Pretty good and totally different. Full of pretty lurid sex which however becomes just a motif. Quite like an 18th century novel about characters who are totally corrupt, except the setting here is early 21st century US campus life.
There are only 3 characters, who narrate chapters in turn; Kyle Gibson, a fairly normal guy, Heather Andruss, his girlfriend, whose only real interest is social and monetary climbing (and will trade a lot of sex for this) and Brett Keller, a fellow student who differentiates himself by his extreme wealth and existing social status; his father runs the biggest local corporate although he is very disillusioned by this, and by women, all of whom who he regards as whores just dependent on men.
Kyle hooks up with Heather, but his lie is to give her a fake engagement ring, which disgusts her so much that she chucks him. Brett, who likes Kyle and has always hated Heather, deliberately infects her with herpes in a revenge conspiracy suggested by Kyle, but in the process makes her pregnant and ends up having to suffer marriage to her so as not to lose faith with his father.
So in an odd way Heather wins; marrying the most desirable man in the college and Kyle ends up working in a shit job. Brett is forced, circumstantially, to end up working for his father in a role which he loathes and was confident for most of the book he could avoid. So greed, lust and in Kyle’s case naivety about Heather’s motives leave them all pretty miserable and unhappy.
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