Bret Easton Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho, became the center of pre-publication controversy last fall when articles in both Time and Spy offered accounts of the protagonist’s atrocious acts of sexual violence and Simon & Schuster dropped plans for publication. Some commentators charged Ellis with misogyny; others asserted his First Amendment rights (as if the First Amendment granted authors the right to contracts with major New York houses). The novel, which was picked up posthaste by Random House, has now been published as the latest entry in its “Vintage Contemporaries” series. This is not, of course, Ellis’s first book to have drawn attention far out of proportion to its merits. His debut novel, Less Than Zero (1985), established the then Bennington undergraduate as the hottest of hot young novelists. Short and fast and glitzy as a music video, Less Than Zero’s plotless, present-tense yarn about one Clay, a rich L.A. collegian home for the Christmas holidays, was tailor-made for the MTV generation. Clay (who also narrates) spends his waking hours with his vacuous high-school friends, holding trivial conversations, listening to rock music, doing drugs, and having indiscriminate sex. We see less of their inner lives than of their expensive cars and clothes; as in a “Peanuts” comic strip, the parents are invariably absent. In the novel’s most infamous episode, Clay’s pals tie a twelve-year-old girl to a bed and rape her; his refusal to participate is meant to mark him as the sensitive one.

Less Than