Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)

  

Bret Easton Ellis was still a college student when his debut novel, Less than Zero, was published in 1985.

The novel's central character, Clay, is also a college student in New England.   He’s come home to Los Angeles for Christmas, where he reconnects with his high school friends. He falls back into a familiar routine of partying, going out to lunch, shopping in Beverly Hills and seeing movies. Everyone is very wealthy and does a lot of drugs. In between these pursuits, Clay has conversations with his ex-girlfriend Blair and others from their clique along these lines:

“Where are your parents?”

“My parents?’

“Yeah.”

“In Japan, I think.”

“What are they doing there?”

“Shopping.  They might be in Aspen.  Does it make any difference?”

Clay's friend Julian however, has parents who are a major problem. Julian's appetite for drugs, and therefore his spending, have gotten so out of control his parents have frozen his credit cards and checking account. So he asks Clay if he can borrow a rather large amount of money.

This debt, and how it’s repaid, leads to the very disturbing conclusion of Less Than Zero.  

I found this book difficult to enjoy and “get into,” especially at first.  The characters have a lot of non-sequitorial, vapid conversations. I understood that the author was trying to “show” the characters’ superficiality and non-connectedness.  And I saw that the author threw in disturbing tidbits here and there to show an unacknowledged moral crisis. But that very vapidity made it hard for me to keep following the story.  The book did become somewhat more engaging as it went on however, and I had no problem finishing it.  

So what was my reward for completing this book?  I suppose I got a glimpse of what I assume is Bret Easton Ellis’ impression of teenage L.A. in the mid-80s.  A kind of historical snapshot with some solid 80s flashbacks. Clay wears Wayfarers, refers specifically to the Elvis Costello “Trust” poster, and his younger sisters shop at Camp Beverly Hills. 

(Trust came out in 1981.  Elvis Costello’s song Less Than Zero is on an earlier album called My Aim Is True.)

(should I track this one down and make it?)

But did I really need to know that these kids are so dead on the inside they watch violent bootleg pornography in order to feel alive?   It’s a rhetorical question I’m not sure I ever wanted to ask. And that’s not even the worst thing these kids get up to, by the way.

Needless to say, this wasn’t an amusing book.  But there was one time, and one time only, when I laughed a little while reading it.   Blair and her father are discussing the next movie he’s producing:

“Daddy, you know I’ve been asking you to put Adam Ant or Sting in the movie,” Blair says.

“I know, I know, honey.  Clyde and I have been talking it over and if you really want it that bad, I think something can be arranged.  What do you think about Adam Ant or Sting in Star Raiders?” he asks Alana and Kim.

“I’d see it,” Kim says.

“I’d see it twice,” Alana says.

“I’d see it on videocassette,” Kim adds.

“I agree with Blair, “ Blair’s father says.  “I think we should seriously look into Adam Ant or String.”

“That’s Sting, daddy.”

“Yeah, Sting.”

You can’t really blame Blair’s father for getting Sting’s name wrong.  After all, Sting (or String as Blair’s father calls him) released his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles in June of 1985.  Probably at the exact same time that Less Than Zero was published.

(I owned this album--on cassette--in the 1980s and remember it fondly.)

Of course prior to going solo, Sting was in the mega popular English band the Police.  Not that everyone didn’t know who Sting was BEFORE he went solo. After all, the Police’s 1983 album, Synchronicity, contained the biggest hit of the year in both the US and the UK.  But in 1985 Sting probably hadn’t fully carved out his own identity apart from the Police quite yet.

1983's biggest hit

Do I recommend this book?  A better question might be, should I have watched the 1987 movie instead?  Robert Downey Jr. is supposed to give a riveting performance as Julian (perhaps a prescient one considering his real-life descent into drug addiction):

And the movie version has Andrew McCarthy as Clay and James Spader playing yet another character you love to hate.  Between these two (the yin and yang of 80s teenage cinema), Jami Gertz as Blair, and Robert Downey Jr. walking that line between acting/reality, the movie is bound to be an 80s flashback worth experiencing!

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1985)

While flipping through my mother’s copy of Family Circle Magazine last summer, I came upon an article by Andrew Postman addressing parents’ concerns about children and the encroachment of “screens” in family life.  

