Manic and not very likeable. It follows the (love - though that is hardly the word) lives of a group of students at a New England university in 1985s. It opens mid sentence and unfolds in frantic chunks, focusing on different characters. It's certainly frank about sex and drugs etc, but it's not as funny as it seems to think; my overriding impression is that of a precocious child trying to shock - so what? Still, an interesting contrast to the exaggerated naïveté of Starter for Ten A Novel.
In Ellis' defence, he does warn you. It opens with a Tim O'Brien quote which sums it up very well: "The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order. Events did not flow. The facts were separate and haphazard and random even as they happened, episodic, broken, no smooth transitions, no sense of unfolding from prior events."