43 pages • 1 hour read
Bret Easton EllisLess Than Zero
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
When Clay goes to a club called Pages in Encino with Rip and a group of other friends, he sees sexual jokes in the bathroom, including one that reads, “Julian gives good head, and is dead” (125).
Clay has a flashback to a point in the past. After spending nine weeks in Palm Springs, at which point everyone had gone home except for his grandfather, he ate a steak that was flown in from his grandfather’s hotel in Nevada.
Back in the present, Clay drinks gin and tonics at Kim’s house when Blair suggests going to a new club called the Garage. At the club, Clay sees Blair flirt with a younger man. Dimitri, another member of their party, gets drunk and needs to go to the hospital after cutting his hand on glass from a broken window.
Clay goes home and watches another religious program, and he thinks about calling in, but he doesn’t know what he would say. Clay calls Blair and asks if she will go to a concert with him, and she says yes but then hangs up. Clay apologizes again for cheating, but Kim tells him to forget it. After the concert, they go to a cafe, and Blair drinks too much. They see a homeless woman next to Sunset Boulevard. Then they hit and kill a coyote. In tears, Blair goes home to take Valium and Thorazine before going to bed. Clay and Blair have a passionate sexual encounter the following night at Kim’s party.
Clay has lunch with his father, who has just bought a new Ferrari. Clay’s father asks if he is excited to go back to school, to which Clay says yes. Clay’s mother says she is too busy to join them, although she merely sits by the pool reading a magazine.
Clay has a flashback to a time when he heard a director at a party at their home tell his father about a stuntman who died. However, the director couldn’t remember the man’s name when Clay’s father asked.
Chapter 8 Summary
Back in the present, after lunch with his father, Clay visits Daniel, but he only finds Daniel’s mother playing tennis in a bikini. She talks about her recent travels and tells Clay about a dream in which Daniel was kidnapped.
Clay goes to visit Kim’s house, but when he enters he hears Muriel screaming and Dmitri playing a guitar with a bandaged hand. Kim is upset that Clay showed up unannounced and tells Clay that she learned from a magazine that her mom is in Hawaii scouting a set for a movie about teenage spastics. Clay and Kim bicker before Clay leaves with the argyle vest he had loaned her.
Clay visits Daniel, who tells him that is not returning to school. He also tells Clay about an idea for a screenplay in which a girl is gang raped by a group of men. After his disheartening visit to Daniel, Clay decides to call his psychiatrist and end their relationship, as he isn’t helping Clay.
Clay next visits his former elementary school, where the views of children running to their parents after school fill him with warmth. He also notices changes, such as old parking lots having been replaced and new administration buildings. He visits the school’s old auditorium where he used to play the piano, and he gets a feeling of panic when he plays a few familiar notes. He also has a memory of his grandmother during his last summer spent with her in Palm Springs before she died. He remembers her taking Percodan before their flight, as well as more distant memories such as eating pink and green mints at the Bel Air Hotel.
Finally, Clay finds Julian at an arcade on Westwood Boulevard. Clay asks for the money he lent him, and Julian says that he must retrieve it from a man named Finn. He asks Clay to accompany him to Finn’s apartment.
Clay reluctantly accompanies Julian to Finn’s penthouse apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. The glass walls there make Clay feel vertigo. He also feels sickened by Julian’s conversation with Finn, in which Finn announces that Julian’s client called to say that Julian was “fantastic” (156). Although he is visibly upset, Julian agrees to meet another client at the San Marquis at 4:00. When Finn looks at Julian, he insists that, for Julian to get his money, Clay has to accompany him to this appointment, as the client has indicated that he wants someone to watch. Walking out, Clay hears Julian tell Finn that this will be his last client. When Clay and Julian leave the penthouse and Clay asks Julian why he didn’t tell Clay he is a sex worker, Julian suggests that Clay doesn’t care. Clay silently realizes that, in fact, he doesn’t.