“This all feels so familiar to me….” writes Andrew.  “A few decades ago, my father, Neil Postman, was America’s best-known “critic” of television and its effect on culture.   His 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death suggested that the dynamics, “grammar” and economics of television were turning us into a perpetual audience...”

The moment I read that sentence, I got a flashback to the 80s.  Yes! I remembered that book! (Not reading it though.  Probably too busy watching TV). It made a huge splash and deservedly so.

The copy I got from the library is the 20th Anniversary Edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  The book, published in 2005, includes an introduction by his son Andrew discussing present day media that is already out of date: the iPhone was not introduced to the public until 2007. 

His father’s book on the other hand, is timeless.  On page one he states: "Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."

Neil Postman continues: "Other culture watchers and worriers...have observed and recorded the dissolution of public discourse in America and its conversion into the arts of show business.  But most of them, I believe, have barely begun to tell the story and meaning of this descent into a vast triviality.”   

He lays the groundwork for his argument by discussing just how enormous an impact means of communication have on the content of a culture.  Why is it so enormous, even history-altering? Because the content of what is expressed by any means of communication is regulated and dictated by those means.  To illustrate this point, Postman uses the example of smoke signals: “While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument.  Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom.”   

The author then takes us on a tour through time, examining those moments in human history when those means--our mediums of communication--changed forever our culture and its contents.  When the written word was invented, culture changed. When the printing press was invented, culture changed. And our present day media overwhelm, with its endless flood of disparate images and sound bites, all started with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830-40s.

The telegraph collapsed space and allowed information to move faster than humans could carry it.  In the 1800s, the average American was not only literate but routinely read and listened to complex subject matter.  Via the printed word (and public talks), coherent, relevant information was shared, discussed, utilized. It served the people.

On the other hand, the telegraph "gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information,” writes Postman.  “That is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.  The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”’

And basically, it’s been pretty much all downhill from there.  The invention of the photograph soon thereafter “was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraph news-from-nowhere that threatened to submerge readers (of newspapers) in a sea of fact from unknown places with unknown faces...it provided the illusion that “the news” had a connection to something within one’s own sensory experience.”

Sound familiar?

Telegraphic sound bites and de-contextualized photographic images laid the perfect groundwork for that most American of pastimes: Watching TV. American television bombards viewers with millions of images, juxtaposed haphazardly within an endless variety of unrelated subject matter.  And the subject matter, writes Postman, “requires minimal skills to comprehend and is largely aimed at emotional gratification” and amusement. Indeed, entertainment is “the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”

All of it?  Even the news?  Yes. Especially the news.  Good-looking and amiable newscasters share fragments of tragedy and barbarism, then smile and urge us to “join them tomorrow!” Jaunty music is cued, the commercials start and the tragedy is forgotten.  In this universe of strangers and fragmentation, nothing is connected; depth of meaning is lost.

Hopefully by now, you’ve gotten the drift of this convincingly argued and elegantly written book.  There is much to learn from it and reflect upon, and here I have only scratched the surface. Neil Postman, by the way, was not TOTALLY anti-TV.  He understood that it could give comfort and pleasure. He didn’t have a problem with it as a vehicle for straightforward entertainment.  

What really upset him was how people did not see that the news shows and “educational programming” (oh yes, he takes aim at that sacred cow, Sesame Street) are “stylized dramatic performances” staged largely to entertain.  The format of television dictates that this be so. No matter how good the intention, the ingesting of any “serious” or educational programming cannot hold a candle to actually reading (and writing). No, it is far better for those who make the commercials that we turn on the TV (or scroll on our smartphone) rather than open a book.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)

Although the 1980s began in a recession,  the stock market soon began to soar astronomically, injecting huge amounts of wealth into certain segments of society before crashing in 1987.  For many, these were heady years, full of giddiness, good times and downright hedonism. Wealthy or not, the feelings seemed to be contagious. In came the big hair, the bold colors and the jewelry which at times seemed to channel that of the ostentatiously rich.  Regular girls wore ropes of faux pearls and fake gem brooches while rappers piled on thick gold chains:

Chanel jewelry circa 1980s

LL Cool J

The excesses of the 1980s were writ large in New York City, the home of all that is huge and over the top.   For the epicenter of that wealth explosion was Wall Street, and from there flowed many stories of social ascendency and moral decay. 

