"People are afraid to merge on the freeway," howls Bloc Party's Kele Okereke in the opening minutes of A Weekend In The City, the east London art-rockers' second album, out on Monday. You may recognise that awkward mantra from Bret Easton Ellis' 1985 debut Less Than Zero, and indeed Okereke has based the whole of his histrionic Song For Clay (Disappear Here) around the novel.
Less Than Zero's story of vacation degradation evidently hasn't lost its hold on our disaffected young men, even if, like Okereke, they were only three years old when it was published. (Or, in my case, barely four months.) But the whole point of that novel was to be scorchingly contemporary - so more than twenty years later, why are we still reading it? In 2007, it looks dated, and, apart from its revolting third act, has lost its power to shock. Indeed, it was banal in the first place: just like the lyrics on A Weekend In The City, it doesn't have nearly as much insight as it thinks it does into youth, consumerism, mass media, and so on.
I don't believe Less Than Zero is still enthralling Okereke and the rest of my generation because it's a great novel. More likely it's just because, somehow, nothing better has come along. Douglas Coupland's Generation X and Alex Garland's The Beach may sum up their moment in history, but their heroes are a few years too old. Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and Joy Williams' The Quick and the Dead are about adolescents, but they're too thoughtful and detached. One must also reject Zadie Smith's White Teeth (too genial) and Nick McDonnell's Twelve (too much a homage to Ellis).
One novelist who exhibits a very teenage nihilism, even if he tends to write about adults, is Chuck Palahniuk, and indeed you'll find his books on the shelves of a million young goths. Unfortunately, he also exhibits very teenage prose and plotting. (Although Fightstar, the solo project of Charlie from Busted, do have a song called Palahniuk's Laughter.)
But if nobody's yet usurped Ellis, I don't think that's necessarily a failure by today's authors. In the last twenty years, young adult fiction has grown up a great deal. Now that you can write honestly about sex and self-destruction, a talented young novelist who wants to write about teenagers may choose to write a novel that's actually aimed at teenagers. Maybe there is a book out there that does for 2007 what Less Than Zero did for 1985, but it's just in a different section of the shop. If there is, I'd like to know about it, and so, I bet, would Bloc Party.
