I preferred the movie. i never prefer the movie.

I loved the Roger Avary film version of this book, so I felt like I owed it to myself to read it. That said, the two are very, very different, and as much as it pains the book snob in me to say it, the movie was far superior. Maybe it's because the setting of the book (the mid-80s) feels so obviously dated, or because the characters seem so schizophrenic, but I just felt like the movie was a little more...real.

Honestly, it probably hurt to have gone into the book having seen the film many, many times (if you haven't seen it, you should; it's quite the underrated gem). I went into it with certain expectations of the characters that were drastically different from Bret Easton Ellis's actual depiction. I kept waiting for the characters to revert back to the way they acted in the movie, or reveal that some of the hook-ups and such were just dreams, and so I wasn't able to appreciate the characters for who they were until halfway through, when I realized what I saw was what I got.

That said, the book itself is quite clever. I can't emphasize enough how much I loved the format, and I'm a sucker for the little precious tricks Ellis employs, such as having a chapter written by the French character written completely in French, or having the book start and stop in mid-sentence. So, if for no other reason, it's worth reading and treasuring for the formatting. However, on the whole it feels very much like a product of the era in which it was written, much like some of the films spawned by Ellis books are quintessentially 80s movies (Less Than Zero, American Psycho, which has the 80s yuppie consumerism as it's main theme even though it wasn't filmed until the late 90s).

Avary was wise to redevelop the film into something more current, and it paid dividends. However, it shows that there was something to the book's theme--disaffected youth is still very much a part of our country's rich, liberal arts campuses; they just wear better clothes

At the beginning of the year, I decided that in 2020 I would devote some time to working through my sprawling to-read list, whether that meant actually reading the books or throwing them out. A second-hand copy of The Rules of Attraction had been sitting on my shelves for years, and I rather thought I might have missed the moment to read and/or enjoy it. Perhaps rather embarrassingly, though, I loved it. It's nihilistic, sure, but also SO well observed, hyper-quotable, and parts of it had me in stitches (especially the scene in which a group of students rush their friend to hospital only for a bizarrely incompetent doctor to declare him dead – while he's sitting up and talking). The characters are almost universally loathsome, but – and I wonder whether this is something I would've missed if I'd read it when I was 20 – there's vulnerability and naivety detectable in their desperate antics. The novel as a whole is fast, funny and brilliantly awful, but it's also somewhat more human than I was expecting.

TinyLetter

Although I've always intended to read Ellis' American Psycho, I read this book today in an entirely unintended way (my Little's fiance brought two books with him to Ohio State University's graduation ceremony and he let me borrow the one he wasn't reading). It's definitely a very interesting book, from its purpose to the way it's executed.

The Rules of Attraction mainly follows three members of a love triangle - Lauren, Paul, and Sean - while fleshing out the story with some interjections from other characters. It takes place during one semester of college, although going to class takes up very little of the students' time. They're mainly concerned with getting laid, high, and drunk. It's extremely different from any other sort of teen comedy, since characters in movies such as Van Wilder or American Pie are generally pretty likable and often experience poignant moments during their depravity. Lauren, Paul, Sean, and their classmates seem to operate on one level - extreme narcissism. The characters' differences in perspective about the same events sharply highlights how self-absorbed and unable to connect with anyone they are. Everyone is madly in love with someone (and that 'someone' changes weekly), but no one ever talks, and beauty and fuckability are tantamount to being loved. At the end of the novel, each character notes that he or she hasn't changed, which flies in the face of normal fiction, where characters are dynamic and their journeys serve a purpose. Major events - abortions, a suicide, the death of one parent and the divorce of another - have absolutely no effect on these people.

This complete unlikability might leave the reader turned off, but the way Ellis handles it redeems it. An unsubtle reading of it might miss the dark humor (which none of the characters are aware of, of course). Ellis seems to be both mocking and mourning the characters as he writes about them, and the fact that Camden College is modeled on his own college suggests he's commenting on things he witnessed firsthand.

Two notes - the book both starts and stops in the middle of sentences (which threw me when I opened it, convinced it was a misprint), and Sean's older brother Patrick pops up later as the main character in the well-known American Psycho.

The complete inverse (and hilariously intentionally so) of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I loved it, and look forward to reading more of Ellis’s novels.

Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in the 80’s. This is my second novel by Bret Easton Ellis after American Psycho, and I can’t say I’m a fan of his writing, especially not in this novel. However, it was somewhat easier to read than American Psycho, but the multiple narrators is the one of the things I dislike the most. The plot is below average for me, a bit too exhausting to follow. I gave it only two stars because I don’t like this writing style, and the repetitive elements like the drugs abuse and sexual encounters.

The following is a true story.

