American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Publication date: 1991
Edition: Picador, 2006
384 pages
Source: Waterstones
Summary: “Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream - and its worst nightmare - American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.”
This is one of those books whose reputation precedes it. The kind of book that apparently “divides” critics and readers alike but is often referred to as “seminal” and “important”, or else is sold shrink-wrapped to protect the young. The kind of book, I realized in trepidation, that people I know either gave up on or couldn’t even bear to start due to either its style and/or its notorious driller-killer violence. A perfect book, then, to oblige oneself to read! And incidentally, maybe I should say at the outset that I haven't seen the 2000 Christian Bale movie version so I don't have that in my head at all.
Before I even handed over the cash I was drawn in by the 118-word opening sentence, beginning on Dante’s “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE”, a subliminally-observed scrawl on the side of a Wall Street bank. I loved this beginning (and incidentally the closing words as well, derivative but as quotable as any of the most classic openers and closers you can think of). After that I will admit to also having found much of the damn thing compulsively readable. Parts, particularly early on, made me laugh out loud, which I wasn’t expecting at all. Stylistically I enjoyed large sections of it. However, and it’s a pretty big caveat, as I’d suspected, the experience of reading became increasingly unbearable as the graphic, repulsive and deeply disturbing descriptions of torture, mutilation and murder mounted up. I daresay gratuitousness in all its forms is one of the things the author wished us to confront. And if you read this book all the way through, you will.
Anyhow, the novel is a simply-constructed first-person, present-tense narrative, beginning at the end of the eighties and taking us through several coke-fuelled years in the life of its yuppie protagonist, Patrick Bateman. Most of it focuses on his social life rather than his high-powered but essentially dull job in an investment bank (which he hates). That other people, particularly women, find him both “sweet” and funny underpins his own contention that things are not what they seem. His friends and acquaintances are defined in deliberately repetitive detail by their designer labels, and express themselves through their choices of bar, club or restaurant and what they order to drink and eat. Conversation between them hardly ever rises above the banal (his peers just ignore Bateman when he attempts to articulate what he feels is wrong with society) and that banality is quite brilliantly written at times.
A third of the way in, things begin to change. The first random murder happens in a chapter titled “Tuesday”. This is immediately juxtaposed with a chapter entitled “Genesis”, and is the first of several teeth-grindingly bland, rambling reviews of eighties bands and singers. Maybe it’s a little obvious, but I found it very effective. After this grisly scene (the murder not the Genesis review), both random and more calculated killings then take place with increasing frequency. Unsurprisingly, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being misogynistic. Certainly many of the women characters are portrayed as dim, and sex is written as joyless porn always only a whisker away from violence. Patrick categorizes nearly all women in his own mind through the size of their breasts, but the body count is not exclusively female (or even human).
As his mental state deteriorates (and in tandem with a running theme of mistaken identity and mishearing of conversations), Patrick repeatedly tells people about what he’s done, usually in throwaway comments. Nobody believes him, or alternatively, appears to hear him, translating “murders and executions” into “mergers and acquisitions”. Significantly, one of the quotations Bret Easton Ellis chooses to precede the novel is “and as things fell apart nobody paid much attention”, a line from the Talking Heads song "(Nothing but) Flowers."
Ultimately, whether he actually committed the crimes depicted in the novel, or whether they were simply psychotic fantasies, is left open. In any case, this is not really the story of a serial killer’s motivations or his attempts to evade discovery. I think it’s probably about what, if anything, moves us anymore. The Dante and Sartre references which bookend the narrative, and the quotations (including Dostoevsky) that precede it, sum up a bleak view of humanity’s brutal nature and the thin veneer of civilization and “culture” that covers it. They also suggest that the existence and behaviour of a Patrick Bateman among us (or the spirit of a such a dangerously dysfunctional character) is inevitable and we only have ourselves to blame for it.
So, a hard read. And an important theme. But... by the time you get to the 210-word (I kid you not) final sentence, you might wonder, did Bret Easton Ellis really need to put readers through such a genuinely horrific experience in order to underpin an excoriating satire on modern mindlessness?
It’s quite possible he did.
Anyway, I am glad I read it. But dear God, I hope I never read anything like it again.
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