Sunset Boulevard

In an article for Vanity Fair back in April 1995 entitled, It Happened on Sunset Boulevard, Christopher Hitchens makes reference to Bret Easton Ellis' classic, Less Than Zero.

There is a tradition of louche to live up to. And so Bret Easton Ellis' affectless bastards cluster in Carnay's railcar diner on the strip, and his narrator in Less Than Zero is knocked back by a Sunset billboard that reads, DISAPPEAR HERE.

The parallel between the article and the underlying theme of Less Than Zero stretches much further than Hitchens cares to mention, or indeed, realizes. Sunset Boulevard runs East to West through the heart of Los Angeles. It's conclusion at the shores of the Pacific is as far as you can travel westward in mainland America. As we all (should) know, Less Than Zero tracks the aimless wandering of our vacuous, despicable protagonist, Clay through the boulevards of LA. Singificantly, a Led Zeppelin lyric appears in the forepages of the text:

There's a feeling I get when I look to the West...

As the novel reaches its conclusion, or rather, anti-conclusion, all meaning is lost; even wandering the streets of LA is given up, replaced by ambivalence. Clay's words:

...I sit on a bench and wait for them, staring out at the expanse of sand that meets the water, where the land ends. Disappear here.

The industrial, commercial, vehicular, political expansion of the United States is complete. The East coast has bridged the gap with the West. Our feelings of impending doom are realized. Not only has the implication come full circle during the pages of the novel, but outlived it also. This is the great triumph of Ellis' novel, and why the task of writing the sequel is only about to be finalised, thirty years on.