“I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don’t know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.”
Patrick Bateman
American Psycho (1991) is a hallucinatory web of social satire spun by author Bret Easton Ellis about a psychopathic serial killer who works in Wall Street in the 1980s. The book examines the dark side effect of a society heavily absorbed in a life of passive consumerism and also its desensitisation to extreme violence through television. The magic of American Psycho is how the author manages to juxtapose these two threads seamlessly – “Dinner last night? At Splash. Not much to remember: a watery Bellini, soggy arugula salad, a sullen waitress. Afterwards I watched a repeat of an old Patty Winters Show that I found on what I originally thought was a videotape of the torture and subsequent murder of two escort girls from last spring (the topic was Tips on How Your Pet Can Become a Movie Star).” American Psycho is undoubtedly black comedy at its finest, and perhaps darkest… told through a first person perspective it details the day to day life of Patrick Batemen, a 27 year old who works in mergers and acquisitions at a company called Pierce & Pierce. Bateman is described as being quite wealthy and yet he does absolutely no work throughout the book, and instead spends his time bouncing between extreme ultraviolence and repetitive social outings. His life is completely void of passion and involvement and he even becomes numb to his massacres, which increase in scale like a rising wave throughout the course of the story.
The book has been scolded by many – feminists especially – for its misogynist and overly violent nature, and saw the author with a mailbox full of death threats. American Psycho was also praised for its daring exploration of the dark recesses of the human psyche, a timeless case study of a human soul completely fractured and devoid of social morals and values. What Bret Easton Ellis accomplished with American Psycho was the literary birth of a true monster – a monster that could very well lurk in the hearts of all ordinary people. The novel uses social satire to hint that this monster exists as modern consumerism, obsession with work, and a blending in with the environment and inability to stand out as an individual, as evidenced by Batemen and his colleagues total inability to properly identify their co workers, and even other characters inability to identify Batemen – “Owen has mistaken me for Marcus Halberstam (even though Marcus is dating Cecelia Wagner) but for some reason it really doesn’t matter and it seems a logical faux pas since Marcus works at P & P also, in fact does the same exact thing I do.” But let’s not get carried away with an analysis of the book, and instead cut right into the flesh of the review.
American Psycho is not pleasure reading (unless you’re a sadist of course) but is gruelling and tough to swallow. It’s hard to tell what is more torturous to read, pages upon pages of violent mutilation being described in vivid detail, or whole chapters dedicated to Batemen’s rambling reviews of his favourite bands and musicians (Genesis, Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis and the News etc). The book, while highly entertaining, borders on formulaic, and can be quite repetitive in its ‘murder scene, dinner scene, murder scene, endless lists of what people are wearing, what the topic on the Patty Winters show is, murder scene’ approach. The author loves to write the vilest, most disturbing stuff that could possibly exist in the human imagination, and then starkly contrast it with something completely mundane, such as a long argument over what restaurant to get a reservation at. However, this is what American Psycho is all about, and to take this element of the book away would be to reduce it from a powerful social commentary into something Marquis De Sade would read on the toilet. The only reason the repetitive nature of the book bothers me is that a lot of it felt unnecessary. At 400 pages, the book is like a never ending story that feels as though it should’ve achieved its goal in half the page length.
But perhaps the thing that disturbs me the most is how I eventually skimmed through most of the boring parts of the book and took my time reading the violent bits. I might even say the only reason I read and enjoyed American Psycho is because, like most people, I have a dark side, and it gets a thrill out of reading or watching things I would never do in real life. Why else do we read books or watch television if not to vicariously experience events outside our day to day routine? If nothing else, American Psycho might make you question your own reflection in the mirror. It might also make you start ending awkward conversations with “I have to return some videotapes.”
★★★★★ 5 stars