Books › The rules of attraction
The rules of attraction
First published 1987 · 352 pages
A dizzying, drug-fueled descent into the hollow heart of 1980s campus life, where everyone is talking but nobody is listening.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like being trapped at a chaotic, endless college party at 3 AM—everyone is shouting, no one is listening, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke and desperation. The narrative moves at a propulsive, breathless clip, driven by stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences that perfectly capture the drug-addled, self-absorbed minds of its rotating narrators. It is a deeply cynical, emotionally vacant world where hedonism masks a profound, aching emptiness. The mood is claustrophobic and dizzying, steeped in 1980s excess and the tragicomedy of unrequited lust. It will delight readers who crave dark, satirical campus fiction and are perfectly happy spending time with deeply unlikable characters spiraling through a void of their own making.
- Mood
- chaotic
- hedonistic
- drug-hazed
- claustrophobic
- Tone
- cynical
- detached
- satirical
- nihilistic
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- youthful nihilism · the emptiness of excess · miscommunication · 1980s decadence · unrequited lust
- The writing
- Breathless, stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences that mimic the frantic, drug-addled minds of its shifting narrators.
- The arc
- A dizzying spiral of hedonistic highs and hollow lows that ultimately flattens into a numb, unresolved apathy.
- Who it's for
- Readers who enjoy dark, satirical campus novels and don't mind deeply unlikable, self-absorbed characters spiraling in a void of their own making.
Content notes
- substance abuse
- explicit sexual content
- sexual assault
- suicide
- eating disorders
About the book
First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.”
This is the second novel from Ellis, of American Psycho fame. It doesn’t depart much from the style (run-on sentences, sex, drugs, 80’s MTV music videos, more drugs, more sex, some violence thrown in there) of his other works, except that here it works throughout the whole book. Here he gives us a little more to work with, like allusions (Howard Roark!), different narrators, a setting that’s not L.A, and a semi-coherent plot. His talent is endless and the sentences run on seamlessly until you’re almost disappointed when a sentence actually ends. Nobody in the world can write like Ellis, though many have tried, and failed miserably. Yes, Ellis is a deranged person (has to be), but he’s also a prolific, talented writer whose put his time in. And here he shines.
It’s about sex and drugs and horrible, self-absorbed, incomplete people, trying to get laid and quit smoking in a fictional University in New England. The things they do are despicable and immoral. There’s nothing redeeming about any of the characters in the entire book, no hope, and yet this book stings because nobody could write this well about people like this if they did not, in fact, exist in real life. When’s the last time you went to college? What do you think happens in Universities around America? What do you think most people are really like? This is a documentary of lost, attractive young people falling into the void. And nobody cares and nobody cares and nobody cares.
Description from Open Library.
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