Word: clays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...holds clues. Photosuperimposition, in which video cameras are used to merge an image of the skull with a photograph of the suspected dead person's face, can often reveal a matching structure. The face can be reconstructed on the skull with some degree of accuracy by applying layers of clay...
...crowd surrounded a weed-covered tomb that had been marked until hours before with the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, who died in 1979, two gravediggers began loosening the solid red clay with pickaxes and then started shoveling. Almost an hour later, their tools struck against the light- colored wood of a coffin. The diggers broke open the casket and, as the crowd jockeyed for position, began handing the contents up to Jose Antonio de Mello, assistant director of the Sao Paulo police forensic team. There emerged some dentures and a few earth-stained bones, some still covered by a pair...
...tells his parents he wants "nothing" for Christmas and seems to mean it. Indifference may be Clay's most endearing virtue. He sleeps with Griffin (male) and Blair (female); whoever asks first gets him. When one of his sisters gives him an expensive leatherbound datebook, he knows at once he will not use it: "I tried to keep a datebook one summer, but it didn't work out. I'd get confused and write down things just to write them down and I came to this realization that I didn't do enough things to keep a datebook." Still...
...Ellis conveys the hellishness of aimless lives with economy and skill; his efforts to distance Clay, the narrator, from all the other zombies is unsuccessful. True, he has a few scruples. He does not mainline heroin, he walks out before the end of an apparently genuine snuff film, and he refuses an obliging friend's invitation to rape a drugged and trussed up twelve-year- old girl. He is also sensitive. The crying jag he experiences at his psychiatrist's office may suggest some inner anguish, although it might just as easily occur because he spends so much time drugged...
Ultimately, Ellis' novel is anchored to a hero who stands for nothing. How Clay managed to muster the energy to go to college in the first place remains mysterious; so do the forces that made him so passive and world-weary at age 18. That such questions about the central character seem important is a tribute to Ellis' talent; his refusal to address them is thus all the more unsettling. In spite of its surface vitality and macabre glitter, Less Than Zero offers little more than its title promises...