The Rules of Attraction

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.