Song for Bret Easton Ellis

I was sleepless last night, and restless I was looking for something to say, and somewhere to say it. Then I lost it.
But. Since I'm still eager to express a dead feeling, I will try to write it down.

I finished reading Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis yesterday.

It's Ellis's first work. Written in 1985 but as scary as a dystopian future, there's absolutely nothing relevant in the book. All that happens is winter holidays and a bunch of walking-dead people, spoiled and rich and famous and infamous. With an almost boring plot, it doesn't lead anywhere, you don't feel attached to the characters, no sympathy for the damned... But then, you get to recognise the main points. They make themselves visible.

The sign, the annihilation. Disappear Here.
The drugs. The syringe fills with blood.
The obsession for perfection. You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.
Money ruling over people. Wonder if he's for sale.
Depersonalisation. People are afraid to merge. To merge.

Ellis's talented writing uses these recurrent features to create the idea of the obsession for things. Things are what makes the world go round, what introduces a person to another. Just like Patrick Bateman's business card in American Psycho, the teenagers here are anticipated by their cars, shoes, drugs, partners. Recurrent is the sign Clay sees everyday, and every day he gets closer and closer to it; recurrent is sex, and the escape from it, until it becomes a torture porn movie; recurrent is the annihilation of every form of feeling.
This absence of feeling is probably the most disturbing feature in Ellis's work. As I mentioned before, you don't feel sympathy for the characters. But why? I reckon it's not about the plot, it's not about the lifestyle. It's about the process of depersonalisation Ellis uses with them. He is probably the one author that manages to depict a character and make it flat. Completely. No feelings. No heart. No soul, no point of view. Well, this is what the term 'alienation' stands for. People - well, characters - just hide behind their things, their drugs and habits. They don't coexist.
"No man's an island", Donne said. Here there are neither men nor islands. Here we have bottles and cupboards.
People are afraid to merge because they're bi-dimensional and they haven't been created with this merging function, they're not full-optional.
The only spark of hope, humanity and life is in those few paragraphs in italics. That's how it used to be; the spark is in the past, therefore it's gone. That's where our protagonist becomes human and three-dimensional, but that's just a dream-like sequence, you don't ever feel there's a way to escape.
In a situation where even time is subject to this inhuman shift, all that's left is nothing to lose, a deep digging down the elevator.

And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.