Customer Reviews

The Rules of Attraction (Audible Modern Vanguard)

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

This is one of the most gorgeous books I have ever read. Ellis is a smart enough writer not to make it gorgeous in the conventional sense, one where swelling sentences and gushing adjectives are mistaken for beauty. Instead, Ellis uses sheer simplicity and straightforward dialogue to convey just how deeply jaded the characters in the novel are. Every character is longing for something more, but trying to go after it in a self-destructive and obsessive compulsive fashion. It is a dead on accurate portrayal of college life, of the religion of namedropping, gossip, misdirected desire, and the search of a place to belong. The characters are expertly drawn and given voices that have more emotion and chracter in them than those found in most films. It is funny and sad at the same time. When you finish the book, you realize it starts in the middle of a sentence and ends in the middle of a sentence, a subtle yet heartbreaking technique that suggests people have felt this way since the beginning of time and that they always will.

After reading every other book in Bret Easton Ellis' backcatalog, I picked up "The Rules of Attraction" expecting more of his overused trademarks: cocaine, sex, vacuous characters. I was really surprised when, in the first few pages, this shaped up to be an incredibly involving novel with some semblance of humanity incorporated into the vacant lives of beautiful college kids searching for love. The story is told through POV segments of various characters, including Sean Bateman (good-looking, hard-drinking, narcissistic), Paul Denton (openly bisexual, provides the novel with genuine morality), and Lauren Hynde (fretting over her boyfriend, who's off in Europe). Their weekly activities of going to parties, getting drunk/high, and getting laid are chronicled in a hell-as-repetition way, with Ellis incorporating bits of stark, unexpected humor that catches the reader off guard. "The Rules of Attraction" flows with a fluid consistency, so that even events that seem to repeat aren't marred by their redundancy and instead seem fresh. What Ellis does--which doesn't happen in many of his novels--is make us sympathetic toward these characters, even though they can be relentlessly egotistical and plain down stupid, we are curious about what their futures hold. It's only in the last 30 or so pages that the novel begins to wear out, with inexplicable motivations and emotions that drift with the consistency of mood swings coming to surface. Despite this, "The Rules of Attraction" is still a damn good novel--one of the best I've read in a while--and it's doubtful Ellis will ever be able to top it.

Where "Less than Zero" lacked in direction and "American Psycho" lacked in consistancy, "The Rules of Attraction" picks up to pieces to form Bret Easton Ellis' most intriguing and important novel to date. Unlike his other novels, I never once felt the need to question the direction of the plot, I was instead lost in the unique and profound story told by the different views of these college students who attended a liberal arts school in New England. Sure like all Ellis' novels, there's drugs, sex, and a lost sense of identity. But unlike his other novels, "The Rules of Attractions" keeps fresh chapter after chapter. I think it had alot to do with how the book was written, with different commentaries by all the characters in the novel. Sometimes the diiferent perspectives of the characters contridicted the other and miscommunications with the conversations were to say the least, really humorous. This is really a touching, sad, funny, and remarkable novel. I guess there are some people who probably can't stomach Ellis' style of heavy drug use and sex. All I can really say if you are that type of reader is: Deal with it. Rock'n'Roll.

Somewhere toward the end of the novel, one of the characters, Paul, gives a nice summation of the plot of the novel: "He (Paul) likes him (Sean). He (Sean) likes her (Lauren). I think she likes someone else, probably me. That's all. No logic."

When love isn't equally requited, it doesn't work out, and we stumble through three complex relationships dealing with this disparity. There is a difference between what we experience and what we percieve from that experience.

Told through the viewpoint of the three main characters (and several minor ones) in monologues, Ellis examines the difference between experience and perception, sometimes going through the same event twice told from different points of view. What we say and what we mean are often different, and these characters bare this.

If the endless drugs and one night stands of Sean and Lauren bother you, watch Paul's story. His thread is the most rewarding, and when he is absent, the novel feels colder. Sean and Lauren stumble through their relationships purposely detached. They don't know what they want from their lives or themselves. Paul is equally confused about his future, but somehow we leave the novel feeling less worry for him.

You either love him, or you hate him...that seems to be the overall reaction people have to Bret Easton Ellis. However, I think I fall somewhere in between. I was enthralled by "Less Than Zero" when I read it in high school back in '85, was tormented by "American Psycho" -- both by its brilliance and audacity -- couldn't get through the first 100 pages of "Glamorama", and "Rules of Attraction"? -- I grew to love the characters over time as I find myself relating to them more than I ever thought I would.

