Less Than Zero

Blair is the daughter of a successful Los Angeles film director. Her parents are separated, and her father is dating a young man, Jared. Blair is Clay's on-again-off-again girlfriend who picks him up from the airport where he returns to his hometown of Los Angeles after his first semester of college in New Hampshire. Rather than showing or feeling affection for her, Clay is inwardly irked by the insipid discussion in their car ride. Blair’s physical description is limited to her friends’ comments, which suggest that, like her peers, she is attractive. For example, Muriel comments, “Oh Blair, you look gorgeous, as usual” (37). Clay cheats on Blair at least twice during his four-week visit home.

In addition to Ellis’s careful avoidance of detailed physical description, Blair’s character exhibits little emotional depth. She goes to the movies, drinks heavily, and does cocaine at parties alongside Clay and her other friends, Alana and Muriel. She reveals a degree of humanity when she inaugurates a discussion with Clay toward the novel’s close in which she asks if he ever loved her, and, in response to Clay’s admitted apathy, she says that it is hard to love someone who doesn’t care. Despite Clay’s mistreatment of her, she calls him the day before his flight and asks him not to return to New Hampshire.

Julian is a childhood friend of Clay’s who occupies the attention of several characters, especially Clay. He is known as a local drug dealer, and Clay has a recurring flashback of Julian kicking a soccer ball at school in fifth grade. When Clay first sees Julian at Kim’s party, he comments that he “doesn’t look as fucked up as Alana said: still tan, hair still blond and short, maybe a little too thin” (22). Aside from these brief sightings Julian is mostly absent during the first half of the novel, although many of the novel’s characters try to reach him in order to buy cocaine.

The second half of the novel reveals that Julian is addicted to even harder drugs, specifically heroin. Clay’s frequent flashbacks poignantly highlight Julian’s transition from an innocent child playing soccer to a young adult who has a substance abuse disorder that led him to prostitution. In addition to achieving a well-developed characterization of Julian despite his absence from much of the novel, Ellis constructs this character as a cautionary tale of the effects of drugs and the materialistic culture of LA’s elite. Julian also provokes the closest exhibition of emotional connection in the novel, as Clay, by lending him money, demonstrates a sincere interest in Julian’s well-being. In turn, Julian’s divulgence of his deepest secret to Clay represents the former’s connection with the protagonist, in stark contrast to the emotional detachment that is typical of its characters.

Julian is one of Ellis’s more sympathetic characters, rendered more so by the penultimate chapter’s scene in which he is beaten and forced to inject heroin by his pimp, Finn.

Trent is a bisexual male model and, to the extent that he has close friends, a close friend of the protagonist, Clay. As a secondary character, he is relatively flat and static. He addresses everyone as “babes,” and is chiefly concerned with getting cocaine. Like his other characters, Ellis characterizes him by means of dialogue and actions. He is from a wealthy family and has a trust fund that he jokingly fears will never run out.

Trent’s disengagement and lack of empathy are highlighted at the novel’s close when he casually smokes a joint while looking at a corpse and later watches a 12-year-old girl being raped.