{"id":170330,"date":"2025-04-10T10:07:57","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T14:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170330"},"modified":"2025-04-10T11:00:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T15:00:38","slug":"teenage-enema-nurses-in-bondage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/04\/10\/teenage-enema-nurses-in-bondage\/","title":{"rendered":"Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Clay is gripping the wheel for no reason. He fingers a Valium then puts it back in the bottle. Goes to the movies and stares at the green exit signs instead of the screen. Looks for his friend Julian in almost every scene of the book but when he finds him and their eyes lock nothing happens, Julian drifts off.<\/p>\n

Listening to his friends talk, Clay wonders if he’s slept with the person being discussed. Waiting for someone at a Du-par’s diner in Studio City, he wonders if the gift-wrapped boxes in the Christmas display on the counter are empty.<\/p>\n

Many of the people his friends talk about are indistinguishable to Clay. His own two younger sisters are indistinguishable to him, mere symptoms of the decline of Western Civilization, baby vipers who ask their mom to turn up \u201cTeenage Enema Nurses in Bondage\u201d by the band Killer Pussy, who put a pet-store fish in the jacuzzi to watch it die, who assure Clay they can get their own cocaine, and get mad when he won\u2019t stop to look at the burning wreckage of a car accident near a McDonald\u2019s in Palm Springs in the middle of the night. The McDonald\u2019s, anyhow, is closed due to a power outage from wind.<\/p>\n

Clay\u2019s repeated phrase, which is also the author\u2019s, spoken out loud on page one by Clay\u2019s girlfriend Blair as she gets on the freeway, is that people are afraid to merge.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are afraid to merge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.\u201d<\/p>\n

If someone hasn\u2019t already mapped Bret\u2019s borrowed use of a Didion device, to build narrative harmony and compression off repeating melodies, or of Bret\u2019s echo of her boom-bust West and the thematic menace of rattlesnakes and mudslides and Santa Ana winds, someone eventually will. What are the psychodynamics of influence? some people ask. I never ask. Influence is a door that is opened. Didion opened it. He walked through, wearing her scarf and sunglasses. But as Clay tells Blair, who has given him a scarf for Christmas and wants him to try it on, \u201cscarves usually fit all people.\u201d One artist\u2019s tricks in the hands of another, who understands how to use them, will produce something new.<\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Less than Zero<\/em> was originally published in 1985. Like many other young people, I read it that year, at age sixteen or seventeen. Its author would have been twenty or twenty-one. I have a distinct memory that when I got to the end, I threw my copy out a window. The effect of this book on me required a drastic measure, apparently. I had never been to Los Angeles. I had never read a book by this author (no one had\u2014it was, of course, his first). I was upset that he\u2019d foisted on me this bleak world of rich kids in Wayfarers, playing Centipede or visiting an evil pimp in a penthouse, gaping at a dead body left in an alley for them to nudge. I still had some growing up to do, some toughening. Not in life, but in my reading, in my ability to see the value of art that hurts me. The year before, I had run out of the cinema in the middle of Blood Simple<\/em>, by the Coen brothers. Literally fled up the aisle. But that movie and its sleazy ambiance touched me to the core.<\/p>\n

What stayed with me from Less than Zero<\/em> was Clay\u2019s loneliness. He is eighteen and home on winter break from his first semester of college, and there\u2019s this sense of returning to a realm he has vacated, as if he is forced to see his own life from a new remove, like a person visiting the world after dying. People keep telling him he\u2019s pale, and they mean it literally\u2014he\u2019s been back east, in New Hampshire\u2014but his complexion has another valence as well, that he\u2019s a ghost, which is what allows him to see what the others cannot, to be affected by what leaves them so numb.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Rereading it now, Less than Zero<\/em> is much more comedic than I\u2019d originally understood. This is not a surprise, considering that American Psycho<\/em> is so subversively funny, not overtly comic but with the deep shadows of a gag built into its core structure. Less than Zero<\/em> similarly has a deadpan irony baked into most of the scenes. The boys all have these lopped-off and ridiculous WASP<\/small> names\u2014Derf, Rip, Trent, Spin, Spit, Finn, Chuck, and, of course, Clay. Those concerned that Clay needs a tan rely on a method that isn\u2019t the sun or creams or even pills, but a process of being dyed in some kind of chemical bath. (Perhaps someday, if not today, the bizarre ubiquity of fake tan will seem as ridiculous as when Bret had merely made it up.)<\/p>\n

The characters are often drinking champagne, which has a tough job in this novel, a drink meant to bring a special occasion vibe, an adult refinement, to dead dynamics among the bored and the young and the restless. Characters say things like, \u201cWhat does she know? She lives in Calabasas for God\u2019s sake.\u201d Clay\u2019s friend Trent laments, \u201cI\u2019m just so sick of dealing with people,\u201d and while it seems grave and right for someone in the book to say this, it\u2019s also wonderfully funny. I\u2019m just so sick of dealing with people. Me too, Trent, me too.<\/p>\n

Trent comments that his mom feels sorry for their maid, whose family was killed in El Salvador, but that his mom will fire the maid anyhow. At an awkward gathering with Clay\u2019s recently divorced parents, his mother gazes absentmindedly at the small Christmas tree that his father\u2019s maid has decorated, a detail inlaid with just the right etching of acid. Rip goes into a rage in a video arcade when they won\u2019t make change and he only has hundred-dollar bills.<\/p>\n