I was staying over at the boy's house. We were post-coital and all of a sudden he remembered he had to go to a friend's house and party with him for four hours. I opted to wait for him in his bedroom. This was uncommon because whatever, it was just sex, we didn't wait around for each other. But I was in between places, so I didn't have much of a choice. I went down to the kitchen and found The Rules of Attraction on the stove. I opened it up in the middle while eating a frozen dinner and drinking watermelon flavored Smirnoff. At first I thought the narrator was a girl. What a slut. But then a chapter in I realized it was Paul Denton. The book got sadder and sadder but I loved it. The boy came home and kissed me and noticed I was reading it. The next time he came over he brought it along with him and told me I could borrow it and smiled.

I finished the book two weeks later. I'd kept going, then read the back cover and raised my eyebrows when I saw that Brett Easton Ellis was a moralist. I started from the beginning. Everything changed. I finished it. I handed it back to the boy, along with a drawing I made for him. "What are we doing?" I asked him, because I thought he liked me. "Uh, I don't want a relationship right now. Maybe we should end this," he said, and I said, "No. Me neither. Yeah." He hugged me goodbye.

This is the most depressing, nasty book I've read in a long time. I read it all in one go last night, since I have a hard time not finishing books once I start them, but I couldn't stand the thought of having to come back to it. There may be some literary merit to the book that I can't appreciate it because I'm so repulsed by the characters, but I rather doubt it. The book certainly captures the complete lack of affect and total self-absorption of the characters, as well as the compulsive, endless consumption without any enjoyment or desire, which characterized a certain set in the 80's. The description of shared events changes from narrator to narrator because they are all flattering themselves and are thoughtless of others. The narrators almost never describe the setting, the reader gets almost no picture of Camden college, because it doesn't matter to these idiots. Beauty, nature, architecture would fail to move them at all. (Victor's trip through Europe is a prime example of this) Also, everybody they know already knows Camden back to front. The college is taken utterly for granted, certainly has nothing to do with learning, it is just the faded backdrop for their repetitive evenings of drinking and screwing each other. Nobody really has real friends; they aimlessly, reasonlessly do things that should hurt their friends, but the friends don't really care about anything either, so no one is hurt. They are all numb. As a few of them say, "Nobody ever knows anybody." Nobody has goals or direction, no one even gets anywhere by accident, nobody has any hope. They don't even really care if they live or die, as evidenced by the casual attempts at suicide now and again.
The fact that there is even the barest trace of a resemblance between my life and the lives of these characters is deeply disturbing. I can't imagine wanting to read this book, if my life was like this, and I can't imagine wanting to read this book if my life was (thankfully) nothing like this. It's all just too ugly.

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He loves her, but used to do it with him, who used to do it with her, who is still pining away for a different him who is currently in Europe thinking about a different her, or is she still really hung up on the him who used to do it with her current him????? Told in a free association style of rambling diary-like entries, Sean, Lauren and Paul talk about the hits and misses in their respective love lives while attending college in New England.

While the first few pages may have you thinking otherwise, this is a much lighter side of Bret Easton Ellis. Dark comedy is a fine art, and this author does it well. Apparently there is also a movie version that was made into a gazillion years ago, but as I was not a fan of “Dawson” or the Van Der Douche it never hit my radar.

However, when doing a little googly-goo of said movie, I found out this happens:

n  n
n  n

Hmmmmm, maybe I should try and track down a copy. Just to see if it maintains the integrity of the book, of course.

Blame it on the fact that I have what I’m assuming is an undiagnosed case of Ebola and am unable to take over-the-counter cold medicine without lapsing into a 12-hour coma, I completely glossed over the fact that Sean’s last name was Bateman. It took until Page 237 and a chapter told from his brother Patrick’s perspective to put two and two together. What a deliciously wicked way to help explain the nuttery that was the Sean Bateman character. If you’re looking for something that is disturbing, but not something that requires a barf bag or a trip to the shrink like American Psycho might, this is a good selection.

”So I stand against the wall, listen to REM, finish the beer, get more, keep my eye on the Freshman girl. Then some other girl, Deidre I think her name is, black spiked hair that already looks dated and trendy, black lipstick, black fingernail polish, black kneesocks, black shoes, nice tits, okay body, Senior, comes over and she’s wearing a black halter top even though it’s like forty below in the room and she’s drunk and coughing like she has T.B., swigging Scotch. I’ve seen her stealing Dante in the bookstore.”

Bret Easton Ellis, in describing this girl, gives us those extra descriptive terms that make us give Deidre a second look. Coughing, swigging, and stealing. Okay, so she is a bit trashy, a bit goth, a bit too easy, maybe, but any girl that steals Dante would definitely have perked my interest back in the day. The music is loud so I’d have to nuzzle up to her ear. She probably smells faintly still of the perfume she put on earlier, but her skin has probably also started to soak up some of the aromas from the party.

I’d tell her, I saw you stealing Dante.

