The rules of attraction

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

First published: 1987
Print length: 283 pagesVintage Contemporaries, 1998

Description

At Camden College in 1980s New Hampshire, privileged students drift through parties, drugs, casual sex, and relationships they understand less clearly than they pretend. Paul, Sean, and Lauren supply the main first-person accounts, each misreading the others while pursuing affection that is rarely returned in the expected direction. Additional voices complicate their overlapping stories, revealing how little genuine communication occurs beneath the campus’s constant social motion. The fragmented, circular structure makes attraction feel less like progress than repetition: desire changes targets, but loneliness and self-absorption persist. Through these competing perspectives, the novel satirizes a culture in which intimacy becomes another performance and attempts at connection repeatedly collapse into indifference.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dialogue-driven · Experimental · Fragmentary · Spare

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Bleak · Dark · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Circular · Fragmented · Nonlinear

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionBelongingClassIsolationLoveSexuality

About Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and screenwriter associated with the Literary Brat Pack. He became prominent at 21 with the controversial bestseller Less Than Zero, whose detached account of wealthy Los Angeles youth established his interest in privilege, alienation, and passive responses to brutality. Across novels that often share characters, Ellis uses affectless voices to place status goods, social rituals, sex, drugs, and violence on the same emotional plane. American Psycho pushed this method to its most extreme form through Patrick Bateman’s obsessive catalogues of consumption and murder; its violence and misogyny drew widespread condemnation on publication. In later work, Ellis increasingly made authorship, memory, and his public identity part of the fiction. Lunar Park casts a fictional version of him in a suburban family and apparent haunting, while The Shards returns to his Los Angeles adolescence through a retrospective narrator who blurs remembered experience with invention.

Shards Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries
Language: English
ISBN: 9780679781486

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