University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles, appears in the novel chiefly as the promised next stage after Buckley: a shared future that seems secure to Thom Wright and Susan Reynolds before their relationship falters, and that becomes, in retrospect, a setting for separation rather than fulfillment. Its role is less that of a campus institution than of a destination through which the characters measure the distance between the lives they expect and the lives they actually reach.

A Promised Future

Thom and Susan had been together since sophomore year and were among the most popular students at Buckley. Their apparent ease as a couple made the future they imagined seem almost automatic. In Bret Ellis’s recollection, their relationship would continue through the transition to the University of California, Los Angeles and beyond; the university stands for that assumed continuity as much as for higher education itself.

The confidence of that expectation is set against the instability already gathering around the group. Thom and Susan’s relationship had lasted roughly two years, but by fall 1981 one of them no longer loved the other. The break that followed initiated a series of painful events, turning a future that had seemed settled into something uncertain.

After the Breakup

Thom and Susan both attended the University of California, Los Angeles after high school, but their shared destination did not restore their relationship. Bret’s later account describes them trying to avoid each other on the campus’s tree-lined paths, green quads, and streets of Westwood. The ordinary details of university life become the geography of their estrangement: they arrive at the same place, but no longer move through it as a couple.

This outcome sharpens the contrast between the future imagined during their relationship and the aftermath of its collapse. The university remains part of the expected progression from school to adulthood, but it cannot secure the intimacy that Thom and Susan had assumed would continue there.

Narrative Significance

The university functions as a marker of conventional time: graduation, college, and the continuation of a young couple’s life together. That schedule is not equally available to everyone in the same way. Bret and Ryan Vaughn imagine leaving high school and beginning again elsewhere, while their attraction remains concealed and subject to the limits of their social world. College can represent the possibility of reinvention, but the novel does not present it as an uncomplicated escape.

In Bret’s retrospective narration, the campus also makes the cost of a broken expectation concrete. The paths and quads associated with a shared future become places where Thom and Susan avoid one another. The University of California, Los Angeles therefore signifies both the promise of onward movement and the fact that reaching the promised destination does not resolve the relationships carried into it.