The context in which one reads The Rules of Attraction may color one’s
view of it. That was the case for me, at
least. The first time I read it was in
September of 2003. I was 20 and going to
Paris for the semester. I seem to recall
reading the entire book on the plane flight from New York to Paris. I seem to recall considering it a very good book
for the reason of such speed—considered it to be on the same level of Less Than Zero. Recently I
have felt the opposite—that Less Than
Zero is clearly the superior work, and that The Rules of Attraction is the “weaker sophomore effort.” This is not the way I felt about The Beautiful and Damned (which oddly
enough is the most popular review on Flying Houses—and by a long shot) and
people tend to think of Bret Easton Ellis and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a similar
vein. For one, they both go by three
names, which people generally do not take as a sign of pretension, but may be
so (think of the “stature of the artist” view—or maybe just an attempt at
accuracy for the names they were called).
They both write about young people and how their social lives affect
their interior and exterior selves. They
both had success when they were very young (Ellis younger, however) and both
were tagged as emblems of the generations they sought to capture in literature. Popular films have been made out of their
novels and short stories—and they continue to be made.
They have also both been equated
with the characters they portrayed. And
it would be too hard to ignore Ellis’s recent doings: the recent New York Times
article about The Canyons is more
than an instructive exercise. In it,
Ellis is painted as a screenwriter who has seemingly abandoned the novel
writing for which he is known and generally admired. It is worth noting that Ellis is not known
for having written the screenplay for anything yet—so a good deal of whether
this latest entre into film remains to be seen. But I will make a small prediction that The Canyons is going to be about as
memorable as The Informers. Which is to say, nothing compared to Less Than Zero or American Psycho. The Rules of
Attraction and Glamorama get
mentioned as secondary works (though I personally believe there is a strong
argument that Glamorama is Ellis’s
best work—but see also this present review, regarding re-assessment of Ellis as
one ages) and most people only know about Imperial
Bedrooms or Lunar Park if they
are devoted readers of Ellis. Maybe
Ellis has achieved his goals in literature and is now seeking success in
film—but it is irresistible to question whether this is just another fact by
which to compare him to Fitzgerald—that late Hollywood period, when he had to
write for the movies to make a living, and where he burnt out too young. Fitzgerald died at 44 and Ellis is currently
49 but there have been advances in longevity.
Rumors have flown about Ellis (hardly ignored by the author in his two
most recent efforts) and whether he shares certain characteristics with his
literary creations. I will just say that
personally, I have my views on this matter (okay I went to NYU and more than a
couple people I met claimed personal connections to him—then again one kid in
Los Angeles claimed that B.E.E. read his self-published first creative
non-fiction book and as time as passed I have increasingly felt that the kid
was a liar) and no review of The
Rules of Attraction should fail to mention its obsession with “gossip,” but
I will decline to offer any personal tidbits that might paint an unfortunate
view: we will respect the separation between artist and art object in this
review.
To
return to context, then: I liked The
Rules of Attraction much better when I was 20 than I liked it when I was
29.75 years old. Maybe it’s because of
something that’s captured in one scene: dismay over the reality that you have
reached a certain age, which Sean experiences when he finds out that a
centerfold in the pages of Playboy is
19 years old—two years younger than him—when he has always seen centerfold
models as being “older”:
“This girl is younger
than me, and that does it—instant depression.
This woman, this flesh was always older and that was part of the
turn-on, but now, coming across this, something I’d never noticed before upsets
me more than thinking about the conversation that Lauren and Judy must have
had.” (210)
And perhaps it summarizes my view when I say I don’t
consider it a spoiler to tell the reader that Sean has had sex with Judy while
Sean was going out with Lauren. This is
because I seriously doubt any reader gets into the nitty-gritty details of this
text—draws a massive chart detailing every relationship and how they are part
of a larger intelligent design—but also seemingly rough outlines of variations
on the same theme: spoiled brats at a small liberal arts college, drinking and
doing lots of drugs and having lots of sex.
It is hard not to mention the context in which I viewed this
book at age 20, too. Briefly, from
September through December of 2002, I was the editor of the film review section
of the NYU student newspaper. That
context matters for two reasons. First,
the film version of The Rules of
Attraction came out while I had the editorial reigns, and I published a
vaguely positive review of the film while not feeling an especially strong urge
to go out and see it (this in contradistinction to American Psycho). Second,
New York University is a college filled with the same types of characters as
those that populate The Rules of
Attraction. So the book is
successful on the second front. If you
have been to college—and more specifically, this “type” of college—then you
will be able to identify with this book in at least some small way. Even though
the characters are ensconced in the mid-1980s, one may indeed be shocked by how
little youth culture has changed—apart from “screen time” which is vaguely
anticipated in certain scenes, such as when Sean thinks Lauren will think he is
cooler if he says he is majoring in Computers….but I cannot find the page that
this detail emerges in.
