Family Matters: Flesh and Blood, Bone and Drugs

Studies throughout history have proven that the relationship between parents and their
child has an effect on the person the child becomes; when the parents are absent, the child is
likely to commit crimes or flunk out of school or do something just as awful. This is further
proven through two literary classics, Bret Easton Ellis Less Than Zero and Russell Banks
Rule of the Bone. These books tell the coming-of-age stories of two boys growing up without a
strong sense of family support, which leads them to other problems.
These characters, at first glance, seem very different. Clay, in Less Than Zero, is an
eighteen year old very wealthy boy who lives in the early 1980s on the west coast. In Rule of
the Bone the main protagonist is Chapman Dorset, an east coaster who later renames himself
Bone, a thirteen year old growing up in poverty during the 1990s. On taking a second look,
however, these two characters have a lot in common. For example, both have parents in the
picture, but the parents dont provide much guidance or support. This leads to the kids struggling
to define their morals, which in turn leads to them dealing with death, sex, and drugs a lot. Their
coming of age processes force them to face a lot of challenges that they would not have faced if
they had a loving, supportive family.
Both Clay and Bone lack a true family. Clays parents are divorced and dont seem to
know how to interact with him or his sisters, let alone raise him properly. They barely interact
with him while he is home from college. In fact, in his telling of the story, he doesnt mention
any of his family members by name because they are so insignificant to him. Bones biological
father abandoned him when he was a child, and his mom remarried to a man who sexually
abused him. His mom and stepfather force him to leave the house, and later, his own mother
chooses her alcoholic, abusive husband over her son. Even when Bone is reunited with his father,
Elizabeth McKinney
English 3651
Dr. Scott
2-22-12

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he still has to contest his ideas of morals with his fathers morals of cheating, drug use, and
killing. Because Bone doesnt have the parental support and guidance he needs, he turns to other
mentors for help: an older Rastafarian man.
Clay, on the other hand, doesnt have an older, wiser mentor, so he tries to learn from his
friends behavior. Clay spends most of his time partying, drinking, snorting cocaine, and having
sex with any of his friends or acquaintances. Because of this lifestyle choice, these kids are numb
to the world, and it takes a lot to rile them up or give them a thrill. For example, Clay and Blairs
relationship is set on fire only after they hit and kill a coyote while driving, and Clays friends
are turned on by snuff films and even gang rape a twelve year old girl. The kids who Clay is
friends with have made sex, drugs, and alcohol an intimate part of their lives, but there is no
meaning behind it, no feelings or emotions. They have even become so accustomed to these
things that death doesnt mean anything to them, but it does play a subtly huge roll in Clays life.
The reader sees a flashback from a time when, for several months, he collects newspaper
clippings of people who have died in the area. Towards the end of the story, he references more
newspaper articles about deaths in the area. A man in Encino killed his wife and two children.
Four teenagers . . . died in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway (195). Clay seems to take
these deaths in stride, listing them one after another like they are nothing. They do have an effect
on him though, which we can see when, after going to a club one night, one of Clays friends
tells the group that he found a corpse behind a building nearby, so they all go to investigate. They
stand in front of the body looking at it for several minutes, and Rip kicks the body and then puts
a cigarette in its mouth. His nonchalant attitude alarms Clay, and he is sickened by the whole
ordeal. Right after this, the boys go to Rips house, where he has the twelve year old girl tied to