The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of those stories. 

This novel describes the rise and fall of Sherman McCoy, he of the Yale chin and $1M bond trader’s salary.  Or rather, it’s the story of a WASP who made more money on top of family money, and how the life he built all came crumbling down.  

Sherman’s story is supported by a vast and colorful set of quintessentially New York characters and crucial storylines that all weave together to create one epic tome.  I loved it. Wolfe provides such believable (and often hilarious) detail and dialog that the book feels like a piece of journalism at times.  

Those enduring themes of class, race and sex underpin the book and allow it to remain relevant over 30 years later.  But enough of the heavy stuff. And I don’t want to spoil this excellent read for anyone who may not have picked it up yet.

There are some fashion moments in this novel.  For example, when Sherman meets Maria at the airport:

“In this mob she looked like something from another galaxy.  She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes.”

Later, at an exclusive dinner party,  Sherman scrutinizes the women, basically dividing them into first wives and second (trophy) wives.  The first (older) wives are “skin and bones”, “starved to near perfection”:

“To compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to the dress designers.  This season no puffs, flounces, pleats, ruffles, bibs, bows, battings, scallops, laces, darts, or shirrs on the bias were too extreme.  They were the social X-rays, to use the phrase that had bubbled up into Sherman’s own brain.”

Tom Wolfe may have had Christian LaCroix in mind when writing those words.   This is a good article about the designer, whose clothing many feel epitomizes the excesses of the 80s.  He also invented the “pouf” skirt which had many variations.

The following are from Christian LaCroix shows in 1987, the year The Bonfire of the Vanities was published:

Her hair might be too big, even for the 80s!

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984)

Upon its publication, Salon magazine wrote: “Bright Lights, Big City...succeeds in capturing, in fewer than 200 pages, an entire decade.”

With praise like that, how could I NOT read a book that “defined, and even determined the mood” of New York City in the 1980s (according to Vanity Fair)?  A book that, according to the New York Times Book Review, succeeded in being the “Manhattan novel” of its generation? 

The only mystery here is that it took me so long to pick it up.  As a teenager in the suburbs 35 years ago, I had heard of this book (or at least the 1988 movie of the same title starring Michael J. Fox).  

But I had never managed to read it. Fast forward a few decades and there I was, reading my library copy in the Big City itself. 

Even my non-bookish husband had taken a crack at it back in the day.  When he saw the book on my night-table he nodded and said, “Bolivian Marching Powder.”

What he was referring to was the book’s euphemism for that 80s drug of choice, cocaine.  

Right off the bat, we meet the main character at a NYC nightclub in the wee hours of the morning, yearning for a hit of the white stuff so he doesn’t just keel over.  The author employs an interesting method of bringing the reader close to this young man. He tells his story using “you” instead of in the first or third person, pulling the reader through the downward spiral of this guy’s life:  

“You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.”

And an excerpt from later on in the book:

“Down on the street, you clamp your sunglasses to your face and wonder where to go.  An old question, it seems to come up more and more frequently. You’ve lost whatever bravura you possessed a few minutes ago.  It’s just beginning to sink in that you have lost your job.”

 “You” is used throughout the entire book, without exception. I’m not sure what to call that literary technique, or even if it is a technique.  It was new to me and it gave the story immediacy and intimacy. It did not feel like a gimmick. And it seemed to be highly effective. It pulled me in so close that I never even saw the emotional gut-punch that, in retrospect, was so obviously coming.  You were (I was?) just trying to get through the story and lost sight of the big picture. You (I?) didn’t see the writing on the wall. Therefore it was very unexpected when you (yes, ME) felt your eyes tearing up while reading the final pages of Bright Lights, Big City on the subway.  

We never even get a name for this young guy who frequently takes the “Bolivian Local” to visit the rarified air of the metaphorical Andes.  But that doesn’t seem to be necessary.

I will stop here so as not to spoil this 80s classic for anyone who may not have read it.  I do recommend it. It’s hard to say if it is generation-defining. I’d be interested to hear others’ take on that.  

