Let us consider "Less Than Zero" in the pale fire of "Glamorama." Let's consider it, as critics and academics and publishers have refused to, not as social commentary or cultural text, but as a novel. An experimental novel. What characters there are swiftly fall away. (Remember Blair? Trent?) If ever there was a discernible plot, it is eagerly forgotten. (Remember who fucks who following Daniel's pre-Christmas party?)

What remains? "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles," the novel famously begins. It's a small sentence, and one almost completely starved of content. People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles: The cadence of that sentence is the cadence of the book. Lines pass by the reader fast and inconspicuous, like frightened traffic on a Los Angeles freeway.

But that's just the beginning. Continue on, and you'll find more than traditional cadences under siege; the narrator's voice itself is at odds with all we've the right to demand. "We do some of the coke," we're flatly informed at one point, "and then go to an arcade in Westwood and play video games for close to two hours and end up spending something like twenty bucks apiece and we stop playing only because we run out of quarters." There are no stylistic quirks to the narrator; over time he becomes almost invisible, an everyman on whom it seems meaningless, if not impossible, to place blame for anything. No matter how violent they may be, acts reported in Ellis' first person anonymous appear as diffuse and abstract as the road rage of his Los Angeles setting -- as if the narrator operated with the inevitability of history itself.

Even individual words behave as accomplices: They are plainclothes words, apparently harmless, even innocent. But their colloquial slouch is a disguise, or rather a trick of voice. See what damage words can do: "When we get to Rip's apartment on Wilshire, he leads us into the bedroom. There's a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head. Her cunt is all rashed and looks dry and I can see that it's been shaved ... Spin kneels by the bed and picks up a syringe and whispers something into her ear. The girl doesn't open her eyes. Spin digs the syringe into her arm. I just stare." Few words here are longer than two syllables; none are SAT fodder. They are small words, but their size makes them as sharp and dangerous as gunshots. They rain down on you and at first you don't notice but gradually the volume increases until suddenly you know it's too late -- there's no escape. Taken in sentences, Ellis' words are lethal.

For the driver on a freeway, every moment is now; by refusing the emotional backwash of a traditional novel, by denying his sentences the basic humanity of language and granting his words the freedom of innocence, Ellis reduces every moment in "Less Than Zero" to now, too. The chapters are as brief as MTV videos, the vocabulary as simple as Mr. Rogers', not to reflect our attention span, but rather, like a life cut short by a bullet, to thwart it. There's too much road rage in "Less Than Zero." Too much adrenaline. You can't possibly follow what's happening because everything happens at once and nothing spans a perceptible expanse of time. Vacuous? Yes. But only in the sense that Flaubert made "Un Coeur Simple" vacuous that he might slip through the shackles of plot. "Glamorama" is an experiment; "Less Than Zero" is a success.