quotidian lives of well-off kids who pass around drug-filled Daffy Duck Pez dispensers, it gave me a queer feeling that I do not usually get from other books. It has a rough kind of charm that I found unexplainable; it left me a tad empty by the last page, but it also gave birth to a tiny voice in my head screaming, “I’m ready to feel a little emptier if it means I’ll be able to find out what happens to the characters in its sequel, Imperial Bedrooms.” And that, of course, hit me hard: I do care about the characters to a certain degree! I do not know what kind of magic Ellis posses that made him turn the tables on me without me noticing. Whatever it is, I like it.
I think Ellis is a master of minimalism, his narration containing little to zilch emotional tinges that perfectly complements the lethargic attitude of the characters. I find it amazingly ironic how the stream of consciousness style seems so cleanly penned when its contents are generally dirty patchworks of the protagonist’s thoughts and memories. Content-wise, what the novel really wants to show is the perils of stoicism, of how too much pleasure can rob you of your humanity little by little.
I’m excited for the sequel! :)
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Photo by: fanoussss
I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy.
Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler)
(Source: cinderellainrubbershoes)
Peace and happiness are available if we can only quiet our distracted thinking long enough to come back to the present moment and notice the blue sky, the child’s smile, the beautiful sunrise.
Peace Is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh (via creatingaquietmind)
Over all, it’s a show that reminds you that the sexual revolution is a done deal, that few women today see sex as a bargaining chip in a bid for commitment, and that gender parity tends to go along with more sex. You can see that as a tradeoff or as a benefit, but studies have shown it to be true: societies in which the sexes are more equal are societies in which people have more sex. Still, to those disinclined to see this as a good thing, “Girls” offers some validation. Much of that awkward sex is awkward in familiar and timeless ways, but some of it is awkward very specifically. That would be solipsistic, niche sex that takes its expectations from porn, in which the man involved seems to feel weirdly and arrogantly entitled to the satisfaction of his particular fantasies—the guy Hannah is sleeping with has one about an eleven-year-old heroin addict with a Cabbage Patch-doll lunchbox—and to the coöperation of a partner who really isn’t that into them. “Guys my age watch so much pornography,” Dunham told the Times. “When I first started kissing boys, I remember noticing things, certain behaviors, where I thought, ‘There’s no way you learned that anywhere but on YouPorn.com.’ ”
- In this week’s Comment, Margaret Talbot writes about Republicans, “Girls,” and sexual freedom: http://nyr.kr/IgeD7F
“I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
-Augustus Waters (The Fault in Our Stars by John Green)
Title: The Fault in Our Stars
Author: John Green
Genre: Young Adult, Drama, Romance
My Rating: ★★★★★___
How would you feel about life when you know that—after some kind of a miracle that postponed your meeting with the Grim Reaper—it’s only prolonged by a tankful of oxygen? How would you feel if your breaths are dependent on the said tank, which is tethered to you like an ominous shadow? The final chapter of your life has finally been published, and all these medicine and hospital visits represent the recklessly scrawled, long-winded epilogue. Then, when all you’re waiting for is that final punctuation to close your tale, a reason to actually be glad to be alive popped up in front of you. The reason’s name is Augustus Waters.
This is The Fault in Our Stars, the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, sixteen-year-old stage IV thyroid cancer survivor. But don’t throw it away just because you realized it’s “just another cancer book,” because in reality, it is not.
This is not a story about death—this is a story about life.
First of all, I want to say that I’m not particularly fond of novels that obviously use the theme of death only because the author knows it will sell like pancakes. I’m not averse to writers wanting to make the readers feel, but using the same formulaic thing over and over comes off as a mere strategy for commercial success. To me, capitalizing on something that guarantees an easy, heavy emotional impact from the audience sometimes feels like cheating. I believe you can touch, pinch, twinge, or even break the hearts of readers using (1) plotlines that do not require the attendance of some scythe-toting skeleton guy or (2) new material that does not zero in on the subject matter begging for tears. Countless of novels about cancer already exist; when I heard about John Green writing one, I backpedaled a little. But what can I do when a larger chunk of my nerdfighter heart trusts Green and all the stories he spins to life? I went through The Fault in Our Stars…and I’m more than glad I did, because even though it’s not perfect, I think it’s one of the best contemporary young adult books that I have read.
Hazel Grace is perhaps the best Green heroine so far. She gets her own humanity, refusing to take the mold that Alaska Young of Looking for Alaska and Margo Roth Spiegelman of Paper Towns share (there’s someone in the novel that squeezes in the cast, though: the enigmatic and “bitchy” Caroline Mathers). While she still exhibits what I fondly call JG’s Smart Kid Syndrome, her raw honesty about life are impactful, especially because the readers take it as the acumen of someone who came so close to Death’s embrace and knows that Death is still an arm span away from her.
But if you’ll ask me who I think takes the spotlight here, I’ll say it’s Augustus. A glimpse of the world from his perspective is never shown, but this is not deterrent for the readers to see he’s perfectly clad as the star-crossed hero. I kind of saw his fate a long, long way before it was revealed, but that knowledge didn’t prepare me when that time finally came. He’s just so alive, so hungry for more truths about the world, so funny, and so beautiful a person that his fate appeared to me as a crime when it took its course. In a short span of time, I’ve grown to love this boy.
Hazel and Augustus’ situation did not transform their love to something you can banner as an extraordinary romance. The book is too honest to subscribe to this trope, and for this, I commend Green. I’ve grown tired of love stories trying to flaunt their magic or whatever because of instances that Lady Luck frowned upon. Hazel and Augustus’ relationship is about as complex as any realistically tragic story—they know they’re an unlucky pair, and they have no choice but to accept that.
This leads us to the cornucopia of wisdom this book offers the readers: what it means to be alive, what it takes for a person to leave a mark, what happens to the people you leave behind, why unfairness seems to be a constant ingredient in recipe of mortality, and how you can say you have lived a good life. If you think about it, The Fault in Our Stars just enumerates things we already know, except that Green shifts the angles of his writing lenses a little so we may see the facts in a new light. It’s refreshing, well-written, and powerful enough not just to make me think, but also to make me laugh and cry (and sometimes both at the same time).
I also have to say I love the Peter van Houten part. In a way, we are shown a facet of love affair with books that can strike a chord with anybody who has been totally invested in a work of literature. Do the characters live long after you’ve flipped the last page, or do they stay as the fictional creations that they are, flat and unmoving on the pages?
This is a great read all in all. I’ll give it 4.5/5 stars! :)