You could say that it captures a New York City that doesn’t exist anymore.  The city is, after all, always changing including the nightlife.  

For example, the Limelight was a nightclub famous in the 1980s and 1990s for its debauchery and even murder.  (It was ironically situated in what was a former Episcopalian church on the corner of 6th Avenue and 20th Street.) “Club Kid” Michael Alig, a frequent patron, was convicted in the 90s of the killing and dismemberment of a drug dealer well known in his circle.    

The Limelight closed down several years ago.  It then became a fancy marketplace where tourists could buy expensive chocolate and other high end treats.

Today, even chocolate is too indulgent for the Limelight.  Where lines of coke were once snorted, now people sweat out toxins after doing a wheatgrass shot.  

Here are pictures of “Limelight Fitness” taken by my husband a few months ago on a lovely spring day.  Yes, the Limelight is now a gym:

My guess is that the Bolivian Local does not make stops at the Limelight anymore.

The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace (1986)

I read The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace when it was initially published in 1986. I then forgot about the strange, sad and compelling story of the Gibbons twins for many years. Perhaps even decades.

Recently, I was trying to recall things that were important or memorable to me in the 1980s.  The faces of June and Jennifer Gibbons swam up from my unconscious like pearl-divers desperate for air. I immediately ordered a copy of the book, which I had once owned, and re-read it.

The copy I had in the 80s looked like this

After finishing the book back in the 80s,  I spent a LOT of time looking at the photographs.  Studying their faces, I wondered how it would be to live their lives, to experience life the way that they did.  There are several pictures of June and Jennifer photographed together, as identical twins often are.

Photo originally published in The Silent Twins.

Not that I envied them.  The book is an account of their first 20 years: from their births in 1963 to 1983, at which time they were residents of Broadmoor, the oldest high-security psychiatric hospital in England.

One could argue that June and Jennifer Gibbons were ensnared in one of the most co-dependent relationships in recorded history.  Ironically, Co-Dependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie was also first published in 1986. The book became an instant self-help classic and the term "co-dependent" became part of our lexicon.  

Co-dependency, in a nutshell, is when your actions and decisions are based almost entirely on your partner’s anticipated response and your core sense of self gets lost.

Mutually co-dependent, one twin would attempt to control the other, then the roles would reverse.  They frequently synchronized their movements and sometimes one would eat for both of them. When forcibly separated, they were miserable and couldn’t function.  Yet both twins were tormented by this fact and desperately wished to be free of the other. They became so enmeshed that the outside world faded and they created a universe of their own.  They dropped out of school, becoming almost totally isolated. They seldom spoke to other people, not even to their own family. Other issues were undoubtedly at play, but their main problem seemed to be their relationship itself.

Jennifer (left) and June. Photos from The Silent Twins

As teens, the girls yearned for “normal” experiences and other relationships. Experimentation in the "outside world" combined with their ongoing emotional turmoil eventually led to criminally destructive behavior. A court found them to be psychopathic and ordered them institutionalized.  

Marjorie Wallace first reported on their case for a newspaper and made friends with them.  She gained access to their copious diaries, stories and drawings. After the publication of The Silent Twins Wallace maintained her friendship with June and Jennifer, visiting them regularly at Broadmoor.  She never accepted the court’s diagnosis.

Years passed. On the morning of March 9, 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor Hospital to Caswell Clinic, a minimum security facility where they would have partial freedom.  Within hours Jennifer was dead due to sudden acute myocarditis, sudden inflammation of the heart. She was 29 with no known heart problems. There was no evidence that drugs, poison or a virus had killed her. Pathologists could not explain her death. June was released from Caswell a year later and now lives a quiet life near her family.

Seeing as how I hadn’t kept up with their story after 1986, I was a bit shocked to find out that Jennifer had died.  Upon reflection however, it is sadly unsurprising. Shortly before the transfer to Caswell, Jennifer told Wallace, “I’m going to die.  We’ve decided." After her sister's death, June confided, "We were war-weary. It had been a long battle. Someone had to break the vicious circle.”

(Information about June and Jennifer’s lives after 1986 was found in these articles by Hilton Als in The New Yorker and Marjorie Wallace in The Guardian.)