And that is one important thing to
note about this book: it is either one long chapter, or about 80 mini-chapters
(maybe I’m off on that number—it’s just off the top of my head—I don’t want to
spend the time to count up every single number of times that each character
speaks in an attempt to make some sort of numerological quotation, nor do I
believe that Ellis wants us to do this)—and if that parenthetical is any sign,
it’s harder to view it as the latter.
This plot evolves over the course of one fall semester—roughly the
months of October and November. This
includes Halloween and it is worth noting here that it bears a similarity to Daylight Savings Time, in ways that I
did not even think about. Really, I must
have considered this book to be of such an inspiring nature that I adopted one
of its narrative techniques: present tense first-person shifting narration (except
that I kept it in third-person). Indeed
some of the scenes we both include probably share some of the same “one-liners
at party” dialogue. I wrote Daylight Savings Time when I was
twenty-three and twenty-four, and Ellis published The Rules of Attraction when he was twenty-four, and while I would
not suggest that I was on the same level of Ellis at that age, I would suggest
that our “mental age” was probably not far off.
This
can be interesting material—but generally it is not. It suffers from the same problem as Palo Alto (recently reviewed here) by
James Franco: we don’t know which character to root for because we’re not sure
of what they care about, or how smart they really are. It appears that Sean is smarter than he
appears, but we never really get any satisfaction out of seeing that side of
him, except maybe in the scene at Vittorio’s (a 70-year-old poetry professor
relocating to Italy that makes passes at Lauren)—that is, we do not know whether
the things he tends to remember have significance or not. At one point Sean mentions how his "hippie" ex-girlfriend knows
to talk about Ginsberg, but then does not realize he wrote “Howl.” I suppose Sean is supposed to appreciate that
he can see through her “feigned coolness,” but the reader is never exactly sure
how much of the behavior of the three major characters is “feigned
coolness.”
This is
most apparent in Paul’s interactions with Sean, and perhaps less apparent in
Sean’s interactions with Lauren. Which
leads me to recognize that I have not provided a plot-line for this novel
yet. It concerns Sean Bateman (younger
brother to Patrick Bateman, who makes an appearance and even gets his own
“monologue-mini-chapter”), who rides a motorcycle and says “rock and roll” and
“deal with it” in response to other people’s random statements, Paul Denton,
who is bisexual but seems more gay than straight, who is from Chicago and
generally seems the most “stuck-up” of the characters, and Lauren Hynde, who pines for her boyfriend Victor who
is “spending some time in Europe,” who keeps
changing her major, who slept with Paul before the action of the novel
“starts” and who sleeps with Sean in the course of it, and who may be the
social conscience of the book itself.
These characters attend the same school as Clay from Less Than Zero (who also has his own
“mini-chapter monologue”): Camden College.
Maybe it says something when I recall that Clay’s “excerpt” is one of
the best parts of this novel, and apparently shows that Ellis has not “lost his
gift” but has just shifted it in a less interesting direction. This is not to say that the subject matter of
this book is boring: it takes on a topic which is rarely examined in literature
and provides a somewhat fascinating resolution of that issue. The issue is sort of referenced in Less Than Zero but attacked head-on in
this book—but maybe it’s the case that a good deal of the allure of Less Than Zero is its almost mystical,
mysterious quality. This is not as
strongly the case here, and though Ellis begins and ends the novel mid-sentence and
includes a “blank” Lauren mini-chapter, he generally is content keep his
authorial gaze fixed upon “society” as the “topic” of the book.
Maybe I
am putting words in his mouth or providing my own interpretive gloss but I
swore I once read an article where B.E.E. claimed to be inspired by Balzac’s La
Comedie Humane and that his work was his take on that sort of vision. If this is the case, the problem mentioned
above (i.e. the same problem with Palo
Alto) makes this attempt a failure.
But, like Palo Alto, it is a
book that I read very quickly the first time around, and that will certainly
remind liberal arts B.A. holders of scenes from their own life and maybe cause
them to write books vaguely imitating its literary style that lack sufficient
quality for publication. However I doubt
that any of them had as much sex as occurs in this book. Aside from the hypersexual element, the book
is generally true to life, and thus good.
However, I would consider it to be a notch below even Imperial Bedrooms, which, while no
masterpiece, at least involved a more mature narrator. For the uninitiated to Ellis, reading about a
Dressed to Get Screwed Party and then holding your own Dressed to Get Screwed
Party is reason enough to experience this book once—just don’t expect to be as
blown away your second time around.
