This past week, I decided to revisit an old favorite of mine that really helped me get through the tough time we’ve all experienced at one point called “adolescence.” I’m referring to the novel Less Than Zero, written by Bret Easton Ellis in 1985 at only 20 years old. Along with the works of J.D. Salinger, as well as The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway, I’d rank it among the best of the “coming of age” stories that helped steer me through the tough years of my youth.

Many probably remember the 1987 film adaptation of Less Than Zero which served as a launching pad for the career of the extremely talented Robert Downey Jr., but—sadly—the book that served as the inspiration for the film is seldom remembered or read only twenty-five years after its publication. The novel is set in the nihilist, smog covered wasteland of 1980s Los Angles, where young people spend their days scoring coke and engaging in meaningless sexual gratification in often such perverse ways that might even make Marquis De Sade cringe. While many view Ellis’ vision of LA as being a bit over the top, it serves as a terrifying caricature of the real “lifestyles of the rich and famous” circa the Reagan years.

The novel’s protagonist, Clay, a college freshman, is spending his Christmas vacation at his mother’s house on Mulholland Drive, drifting from party to party, hook-up to hook-up, constantly shoving cocaine down his nose with the rest of his young friends who have too much money and too much time. One of the biggest themes of the novel that I picked up is how the young people in the novel numb themselves with drugs, sex, and materialism to keep from feeling anything that could be regarded as genuine emotions, which leads to some gruesome and barbaric behavior. This numbness and apathy is also seen in the adults in the novel, who care more about sun tans, hair transplants, and vacations in Europe than they do about putting any effort into raising their kids. It is also interesting to note that—this being Los Angeles—most of the adults are in some way involved in the film industry, making careers off of manufacturing and selling fake realities. As a result, each character, regardless of age, is unable to leave their false worlds of security.

Clay is stuck in this world, being perpetually blown around by forces outside of himself, trying to reconcile the harsh realities of the real world with the fake world in which he has been raised and feels trapped in. He is very much like a gen-X update Holden Caulfied from J.D. Salinger’s 1951 alienated-youth classic, The Catcher in the Rye. And just like Holden, the question of whether Clay will ever leave the “phony” world he has come to know as home and become a well functioning adult is ambiguous.

What makes this novel so relevant today (besides the fact that it takes place in a overly-sexed, capitalism-obsessed Gilded Age that many would argue hasn’t ended) is that it is one of the last novels about young people to have had such a huge cultural impact as to have had the author heralded as the “voice of his generation.” While Stephne Chbosky’s 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower came close in some ways to reaching similar status, it has remained a cult classic.

Why is it that the 2000′s have failed to yield a Salinger or Ellis? It seems strange that there has not yet been a novel to deal with the classic themes of teenage angst and rebellion set to the backdrop of 9/11 or the Iraq War. Is it that the new generation of disaffected youths has forgotten the power and significance of the novel? I think this is very plausible. With television and the internet playing such a vital role in the lives of young people, many have little interest in reading. It is interesting to note that the success of The Perks of Being a Wallflower is owed largely to its being published by MTV Books. It is a sad state of culture when most young people would rather watch Jersey Shore than read an inspiring novel. We can only hope that the 2010′s, a time already ripe in cultural conflict, can bring us better luck; that we may find a new voice in literature to shine a light on the awkwardness of youth.