There is casual destruction here and there, as dollops of mise-en-sc\u00e8ne. Clay stares at a video of buildings being blown up in slow motion. A woman collapses on a sidewalk and no one seems to notice. A guy named Dimitri puts his hand through a glass window. \u201cAfter taking him to some emergency room at some hospital,\u201d Clay tells us, \u201cwe go to a coffee shop on Wilshire.\u201d Trent tells Clay he had a dream where he saw the whole world melt.<\/p>\n

Late in the book, as if exhibiting, finally, some tiny spark of life, Clay\u2019s friend Alana says, \u201cI think we\u2019ve all lost some sort of feeling.\u201d Just after, Rip comes to a similar conclusion. \u201cI don\u2019t have anything to lose,\u201d he says mournfully.<\/p>\n

The characters go to real places, like Ma Maison, and places that are not real but, on the fortieth anniversary of this novel, now, in 2025, are uncannily right, such as Trumps, a restaurant to which Clay\u2019s father pilots his new Ferrari. Also now, in 2025, Trent\u2019s nightmare has partly come true: whole swaths of Los Angeles have been incinerated, or washed away. There\u2019s 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\u2019s to come for everyone. Dreaming that the world is melting has graduated from private concern, and metaphor, to here and now.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

When I visited Los Angeles for the first time, in the late eighties, not too long after reading Less than Zero<\/em>, it was June and the sky was leaden and gray, from its famous seasonal marine layer. The city was a foreign planet to me, with none of the provincial wholesomeness of Northern California. It was Mars. I was with college friends. We snuck onto the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel and went into an empty bungalow whose door was weirdly ajar, like someone had left in a hurry. It was maybe 4 A.M.<\/small> and there was champagne in a bucket, still cold. Food on a dining service cart, also cold.<\/p>\n

On that same trip, I was on Melrose, walking behind a woman in a super-short miniskirt with very tan legs and teased bleached hair and a red leather jacket. She had the exact look of the people in the videos I\u2019d seen on MTV, people like Dale Bozzio and Kim Wilde. The woman\u2019s legs were smooth and thin and the color of caramel. If you\u2019re from Northern California, people don\u2019t look like that. Their skin is not tanned to that color. The woman stopped walking and turned to enter a store, and I saw that she had the face of a very old person. It was a shocking revelation, on account of the illogical contrast of her legs and hair and leather jacket under the gray June light. Like I was Jack Nicholson in the moment in The Shining<\/em> when the beautiful young woman transforms, in his embrace, to a corpse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to go back,\u201d Clay\u2019s friend Daniel says on one of their many aimless nights, as they have a drink at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. \u201cWhere?\u201d Clay asks. There\u2019s a long pause and Daniel, fingering the sunglasses he\u2019s wearing in the dark bar, says, \u201cI don\u2019t know. Just back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julian, a beautiful hustler lost in the undertow of his pimp, is Clay\u2019s childhood friend. Clay holds on to memories of the two of them playing soccer in fifth grade. Likewise, Clay\u2019s wonder at whether there\u2019s anything in the boxes in the Du-par’s Christmas display is some atavistic grip on childhood. His friends would all know that the boxes are empty. What makes Clay worth caring about is that he\u2019s not sure.<\/p>\n

Indeed, a surprisingly traditional aspect of this debut novel is that it\u2019s designed to give the reader empathy for Clay, Clay as the reader\u2019s stand-in, who can witness the nihilism around him from a certain ethical remove. (By the time of American Psycho<\/em>, Bret had dispensed with this convention, in the creation of a protagonist who requires a more sophisticated reader, one who can navigate moral ambiguity.) Even if Clay seems to his friends to be more or less like them\u2014coked-up and disaffected\u2014and even if he tells the reader that he wants \u201cto see the worst,\u201d poor Clay is somatizing all over the place. He\u2019s nervous and breaking out into cold sweats, suffers insomnia and occasional crying jags. He\u2019s easily thrown, with a fragile core of sentimentality, expressed in italicized sections of some other time, back when he could feel, reminiscences that connect Clay to his grandparents and a Western mythology of homey optimism, Clay as a boy on his grandmother\u2019s lap, Clay hearing her hum \u201cOn the Sunny Side of the Street\u201d\u2014in other words, exactly the sort of narrative space that his friend Daniel longs to enter, in his vague desire to \u201cgo back.\u201d<\/p>\n

I daresay this entire novel is a somatization of Clay\u2019s inner emotional reality. Like those frogs that secrete a hallucinogen that makes people trip, Clay has secreted the poisonous dream of this book so that we can see what he\u2019s up against<\/em>.<\/p>\n

At the end, when he says he\u2019s leaving, it\u2019s such a relief. But Clay\u2019s immersion in a world where nothing matters might already have wrecked him. He\u2019s a ticking time bomb in the hands of his creator.<\/p>\n

They all are. What Bret Easton Ellis had made, in this first youthful novel, was a cast that would return, in one form or another, under various guises, in other books. People who, like zombies, and because they are <\/em>zombies, would be impossible to kill.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This essay will appear in the forthcoming reissue of Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s <\/em>Less Than Zero, which will be published by Vintage in May.<\/em><\/p>\n

Rachel Kushner\u2019s most recent novel is <\/em>Creation Lake, a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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