Talk:The Rules of Attraction

Comments

This is not related to the article about the book, but to the book. I just got a copy of it from the library, and I believe there are some pages missing in the beginning. It starts in the middle of a sentence: and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or, actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden,... since I know Ellis has used incomplete sentences in later works (e.g. in American Psycho), I am not certain this actually is a missing page, but I guess someone here has the book and can inform me about it. Ellipse 22:33, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's a good thing you pointed this out, because I forgot to add it to the article. The book begins with only a partial sentence, which Ellis did on purpose. The point is to bring the reader in in the middle of the action, rather than the beginning. -- LGagnon 22:39, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply (Wikipedia never seems to stop amazing me by quick replies/updates). I was actually able to use Amazon's Look Inside service to find out before I saw your reply, but thanks anyway.Ellipse 13:01, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

One thing I simply can't understand in this book is how Paul and Sean both mistake the "phantom female" whom kills herself, and is leaving notes in Bateman's mailbox for Lauren. I mean Sean seems to have prior knowledge of Lauren and there is a number of rather unsubtle hints that Paul and Lauren had a (however brief) relationship. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.67.117.209 (talk) 22:05, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Secret History

"The protagonists of Donna Tartt's 1992 novel The Secret History are referenced by 'Stuart'" How can they be referenced if this book was published in 1987? Is it just a coincidence? -Fetology 21:31, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Sounds suspect. I'm removing it until someone can give a reference to prove it. -- LGagnon 21:41, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Bret and Donna Tartt were in the same workshop together at Bennington in 1985, or earlier, and they vowed to write about Bennington by calling it Camden College. Maybe Donna wrote about those characters back then and they made a similar vow to publish thinly intertwining narratives. - Joe, March 27th 2007

Deletion

Before we start a pointless revert war, can someone explain why that text had to be deleted? The summary box exists so that things like this won't happened. -- LGagnon 17:33, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Expand?

Hey, i've never edited wikipedia before, and dont really know what im doing. But considering (IMO) the book is much much better than then film, does there deserve to be more info about the book than the film other than charater overview? More on plot, analysis, etc.

Could somebody but a stub or expand tag on the page? Thanks. =D

70.238.246.3 05:00, 25 December 2006 (UTC)Charlie

Worst wiki article ever?

Seriously, someone needs to do a re-write. I've only read the book once, so couldn't possibly ;-) but this article is POV, contains original research, is largely unsourced and is about as encyclopedic as....something very unencyclopedic. Sort it out!! 82.19.66.37 20:36, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Characters: Lauren Hynde

From the article's 'characters' section: "At the beginning of the novel, it is revealed that Lauren lost her virginity at a party during her freshman year at Camden, where she got so intoxicated that she passed out in bed with another student only to awaken and find herself being raped by a pair of townies."

It is not at all clear that this happened to Lauren. This story is told by an unnamed person, to an unnamed narrator. With the exception of its beginning, all of the chapters in the book start with their narrator's name. The book begins partway through a sentence, and therefore the narrator of this first chapter remains anonymous. The narrator contributes little more than the words "… she told me …" in the first line. Otherwise the chapter could almost read as a third person account (similar to the beginning of Ellis' American Psycho, where Tim Price is introduced in such a way that he initially appears almost the third person subject of the book, and it is a while before Patrick Bateman comes to the fore as the first person narrator).

Given the 'endless cycle' interpretation referenced in the 'plot summary' section, it seems plausible that the narrator is in fact Sean, and the story is the hitchhiker's from the end of the book (which finishes mid-sentence) simply carrying on back into the beginning. Sean comments toward the end of the last chapter, "She started telling me her life story, which wasn’t very interesting …". This potentially refers back to the opening line of the book, "and it’s a story that might bore you but you don’t have to listen …".

Skimming back over the novel now I cannot find anything later in it that implies that the opening story is Lauren's. I might have missed something though—can anyone else spot something that does? The film adaptation portrays the events has happening to Lauren, but its plot is significantly different from the book's.

Dr.Jamf (talk) 13:09, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Okay, so I was wrong, ignore the above. I reread the book a month or so ago and found the following line in Lauren's second to last chapter:

“I screwed him,” I tell Franklin. It’s the townie I lost my virginity to.

Dr.Jamf (talk) 13:19, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Community Page on Facebook has wrong cover image

The Community page for "The Rules of Attraction" on Facebook (which includes the Wiki article) is showing a different cover by a different author of the similarly titled "Rules of Attraction." I'd fix this myself, but I'm not sure how. This doesn't directly involve Wikipedia but I thought it might be an issue since the article is generating the wrong image for that site, which may indicate a problem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.117.164.111 (talk) 03:39, 18 December 2013 (UTC)