Reading The Rules of Attraction felt like being dropped into a party that never ends—one where the music is loud, the alcohol endless, and everyone is both searching and utterly lost. Ellis constructs his novel through shifting voices, fragmented perspectives, and overlapping narratives. At first, the style unsettled me, but soon I realized it mirrored the confusion and alienation of his characters.

The story unfolds at a liberal arts college in the 1980s, where students drift through affairs, drugs, and half-hearted philosophies. What struck me most was how every character speaks, yet almost no one truly listens. Sean, Paul, Lauren—they circle one another in a haze of desire and misunderstanding. I felt a strange tension reading their confessions: on the surface, they seemed confident, rebellious, even careless, but underneath, I sensed a profound emptiness.

Ellis’s prose is sharp, ironic, and relentless. As I turned the pages, I often felt complicit, like an eavesdropper overhearing conversations I wasn’t meant to hear. The humor is biting, but the laughter is hollow, echoing against loneliness that no party can mask.

What lingered with me after finishing was not any single storyline—since most are left unresolved—but the mood: a portrait of a generation intoxicated and adrift. It made me reflect uneasily on how disconnection can masquerade as freedom, and how desire, when detached from meaning, leaves only a gnawing void.

The Rules of Attraction didn’t comfort me; it unsettled me. Yet in that discomfort lay its power: a reminder that sometimes literature holds up a mirror to the chaos we’d rather not see.