Tuesday, August 2, 2011

The Rules of Attraction


     The novel The Rules of Attraction is a clever and amazing book about the encounters of a few individuals from a small college. Their stories intervene with one another placing the reader in bedrooms, parties and diners with precise detail about how these few people know each other. It makes sense the way the author Bret Easton Ellis forms his text on the young adults, the story starting in the middle and not ending at all. The students of Camden are cliché and stereotypical in my opinion. They put people in genres according to what they wear, how they act, what they listen too. They all have American Express, drink coffee, chain-smoking, drug addicts, party animals and egotistical. No one wants to go home alone on any one night without being laid. They talk about love, but they don’t really know what that is.
     They are self-centered in my opinion, up-class, snotty rich, Caucasian, confused about their existence. I kept thinking as I read, this isn’t going anywhere, the plot I mean. The story begins in October and ends in December and I honestly think that amongst this group of classmates, they have all at one point slept with one another. I thought this was careless behavior and that as young adults they were pathetic.
Lauren is going on and on about some guy Victor who never even mentions her name while on his travels to Europe. She supposedly is goo-goo-gaga over this guy, yet she sleeps with Sean and Paul and some other guy she can’t remember…
Sean seems really cool, laid back, you know, “rock n’ roll.” He is Bisexual and most the men there were bisexual too. They had either slept with Sean, or another male classmate. Sean slept with almost all the girls he encountered although he claimed to be in love with Lauren. What ever happen to Candice?
Paul was he in love with Sean, or Mitchell, or someone else maybe? He sleeps with men mostly and although I feel he did love Sean he gets over him and the many others instantly. Also he took big offense when his friends brought up parents and the fact that they were all getting divorces, yet he claimed that his parents were still hanging together. His mother drags him to Boston to tell him that she hasn’t spoken to his father in a month and that they would divorce soon. (Cliché, stereotypical, to be expected, cultural?)
     I called the novel amazing because I understand what Ellis is getting at about this culture. Here is a college campus with students who should be preparing for their futures, but they don’t’ even know what that is. They don’t know why they are going to school. They change their majors frequently. They only talk and wonder about themselves. All the terrible things that happen in so many individuals’ lives and this self-centered bunch of young adults think that what they are doing is life. It’s pathetic. “They are pathetic.” I visualized their dorms with the popular culture references. Everyone had posters on their walls, owned stereos, drink tab, drive Saabs, smoke parliaments, smoke pot, take acid, swallow mushrooms, swallow pills, swallow booze, swallow cough syrup, wear sunglasses at night and attend Dressed to Get Screwed Parties. Yeah, “it’s pathetic.”
Victor seems to be more down to earth than everyone. Maybe I only think this because he did not speak as much as the other characters; however, while he was in Europe he was not eagerly trying to get back to Camden, back to what everyone was doing. He mentions he is not into guys, or being with them in bed. He is away most of the time. Away from this campus that gives me a hangover just thinking about it. In the end, at the REM concert he mentions that he smiled at a pretty girl and she gave him a nauseated look. His reaction was, “what is her problem?”
“Why couldn’t she just smile back? Was she worrying about imminent war? Was she feeling real terror? Or inspiration? Or passion? That girl, like all others, I had come to believe, was terminally numb. The Talking Heads record was scratched maybe or perhaps Dad hadn’t sent the check yet. That was all this girl was worried about” (273). This is the impression I got from Lauren, Judy, Susan, Katrina, Deidre, Mary, Paul, Sean, Steve, Stuart, Mitchell, Harry, Bertrand and all the other irresponsible individuals...but not Victor.
     What was any of their problems?
     “Rock n’ roll.”

(273) Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules of Attraction. First Vintage Contemporaries Addition. New York, 1987.

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