Savagely funny but incredibly sad, on its surface, "The Rules of Attraction" may not seem like it has a lot to say, but by the end of it, the reader (at least this reader) was left exhilarated and depressed by how much I liked these characters despite their apparent lack of any redeeming qualities and moral vacuity.

Ellis' writing is alternately laugh-out-loud funny, barbed, and subtly poignant. He never hits you over the head. I was disappointed, though, by the last thirty or so pages, which felt like Ellis was running out of steam. But nonetheless, this ranks as one of his best.

...and despite the bad reviews, the recent film version is extremely well done in its own right, though the screenwriter takes certain liberties with time and sequence of plot. James van der Beek plays a great Sean Bateman. Worth seeing.

"The Rules of Attraction" is probably the darkest novel about college ever written, and it is also probably one of the most accurate. For Ellis' characters, and many real college students, college is a time for sex and partying, a 4 year farewell party before entering the responsibility of the 'real world.' Ellis' characters are so filthy rich that responsibility is not a concept they can fathom. To them, college is a formality; another status symbol that they feel defines them. It's just another place to spend their parents' money, with more peers and more party venues. Like all Ellis novels, "The Rules Of Attraction" is grossly underrated and misunderstood. It is a quick but disturbing read that stays with you long after you finish the novel. Another Ellis masterwork.

Less Than Zero may be his classic, American Psycho may be his masterpiece of authorial control, but Rules is his best and most touching book. I go to UC Santa Cruz, a West Coast public school version of Camden. I've lived the lifestyle described in this book, and I've also lived a more straight-laced one. Anyone on-campus really can screw just about anyone else on-campus. You really can find any drug, and people to do them with. Classes are typically full on the first day and test days, and only about half the people show up otherwise. The characters aren't hollow but their lives are and they don't know what to do about it. People tend to love or hate this book. If you are an idealistic liberal, or one who thinks all people are essentially good, you will hate this book. If you're fairly cynical about life this is an incredibly thoughtful and insightful book about college life. Not every college student lives it, but a whole lot do.

Okay, I realize I might be over-emphatic on exactly how much I love this book but I LOVE THIS BOOK. If you ever feel the need to read a novel depicting life in a certain lifestyle,(especially if that craving reaches to college kids in the mood), then this is the book for you. I've now read it at least twenty times, and each time I can't help but get sucked into the characters and their lifestyle. The author uses a unique method of "showing the world through their eyes" to develop the characters and allow the reader to fully understand exactly what each character is thinking at any particular time. The description provided of the plot does not do it justice. This is more than just a book about three college kids, it's about a whole generation, and how anything can be different if you look at it from the right angle. No surface characters here, this novel brings you to the heart of the matter, and once there, you never want it to end. If you like Irvine Welsh, you'll love Bret Easton Ellis.

If you are, ever have been, or ever plan to be a student at a northeastern liberal arts college, this book should be required reading for you. Bret Easton Ellis, himself a graduate of Bennington College, manages to craft a darkly comedic novel that is both intentionally over the top and yet frighteningly close to some satirical version of truth. Ellis's insights into the strange quirks of liberal arts college students are brilliant and capture perfectly what we've all thought to ourselves but never been quite able to express accurately. Whether detailing someone staring "in a way only a Social Science major could" (p. 45) or the ridiculous escapades of rich kids with too many drugs and too much meaningless sex (well, this is most pages), Ellis is excellent.

And let's face it, the constant references within the book to various liberal arts colleges (Paul's obnoxious old friend who goes to Sarah Lawrence; the boy he sees on the bus and wonders, "Did this guy go to Hampshire?") will leave people either laughing due to some vague rivalry with a school they don't attend, or helplessly defending their own school when it's their turn to be subtly ridiculed.

I read this book in a day. It isn't a difficult read, but it's a genuinely good one.

Ellis' most maligned novel, but for me his greatest, an intricate, deeply personal account of lives ebbing away into nothingness. The characters, as usual, are often chauvinsitic, prejudice, even misanthropic creatures, but Ellis manages to get the reader on their side. We follow several voices, all ultimately revealing their inner vulnerability and their true selves in a confusion of hard drugs, hard sex and hard emotions. We begin with nothing, end with nothing, and nothing much happens in between, but surely this is the point; these lives, this generation, like the novel itself, seems to be in a rush to get where they are going. The only thing is, none of them know where that is.