An utterly chilling descent into madness. A controversial, but not entirely incorrect statement on class, workplace culture, toxic masculinity, and power dynamics.

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”

This book was bananas! Strap in and let it take you for an unhinged ride. It’s hilarious and clever and offensive and annoying and gory and ridiculous back to hilarious. The read repeats like a Groundhog Day so you may find yourself skimming through - all the times a character’s outfit is described, every time the word “hardbody” is used, every mention of The Patty Winters Show (yes, I googled this to see if it was real, it is not, but there is a London indie pop band with the same name), also the 7 pages about Whitney Houston’s music (Girl I love ya, you were truly one of the greats, but ya know, we're talkin' about working out, drinking Cristal, and killin' people right now…), the 6 pages about Huey Lewis and the News (their music really wasn't that good) and I would mention more but… I have to return some videotapes.

In honor of my American Psycho read, I watched the 2000 film starring Christian Bale and made an appointment to try a Rage Room. I’m going to smash things like a psycho, I hear it’s therapeutic.

Obviously this is unimaginably violent, vulgar, and gruesome. I have never read anything nearly so depraved or disturbing. When it comes to transgressive fiction, this wins by a long shot. This book is extremely upsetting and difficult to read. The granular, pages-long descriptions of sex that begets torture that begets killing are repulsive and gratuitous.

It is also a brilliant narrative on the emptiness of consumerism and the effects of our stimulation society. Numbness is dangerous, and life is shallow when it's defined by objects.

I loved this book almost as much as I hated it.

simplemente no estoy ahí.

Hace un año “American psycho” cambió mi forma de ver la literatura. La narración de Patrick Bateman fue una que me llevó por un recorrido turbulento, pasando por los fragmentos más perturbadores y oscuros. Muchas veces las voces de los libros me han hecho desconfiar en mi forma de percibir la literatura, pero la de este no solo me llevo al límite -y más allá-, sino que me abrió las puertas de una mente y con ella, al grado más profundo e incómoda intimidad. Hace un año de mi primera lectura y todavía recuerdo todo lo sentí, la forma en que este narrador tan potente fue capaz de hacerme ver su versión distorsionada de un mundo, haciendo parecerla real. Constantemente cuestionando porqué continuaba leyendo; constantemente sintiendo asco por lo que leía; constantemente preguntándome cómo es que algo pudo escribir algo así; constantemente preguntándome cómo la literatura es capaz de provocar sensaciones físicas al lector; constantemente pensando hasta dónde puede llegar la literatura. Esta es la clase de libro del que simplemente no puedes olvidar; incluso detestándole, de alguna manera tu mente vuelve a él. No está escrito para gustar, sino para demostrar que la literatura puede retratar cosas en extremo terribles.

Supongo que no es sorpresa para nadie que este libro me fascinase. Un año después sigo hablando de este libro e incluso me disfrazo de Patrick para ir a la universidad. Halloween es mi día favorito del año porque puedo disfrazarme dos veces un mismo día -incluso en público- si quiero, y está bien.

Siempre quise escribir sobre “American psycho” y ahora mismo me encuentro escribiendo una especie de análisis comparativo entre la obra de Easton Ellis y Tartt, basándome en la filosofía de Edmund Burke para un vídeo ensayo -qué ganas de grabarlo-. Puede ser que que mis clases de literatura están haciendo efecto en mí.

I am not convinced that endless descriptions of murder and torture are a good metaphor for unrestrained eighties capitalism. Consequently, while I have read many books that made me uncomfortable or nauseous, I have not read any that did so for such weak returns.

The prose style is never better than competent. Generally it alternates between repellant and just very dull. I don't think it's hard to make readers feel sick and disgusted. If I tell you I have a puppy in one hand, and a blunt pencil in the other, even though you know they don't really exist you probably don't want me to decribe what happens when the two are made to interact. Exercises in this sort of writing have to work hard not to feel juvenile and this one doesn't work at all.

There is a lively ongoing debate over whether it's misogynistic or not, (just have a look at the comments to Paul Bryant's excellent review). To me it seems self-evident that the book is misogynistic – but then there are a lot of excellent novels that are also misogynistic, so I'm not sure how far that gets you. More pertinent for me was just the fact that I loathed every moment I spent reading it.

I think I threw it away halfway through. Maybe it turns into Tolstoy after page 200, but I have no inclination whatever to find out.

I'm not sure what to say about this book. It just wasn't for me.

'Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence.'

Enter at your own risk, there's no Exit.

Let me introduce you to Maestro Bateman, your narcissistic, fancy-looking next-door neighbor with a psychotic nihilistic, obsessive-compulsive urge for sadistic rape and serial killing. We enter the depth of human depravity and manipulation. Ted Bundy's ghost enters: 'Murder becomes possession.'
The Bate is vain, snobbish, competitive and pretentious, he just wants to FIT IN! In his process of depersonalisation, he performs increasingly disturbing and brutal acts on his victims, a killing spree without any repercussions, so his murders become almost meaningless to him.

This convoluted, chilling, dark satire shows that the pursuance of money and power inevitably leads to greed, moral decay, and, finally, violence. Bateman is the symbol of those excesses of capitalism, while in his materialistic world, human feelings are obliterated by his serrogated knife.