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his bed. This is where the reader sees the line Clay cannot cross, and he leaves, disgusted by their
behavior.
The way Clays friends react so calmly to all of this frightens and confuses him, which is
why Clay finally realizes that he doesnt want to be a part of this life anymore. Although this
becomes a solid reality when he sees what his friends are doing, it really starts when he witnesses
what Julian, his best friend, has resigned himself to doing in order to pay his drug debts. Julians
pimp, Finn, tells Julian, I didnt turn you into a whore. You did it yourself (182). This
statement hits home with Clay, because it makes him realize he is on the same track Julian is on,
and it is his own fault. Shortly after this, Clay leaves Julian and doesnt see him at all in the rest
of the novel, but instead prepares to go back to school to try to give himself a future so he
doesnt end up like his best friend.
Bones mentor, and best friend, I-Man, is a black man from Jamaica who spends his days
practicing Rastafarianismsmoking ganja, listening to reggae music, and telling Bone it is up
to you. Bone settled in with I-Man after his mother rejected him, and soon became a devout
believer in I-Man. I-Man taught him about Rastafarianism, showing him how to grow and cook
the food and the ganja, how to get started down the path of knowing ones true self, and how to
make your own decisionswhich is perhaps the biggest lesson Bone learned in the novel,
because it helped him define his life and his beliefs. This especially helps Bone because I-Man
lets him down several times inconspicuously throughout the novel, such as when Bone sees IMans gun, but the most obvious situation is when Bone catches him having sex with Evening
Star. Bone is shocked from witnessing this casual sex encounter involving someone he thought
better of, and it leads him to tell his father of the incident. He turned to his father as a sort of last
resort. Bones best friend and savior had just betrayed him, so he looked to his father for help.

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This of course leads to I-Mans death, which is the ultimate letdown because not only is I-Man
no longer around to help Bone, but Bone also realizes his father doesnt care one way or the
other for him.
Since Bone has spent most of his life without a strong guiding light, he is constantly
questioning his beliefs and morals. He knows he has lines that he wont cross, but he doesnt
know where they are. He tries to define the difference between dealing weed and dealing meth,
or between stealing lingerie for his mom and taking money from his mom. While Russ tries to
convince him to steal some of the stolen VCRs from the bikers, Bone tries to work out where to
put his lines and how to explain it. He thinks there was a lot about right and wrong that my
parents hadnt taught me and now due to my situation I was having to work out most of it myself
. . . It was like the difference between dealing small-load weed and dealing crankthere was
one, I knew but I didnt know what it was (68). He also spends some time talking about sex in
the beginning of his story, especially after watching Bruce and the other bikers perform and talk
about it, but he brushes it off, making the excuse that he is too young for it. Towards the end of
the novel, however, when he is less than a year older, he uses sex as a means of revenge, a way to
get back at his father for killing I-Man. Bone is also fascinated by death, and this is shown many
times in the novel. He takes his stepfathers gun and shoots his parents bed, he shoots out the
window in the Ridgeways house, and after being rejected by his mother and rejecting his
grandmother, he spends hours vividly imagining killing his familymother, grandmother, and
stepfather.
These obsessions reveal just how unsure Bone is about where he draws the line. He wont
have sex with random people, but he is okay with using it for revenge. He wont sell stolen
VCRs, but he will trash someones house. I-Man is the first person to give him any sort of

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guidance, and Bone latches on to that, but when he sees the hypocritical, in his eyes at least,
actions of his best friend, he becomes lost again. Clay, until the end of the novel, didnt have any
lines for himself because he had never been in a situation where he needed any. What he did was
what society did, what society told him was okay. After going to school on the east coast,
however, he realizes much of what he has been doing is wrong. When his friends activities
escalate to the extremes of gang-raping a young girl and getting off on snuff films, he knows he
cant be a part of that. This, ultimately, is why he goes back to school; he needs an escape from
this life, and his education seems to be the only way out.
There is, of course, another way for Clay to have avoided his whole dilemma. If his
parents had paid any attention to him while he was growing up, he would not have turned as
quickly to drugs, partying, and sex to find some sense of fulfillment in his life. The same is true
for Bone. If his parents had raised him in a loving home, without any alcoholism or abuse, he
would never have run away or gotten into drugs. Instead, he would have finished school.
These two novels display the horrors that a poor family structure can force the children to
experience. Many parents would say it is their worst nightmare for their child to turn out like
Clay or Bone; homeless or doing drugs constantly or having sex with anyone who invited them.
These stories reveal the opposite: both Clay and Bones parents dont care what happens to them,
so the two young men must decide what is good and what is bad for themselves, which leads
them down many wrong paths until the ends of their novels, where the reader sees both start to
turn their lives around. Clay returns to school to make a new life for himself and Bone finds not
only a job, but also a sense of peace with the losses of I-Man, Rose, Russ, and everyone else he
knew in his previous life.