1980s BOOK CLUB SELECTIONS

1. 1980s BOOK CLUBSELECTIONS

2. The Rules of AttractionBret Easton Ellis (288 pages) Through a series of brief first-person accounts, the novel chronicles one term at a fictional New England college, with particular emphasis on a love triangle (one woman and two men) in which all possible combinations have been explored, and each pines after the one who's pining after the other. Theirs is a world of physical, chemical and emotional excess, an adolescent fantasy of sex and drugs wherein characters are distinguished only by the respective means by which they squander their health, wealth and youth. Despite its contemporary feel and flashy structure, the narrative relies on the stalest staples of melodrama and manages to pack in a suicide, assorted suicide attempts, an abortion and the death of a parent without giving the impression that anything is happening or that any of it matters.

3. American PsychoBret Easton Ellis (416 pages) In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

4. Imperial Bedrooms Bret Easton Ellis (192 pages) Ellis explores what disillusioned youth looks like 25 years later in this brutal sequel to Less Than Zero. Clay, now a screenwriter, returns at Christmas to an L.A. that looks and operates much as it did 25 years ago. Trent is now a producer and married to Clay's ex, Blair, while Julian runs an escort service and Rip, Clay's old dealer, has had so much plastic surgery he's unrecognizable. While casting a script he's written, Clay falls for a young, untalented actress named Rain Turner, and his obsession and affair with her powers him through an alcoholic haze that swirls with images of death, mysterious text messages, and cars lurking outside his apartment. The story takes on a creepy noirishbent as it barrels toward a conclusion that reveals the horror that lies at the center of a tortured soul.

5. Story of my LifeJay McInerney (208 pages) In his breathlessly paced novel, Jay McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel, falling in and out of lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters. “McInerney's Story of My Life is quite as brilliant as Bright Lights, Big City and a lot funnier." -- the Sunday Times (London)

6. White NoiseDom De Lillo (336 pages) White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. Nice-guy narrator Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a small college. His wife may be taking a drug that removes fear, and one day a nearby chemical plant accidentally releases a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Writing before Bhopal and Prozac entered the popular lexicon, DeLillo produced a work so closely tuned into its time that it tells the future.

7. Hello, I Must Be Going Christine Hodgen(320 pages) It's the early 1980s, and tomboy Frankie Hawthorne's world is overturned when her beloved father—a Vietnam amputee who masks depression by playing comedian—shoots himself. Frankie's neighborhood, in a down-at-the-heels industrial city near Boston, has had its own happier times. Soon, Frankie decides not to talk, resisting the overly ebullient school psychologist, and comforting herself by drawing cartoons. Finally, with some unlikely help, Frankie understands the possibility of growing beyond grief. Balancing perfectly between funny and sad, this poignant novel is about the tenacity of ghosts and the stubbornness of love.

8. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated CultureDouglas Coupland(192 pages) Douglas Coupland coined the term "Generation X" and gave a voice to a generation in search of itself. This is a field guide to and for the vast generation born in the late 1950s and the 1960s that reached adulthood in the 1980s - a generation that has been erroneously labeled "postponed" and "indifferent." This is facto-fiction about a wildly accelerating subculture waiting in the corridor.

9. Eighty-SixedDavid Feinberg (336 pages) In this witty first novel, Feinberg contrasts pre-AIDS 1980 with post-AIDS 1986, illuminating the changes that have come about in the gay community. In 1980, B.J. Rosenthal's biggest concern is finding a steady boyfriend, as he goes from one sex partner to another, but in 1986 his attention is focused on AIDS anxiety and the painful death of friends. Unlike the recent spate of somber novels dealing with AIDS, Feinberg's work mixes generous doses of humor with an increasing sense of pathos, bringing to mind the plays of Harvey Fierstein.