Now Sean is way more worried about banging the cute freshman girl.... Why?... because she is garden-fresh, practically just hatched. She hasn’t been initiated into the Camden Liberal Arts college tradition of swill, sweat, and semen. Interesting enough, Camden is probably the most famous college in recent American literary history. Writers Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt all attended the very expensive Bennington College in Vermont. All have used Camden as a fictional universe for their Bennington experiences. The author Donna Tartt also attended Bennington, but in her novel The Secret History, she uses the fictional name of Hampden.

Camden. Hampden. I do believe there is literary collusion going on. No Russians as far as I can tell were involved.

Sean has a stalker, a sweet secret admirer, who leaves him love notes in his mail box. ”It is simple. I watch him. He reveals himself in dark contours. Everything I believe in floats away when I witness him, say, eating or crossing the boundaries of a crowded room. I feel a scourge. I have his name written on a sheet of pale blue paper that is tissue thin.” She is a ghost throughout the book as we whiplash between different narrators who all reveal pieces of what has happened. Sometimes their accounts differ, and sometimes the omission of facts from one narrator, in particular, reveals much about how far they are from understanding what they truly desire. Sometimes they lie. The task for the reader is to evaluate what we are told until the truth becomes a glittering, but tarnished, pearl.

So I’ve sort of introduced Sean to you, as he is tucking Deidre into his back pocket in case he needs her while he attempts to catch the eye of cute freshman. As the plot develops, his life becomes more complicated as he finds himself trapped in a confusing, obsessive relationship (sexship) with Lauren. To add more spice to the caldron of lust, he also is having sex with...Paul? Is he? As this triangle acquires more weight, we start to understand the inability of any of these characters to get passed impulsive desires and find any meaning in love.

”’He likes him. He likes her. I think she likes someone else, probably me. That’s all. No logic.’”

Ask that same question of these people a week later and the corners of the triangle will point in different or all new directions. It is all fluid and meaningless, but not without psychological mutilation.

Remember the stalker?

”The seeds of love have taken hold and if we can’t burn together, I’ll burn alone.”

Going to class at Camden seems optional. It is certainly low on the list of priorities. These kids are being washed up on the shores of a hedonistic island, and if anyone is feeling inhibited, soon the copious amounts of alcohol, drugs, and hormonally driven lust have them dancing to the latest Talking Heads album along with the natives.

It makes me wonder, after these people are booted off the island, how anyone can reintegrate into regular society. Camden will leave these people morally decimated, distrustful, and with probably more than one nasty habit. Ahhh yes, the ‘80s.

Don’t miss the Dressed to Get Screwed party. The highlight of the year.

The book jacket says this is a vast departure from Bret Easton Ellis’s first book, Less Than Zero, which for a few chapters I was thinking what the hell are they talking about, but as I got deeper in the book, I started to realize that this book is actually significantly different from his first book. In Less Than Zero, his characters are soulless, people really beyond redemption in my opinion. In this book, he infuses some humor, some legitimate pain, and explores deeper themes about adolescents awkwardly trapped in an extended childhood and with no real idea why anyone would ever want to be an adult. They are rich, spoiled, and lost. LIke a spectre floating behind the scenes, we have the tale of the secret admirer who is the only person who seems to understand real desire, and sustainable love. The poignancy of her situation will make your heart strings tremble.

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I've never really been a fan of multiple narrators in a novel. Switching character voices every 20-30 pages or so wouldn't have been so bad, but here it happens sometimes in as little as 2-3. To me it felt driving along a stretch of road that had traffic lights every 100 metres. I just want to get moving! There was no flow here. Pity, as my last outing with Bret Easton Ellis was simply superb. There was rarely a dull moment in Glamorama, and the shift in story about halfway through was one of the best and most unputdownable I've come across in years. One thing both books have in common though is young people. Bret Eaton Ellis is great when it comes to writing about people under the age of 30. Here we get a group of college students in the 80s, and I quickly noticed that some of his characters from later novels are in here too. So this is basically getting acquainted with them during their higher education. Not that the novel is about their actual education mind you, this is awash with drinking, taking drugs, partying, having sex and being in relationships all the way through. Seeing as there is no real plot, I could have read half of it and not missed much if I didn't read the rest of it. After a while it just became a drag and very repetitive. But it does capture what it intends to capture really well. Although not absolutely essential, I think it would have helped being somewhere around the age of the characters here - or if you just have a thing for spoiled, self-absorbed and tumultuous brats. Would I have appreciated it more if read in my 20s and not 40s? Probably. Although that wasn't a factor when reading Glamorama simply because it was a mesmerizing novel from start to finish and this simply was not. Makes me wish I'd read his fictional memoir 'Lunar Park' instead.

Dit is echt verreweg het allerleegste boek dat ik ooit heb gelezen