The effect of this book on me required a drastic measure

April 12, 2025 12:30 AM

There’s a feeling that we have now but not later, that beauty is fragile and fleeting, and that what happens to us is a portent of what’s to come for everyone. Dreaming that the world is melting has graduated from private concern, and metaphor, to here and now. from Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage by Rachel Kushner, the foreword to a forthcoming edition of Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

That's a solid essay. Before a bunch of people come in here to let us all know that Bret Easton Ellis is trash and his novels are poop, let me say that I like pretty much all his books. I am a bit younger than Kushner, so didn't read Less Than Zero when it first came out, but I did read it at an impressionable age and feel like it really captured something.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:35 AM on April 12 [7 favorites]

Rachel Kushner is a terrific writer. Her collection of essays, The Hard Crowd, is great.
posted by dobbs at 4:46 AM on April 12 [4 favorites]

Less than Zero was originally published in 1985. ... Its author would have been twenty or twenty-one.

"would have been"? He was twenty-one. It took me one search to find out. Three to confirm. Don't be lazy.
posted by BWA at 5:26 AM on April 12 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that's a stylistic twitch, not a fact-checking/editing problem. Part of Kushner's take is on fleeting, fluid youth, so not pinning down exact ages seems thematic. Also, she's doing that Didionic thing she mentions, twinning and repeating and intertwining for effect.

Just for the record, the whole bit is: Like many other young people, I read it that year, at age sixteen or seventeen. Its author would have been twenty or twenty-one.
posted by chavenet at 6:38 AM on April 12 [18 favorites]

I was 18 when it came out. Read it in one sitting at the library. It seemed important, or at least authoritative. I doubt I would esteem it as much now.

My favorite detail was someone getting excited that they went to see X and the band played their rarely performed song “Adult Books”.
posted by Lemkin at 7:32 AM on April 12 [5 favorites]

Rachel Kushner rules
posted by youthenrage at 12:00 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

what is strange, this book seems more timely, more relevant then today. The message and emotional roller coaster remain. dunno.

Also, she's doing that Didionic thing

I'd steal that line.

"But when it comes to our lady (Joan)
You might even try it
Supersonic
Didionic"
posted by clavdivs at 1:37 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

For the musically curious.
posted by The Tensor at 12:59 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

I'm about the same age as Ellis, and read Less Than Zero at about the time it came out, but didn't particularly like it, or Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. (Oddly, I did like their sophomore books--Ellis' The Rules of Attraction, McInerney's Ransom--quite a lot more, maybe because they seemed to have less expectations loaded onto them.) Maybe it was because I somehow got the idea that I was supposed to actually identify with these guys--someone from LA who did a lot of coke and hung out with a lot of rich people (and was either rich himself or pretty close to it) and someone from Manhattan who did a lot of coke and was fucking up his job at the New Yorker--and, boy, did I not ever.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:14 PM on April 14 [3 favorites]