Product Description

In The Rules of Attraction Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College, a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan 80s. He treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the centre of their lives. Racing from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World, this is a poignant take on the death of romance.

‘Inspired. A wonderfully comic novel’ Gore Vidal

‘Compelling . . . sympathetic to his “lost generation” the way only Fitzgerald was about his’ Vanity Fair

‘One of the primary inside sources in upper-middle-class America’s continuing investigation of what has happened to its children’ New York Times

‘Ellis has always been regarded as the bad boy of contemporary American letters’ Douglas Kennedy

‘A tour of the heart of darkness, a moral armageddon’ The Times

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12607 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of five novels and a collection of stories, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. He divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
Having read all of BEE's work, I believe this is the best example of his misunderstood genius. A complex, subtle and strangely poignant account of American college life in the 1980's, played out through three first-person narrators who show us the world through disillusioned, disaffected eyes. The characterisation is expertly done, and in the end we are left feeling a strange empathy with these hollow lives. It begins in the middle of a sentence and ends in the middle of a sentence, and true, nothing much happens in between, but this is a book about characters, not plot. Style truly reflects content, and the effect is to immerse you totally in the world being portrayed...

Bret Easton Ellis examines the emptiness of US College life
Here Bret Easton Ellis focuses on a love triangle between three students at a liberal arts college in New Hampshire. Ellis' style reflects well the emptiness of their respective lives, as they move from one sexual conquest to another, from one drug to another, and one party to another. With the Rules of Attraction Ellis presents himself as the natural successor to the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger, and as a worthy contemporary of Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahunik, in his nihilistic portrayal of modern life. Readers who enjoyed 'Less Than Zero', Ellis' trailblazing debut, will find ROA very much to their taste, as it can be seen as almost a continuation of its predecessor (LTZ's main protagonist, LA rich kid Clay, makes an appearance), both in style of prose, and in content. It makes for less unsettling reading in most parts than its infamous follow- up, 'American Psycho', although should not be discounted as a lesser work. ROA: a novel very much evocative of its time, but still relevant today, must be highly recommended.

outstanding
an outstanding piece of writing. the rules seem to state that if ‘a’ likes ‘b’, ‘b’ will not like ‘a’, but ‘c’, who, in turn, will not like ‘b’, but ‘d’, ad infinitum. thus Lauren likes Victor, who seems practically unaware of her existence. Paul likes Sean, who, illuminatingly, screens Paul almost completely out of his personal narrative. Sean likes Lauren who, as noted, likes Victor. one might think that the main characters deserve to botch any attempt to get together with the real objects of their romantic lives, given how unfaithful they are, and how casually they treat sex, which is mostly done drunk, and with whoever’s to hand. however, faithful romantic love is dismissed as futile too – the most romantic of the narrators, tellingly never named, ends up despairing, and committing suicide.

Easton Ellis uses the different narrative voices in the novel very skilfully to demonstrate how the same events are viewed differently by different people, how people can read each other wrong, and interpret events and other people wrong, in particular, altering or concealing the truth to suit their own needs and self-image. though all the characters are almost entirely egotistical in their approach to life, Easton Ellis writes from inside his characters, rather than outside: the writer does not sneer at his characters, and, overall, invites the reader to see them as products of their environment.

the main characters are confused and unhappy about life, without really knowing why, or how to make themselves happy. they wearily return to what are supposed to be life’s pleasures - sex, drugs, parties – because they don’t know where else to turn. nor are any alternative pleasures suggested by the novel. any idealism about the pleasures of art, for example, is soon crushed: Sean thinks Lauren’s poetry is rubbish; Lauren’s poetry teacher is a pitiful, lecherous creature; the characters who talk about art do so in such a pretentious way as to make art seem meaningless.

nor do any of the characters find any kind of redemption. the way the novel starts mid-sentence and ends mid-sentence is a useful stylistic device to point out that what we are seeing here is merely a snapshot of a recurring sequence of episodes – these same type of events will just keep happening, parties, drugs, casual sex, parties, drugs, casual sex, parties …

for me, Easton Ellis falters slightly only at one point, when one of the characters improbably stops and considers why we should care about the pain of these rich kids, when their pain often occurs as the result of such trivial incidents. pain, we are told, depends on circumstances, and is as relevant if the result of not being able to book a table at one's favourite table as of anything else. here the author’s voice comes through a bit too strongly, i think – Easton Ellis loses his lightness of touch when he attempts didacticism. but, this is only a slight blip in an extraordinary novel.