Flashback Trio

The mid-1980s saw three novels take a look at the world of that time through the eyes of young adults living it. Two focused on young people in the fast lanes of the coasts; the third used a teenage girl in small-town Kentucky.

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Less Than Zero, with a title taken from an Elvis Costello song, was the only one of the three written by a person in the age range being explored. Bret Easton Ellis was 21 and a student at Bennington College in Vermont when it was published in 1985, although he had been working on it more or less since his high school years in southern California. Although the central character of Zero is a rich college student from southern California back from a New England for Christmas break, Ellis is clear it's not autobiographical.

Clay, back home from college, looks up old friends and spends time with them on the party circuit as he did before he left for school. He finds the things that used to enliven or at least entertain him now shallow, and the people with whom he shared those experiences shallower still. Attempting at first to recapture the feelings he remembers by intensifying some of his partying, Clay finds himself more and more alienated from his friends and their activities.

Ellis is sometimes given credit for foreshadowing the emptiness of modern celebrity culture, in which people named Kardashian or Hilton are famous for doing nothing or for doing things that make nothing look good. But wealthy cultures especially have produced vacuous hedonists since the days of the vomitorium, so he's hardly a prophet. In the end, Clay is a young man who finds he has nothing in common with the place he left, but hasn't bothered to try to move himself forward in any way. If his old scene means less than zero, Clay has barely breached positive numbers and seems unmotivated to add to himself in any way.

Ellis uses a fairly affectless style, perhaps in order to expose the emptiness of the characters' pursuit of experience after experience -- how eventually they have all become deadened to even the depravity they are supposed to be reveling in. But the combination of his flatly-written prose and the increasing banality of the debauchery it describes make Zero a chore to get through, and after you have, you have a hard time coming up with any reason why you did.

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Jay McInerney, along with Ellis, Tama Janowitz and Mark Lindquist, was identified in a 1987 Village Voice article as one of a "literary Brat Pack," paralleling the cinematic Brat Pack who often starred in John Hughes' movies. McInerney earned the inclusion with his 1984 Bright Lights, Big City, the story of a young magazine fact-checker whose personal life spirals out of control thanks to setbacks and the mid-80s Manhattan party scene.

McInerney wrote Lights in the second person, which means our narrator is never named and we know him only as "you." "You" is a 24-year-old from the midwest who moved to New York City with his wife, Amanda, an aspiring model. Unable to land a writing job, he hoped to get his foot in the door as an editor and fact-checker. But when Amanda's modeling career takes off, she leaves him and he is unable to deal with this tragedy on top of his mother's death. Increasing investment in the drug-fueled Manhattan party scene doesn't help and he continues to lose more control of his life as he attempts to hold on to his memories of his wife.

Lights is meant to have some comic edge to its exploration of the narrator's troubles, but it reads more like someone took a mid-period Woody Allen movie, rewrote it into second person and added cocaine. Its central revelation -- that sorrow floats and can't be drowned (or snorted away), and that doing whatever feels good will eventually wind up leaving you not feeling much of anything -- is not nearly world-shaking enough to sit through 180 pages of second-person weirdness to get to.

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Ellis, as mentioned, was 21 when Zero was published, and McInerney 34 when Lights came out. Bobbie Ann Mason, by contrast, was already 45 when her first novel, In Country, was released in 1985, following a successful collection of short stories. Being older probably gave her a head start on reflecting on the human condition, since she'd had some more of it in her life.

In the summer of 1984, a year of Springsteen and Michael Jackson, Samantha "Sam" Hughes graduates from Hopewell High School in Kentucky. Her father died in Vietnam before she was born. Her mother has recently remarried and moved to a nearby city. Sam and her uncle, Emmett Smith, still live in Hopewell, but her mother wants her to move in with her so she can attend college. Sam wonders who will take care of Emmett, the only real father figure she has ever known but who came back from his own Vietnam experience damaged enough for her to be unsure of his ability to take care of himself.

Through the summer, Sam tries to learn about the war that took her father's life as well as understand something about what she wants in the world. Does she want to stay in Hopewell to care for Emmett and probably marry her boyfriend Lonnie (locally famous for sinking a string of jump shots during a senior season basketball game)? The placing of the Vietnam War Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., provides a spur for both her and Emmett to seek their answers.

As an exploration of character and condition, In Country stands well above either Zero or Lights. It lacks the former's poisonous indifference towards its own characters and the latter's arty affectations, and it roots its meditations and narrative in experiences much more common and relatable than the lurid revelries of the American coasts. I read In Country and I want to find out what Sam will learn and what Emmett will do -- none of the cast of either of the other two novels evokes that response. Ellis doesn't care enough about his to give them humanity and McInerney doesn't care enough about his to give his narrator a name, and if they don't care, why should I?

Like Clay and "you," Sam learns that she wants answers beyond what she's always known. But unlike Clay, she takes steps to find them, and unlike "you," she doesn't run from them and hide behind a mound of white powder. Is that because Mason had enough perspective to look at that verge-of-adulthood time of life with a clearer eye that the others, who were too close to really see it? Maybe. Either way, she produced the best book of the three, and the least famous. Oh well.

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All three books were made into movies. In Country features a fantastic performance by Emily Lloyd and a not-bad one from Bruce Willis. I never saw the other two so I can't really say anything about them.