By An over-the-top satire on Wall Street culture, rife with brand name obsessions, spectacular misogyny and, of course, murder.
About the Book
Title: American Psycho
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Published: 1991
Genre: fiction, horror, classics, modern classics
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
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 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.
My Thoughts
I have mixed feelings on this book.
American Psycho is one of those books that I’ve been meaning to read for ages, due to the seemingly endless pop culture references to it, but never got around to. On some level I was avoiding it because I knew the subject matter and sure enough though I consider myself fairly desensitized to all manner of things, I found some scenes in this to be veritably stomach-turning. As I said to my friend, if you don’t want to read incredibly sick descriptions of violence against women maybe uh don’t pick this one up.
On the whole, though, I was not surprised by the violence nearly as much as I was surprised by the humor. American Psycho is a surprisingly funny book. It is more clearly satirical than I was expecting.
Taking place amongst the insufferable social arena of 1980s Wall Street brokers, the novel is filled with plodding accounts of dinner reservations at high-end restaurants, rattling off brand-names and characters always on the search for attractive women and good ol’ cocaine. Though you might expect a life like this to be moderately exciting, decadent as it is, the novel quickly becomes repetitive and the reader begins to settle into the mundanity of life as Patrick Bateman lives it.
Patrick Bateman: Psychopath, Materialist, Chameleon
So let’s talk about Patrick, the unreliable narrator and disturbing character study to which the story is primarily devoted. A 26-year-old Wall Street broker with psychopathic tendencies, he meticulously details the events of each day, down to the brand names of every piece of clothing he and everyone else around him wears. It is our first glimpse into his materialism. With nowhere else to direct his energy (besides murder, it seems) he worships the material.
He is comically obsessed with outward appearances, and this is where much of the book’s humor manifests. Patrick’s priorities are extraordinarily mixed up. He details the murders he commits in excruciating detail, yet with zero emotion. The only times in the book where he displays any sort of human feeling is when his material vanity is disturbed, such as the “business card scene”, or when he can’t get a reservation at Dorsia.
Another example of absurdity in the novel is Patrick’s constant pleas for attention and acknowledgement; he practically begs to be caught. He drops confessions into the vapid conversations he has with his business partners and girlfriends, which go unheard. Simply, no one cares about his life. Everyone is so absorbed in their own world of vapid obsession that Patrick’s comments about “I like to dissect girls. don’t you know I’m utterly insane?” go entirely unnoticed. This is another point of humor in the book that is nearly constant. It almost makes you feel bad for him in some twisted sort of way.
Patrick’s shallowness is not limited to his obsession with material wealth and possessions, however. Another constant theme in his character is his desire to fit in. He does this by obsessively consuming popular culture, and the novel has several chapters devoted to his bizarre reviews of popular music artists, like Huey Lewis and the News, and Whitney Houston. Often these are interspersed right after intense descriptions of his brutal murders and mutilations.
At the beginning of the book, there is a scene where Patrick is having dinner with some friends, and he goes on an odd rant about the current problems in the world, essentially reciting the most uncreative and standard political opinions that he thinks will be accepted by the social circle he is with. He has no opinions of his own, and when he does, he’s painfully hypocritical, changing his outward positioning based on what is more socially advantageous, or what will make him look most “like a normal person.”
Patrick Bateman has a vision of the kind of person he is which is incongruous with his actual behavior, and he hates to be called out on his hypocrisy. He shames his friends for making racist and anti-Semitic remarks, yet his internal monologue is itself virulently racist, homophobic, and of course misogynistic. He constantly makes fun of smokers for their “disgusting habit”, yet on several occasions he smokes cigars. He also looks down on people who use drugs, but he himself is constantly high on cocaine and benzodiazepines.
Brett Easton Ellis has said that this book is based on his young adult life in New York. My interpretation is that American Psycho is that nihilistic, materialistic and identity-less existence as he felt it, taken to a gory extreme. The book is less about the brutal acts of violence that Patrick Bateman commits and more about the disturbed psyche behind the murderer himself.
Overall, it was a very unsettling read that I can’t say I’d like to re-read, as diving back into the twisted mind of this character is like hanging around the worst people you know, times a million.
Have you read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis? If so, what did you think? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
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