Chapter 9 Summary
Clay accompanies Julian to the San Marquis, and the man, Mr. Erickson, who is in his forties, offers them a drink. Clay admits to wanting one but refuses when Julian does. Clay puts on music, but the client, who is from Muncie, Indiana, tells him that it’s not allowed, as Clay needs to hear everything, Clay goes to the bathroom and tries to vomit but cannot, so he continually flushes the toilet and runs the water to drown out the noise of the man having sex with Julian.
Clay next goes to the club where Finn promised to give Julian his money, but, when they arrive, Finn asks for another favor and insists that the two accompany him to another house party, where Finn promises he will hand over the money. Julian rides in the car with Finn and a young sex worker named Lee, and Clay follows. When Julian refuses to service another client, an argument erupts between the two in which Finn beats up Julian, calls him a “whore,” and forcibly shoots drugs into his arm. Clay leaves alone while Julian screams in the bathroom.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The plot of the novel becomes increasingly violent and dark as the novel progresses. Ellis scaffolds his writing so that, in the beginning, the reader is shown glimpses of Clay’s casual sexual encounters—first with the UCLA student, Griffin; then with Blair; then with an unnamed teenager. In the second part of the novel, Ellis presents increasingly violent sexual encounters between people who are not matched in age or power, and references to rape, particularly gang rape, escalate. Moreover, the variety of prostitution that Ellis shows is particularly unsetting: the solicitation of a young, teenage heroin addict by an older client and the violent side of his relationship with Finn, his pimp.
For much of the novel, Julian occupies many of the other characters’ thoughts but is rarely seen. In fact, it is his absence that is most conspicuous. The other characters’ awareness of his absence piques the reader’s interest as characters look for Julian in multiple locales brimming with wealth. This interest is satisfied—albeit in an unsettling fashion—in these revelatory chapters in which Julian is presented as the victim of Finn’s violence unable to regain his money without remaining under Finn’s control.
Also introduced in this section is the theme of voyeurism. When Clay is forced to watch Julian engage in a sex act, he is at first excited by the idea, admitting, “I want to see the worst” (160). However, the reality of watching and hearing this sexual transaction and its unequal power dynamics leads him to seek to drown it out, first with music and then with repeated sounds of water. Clay’s narrative style also places the reader in the position of the voyeur. The storytelling is very cinematic, and brief sections within the chapters function like camera cuts. Clay’s obsession with billboards, television, and posters establishes the importance of vision and aesthetics within the novel. However, he has brought the reader from the point of observing casual teenaged sexual encounters earlier in the novel to witnessing various deaths and Julian’s unwanted sex work and forced drug usage as the work nears its conclusion.
As a narrator, Clay is constantly aware of who is watching what. For example, in the opening chapter, he describes his room as having an Elvis Costello poster. He remarks, “Elvis looks past me, with this wry, ironic smile on his lips, staring out the window…they look at whoever’s standing by the window” (3). Clay, as the protagonist, is the object of the novel’s gaze. As the reader watches him have sex with men and women in the earlier chapters, as if he were on camera, the narration of Julian’s experiences eventually forces Clay to move behind the camera. Although he desires the titillation of voyeurism, Clay finds his friend’s coerced prostitution too difficult to witness. For this reason, he “cuts” to “an image of Julian in fifth grade, kicking a soccer ball across a green field,” juxtaposing this with the client’s comment that Julian is “a very beautiful boy” (163). These gritty chapters reveal the exploitation inherent in a society obsessed with film and images.
Finally, these chapters continue the novel’s theme of drug use; however, this late in the novel, drugs are not featured as party entertainment for the wealthy young people of LA. Rather, they are displayed as dangerous and addictive. Julian’s pimp, Finn, avers that Julian’s drug addiction forced him into prostitution, insultingly insisting that he did not turn Julian into a “whore,” but that Julian did that himself.
Clay slowly distances himself from his peers. He has chosen to return to college, unlike Daniel, who prefers to write a sexually violent screenplay. The screenplay itself proves to be an instance of foreshadowing of the novel’s disturbing closing chapters.
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