The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
Published 1987 · 78,650 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Rules of Attraction to read?
The Rules of Attraction scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Flat, brand-heavy eighties vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Short, affectless sentences.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Concrete throughout, deliberately shallow.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Moderate; a large cast.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Rotating first-person narrators, all unreliable, several contradicting each other.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Deliberately little; the flatness is the point.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- Total — nobody in the book understands themselves.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Nothing resolves; it opens and closes mid-sentence.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- Many alternating narrators with no stable centre.
How The Rules of Attraction is regarded
The Rules of Attraction holds a literary regard score of 53 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.