We have 'brunch with a corpse', lethal hair mousse, we almost drown in body parts and fluids and chopped-up new decoration ideas like severed heads á la Dahmer enhance our living situation, we'll never dine alone again.

A highly recommended glimpse into the darkest pit of the human psyche and a mirror of reality and illusion, logic and disorder, narcissism and self-loathing.

So nun habe ich endlich auch das „großartige epochale gesellschaftskritische ironische Werk“ American Psycho von Bret Easton Ellis gelesen und ich sage WÄH! Dies mache ich übrigens nicht wegen der ausufernden Gewaltszenen, die mich allzusehr schockiert hätten oder wegen der allesamt unsympathischen Figuren, sondern wegen der sprachlichen Armut und der kompletten Einfallslosigkeit und Logikferne im Plot abgesehen von den ausufernden Gewaltfantasien, die eigentlich noch das Beste an dem Machwerk sind. Mir graut auch davor, dass dieser Roman von männlichen Zeitgeistyuppies hochgepusht wurde, die die Ironie bejubeln und sich aber offensichtlich fokussierter an den Gewaltszenen aufgeilen, denn der Rest ist fast nicht der Rede wert. Das wäre so, wie wenn man bei einem GINA WILD Porno die ironisch gemeinte „Handlung“ als hohe Filmkunst bezeichnen würde.

Ok ich weiß worauf der Autor hinauswill Konsumkritik & Gesellschaftskritik an der Manhattan Yuppie Buberlpartie und ihrer weiblichen Anhängsel, die stumpf, dumm, ignorant, geldgeil, hedonistisch, oberflächlich und rücksichtslos sind. - ich bin ja nicht ganz dämlich und auf der Nudelsuppe dahergeschwommen, aber diese Absicht ist so langweilig, langatmig und ungelenk umgesetzt, dass ich mich ob des Erfolges des Romans wirklich wundern muss.

Die unzähligen Markenaufzählungen auf jeder einzelnen Seite und die detaillierte Beschreibungen eines jeden zu sich genommenen Schi-Schi-Menüs inklusive Erwähnung des Luxusrestaurants sind tatsächlich sowas wie eine Zwangsneurose ähnlich dem Zählen von Bodenplatten, auf eine MONK-Art, aber Monk ist witziger, nicht so penetrant und nervig wie uns der Autor den Psycho Bateman skizziert. Wenn Konsumkritik vom Autor angebracht werden soll, hätten auch 100 Seiten gereicht und nicht in jedem zehnten Satz des mehr als 500 Seiten umfassenden Machwerks. Fast scheint es, als hätte Ellis für jedes Product Placement vorabkassiert. Da wäre er reich gewesen, bevor ein Buch-Exemplar verkauft worden wäre.

Bei den Gewaltszenen muss ich dem Autor wirklich Hochachtung zollen. So viel grauslicher schlecht formulierter Splatter Trash ohne Sinn und Verstand habe ich wirklich noch nie gesehen, geschweige denn gelesen. Bedauerlicherweise müssen auch Grausamkeiten, wenn sie als ironische Kritik gemeint sein sollten, wohldosiert und überraschend eingesetzt werden, ansonsten ist es nur ein primitiver Hardcore Snuff Porno und keine hohe Literatur.

Im Bereich der Gesellschaftskritik gibt es durchaus ein paar innovative Szenen, weswegen sich das Werk bei mir ungewollter Weise auf zwei Sterne schraubt. Der Visitenkartenschwanzvergleich und der Restaurantumbestellwahnsinn, in dem alle den Überblick verlieren, waren wirklich sehr witzig. Kleine Jungs die Essen und Tische in Restaurants nur bestellen aber stattdessen saufen, koksen, konkurrieren und wie Waschweiber tratschen - gäähnend langweilige Typen. Und die angehängten Weiber sind auch nicht besser.

Auch im Finish auf den allerletzten Seiten versucht der Ellis, die logischen Löcher im Plot zu stopfen und mysteriös eventuell anzudeuten, dass alle Gewaltszenen möglicherweise einem Drogen-Hirngespinst entsprungen sein könnten. Auch dafür zolle ich ihm Anerkennung, aber zu wenig und viel zu spät.

Also bleibt als Fazit eine kurze Inhaltsbeschreibung:

Essen bestellen, saufen, koksen, tratschen, saufen, Drogen, Gewalt, Tisch bestellen, saufen, Drogen, tratschen, saufen, Gewalt, Blutrausch, Folter, Gewalt, Gewalt, Blutrausch, Folter, Drogen, Gewalt, Gewalt – kurz gesagt ein entbehrliches Stück Zeitgeistroman, das in der Realität hoffentlich nicht mehr so eine Rolle spielt.

Nachtrag: Uppsi ich habe den SEX vergessen

When I first read it about 2 years ago I absolutely hated it, see my old review below.
I was curious of rereading it now as my reading taste has changed and I'm more into very unlikeable characters and darker topics now. I wouldn't say I love the book but it is very successful in making the characters feel very awful and horrific even without the killings. It was intense following through his tought, behavior and life.


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Review from 2022.

I haven't hated a book with such a passion in a long time. This book contains heavily with rude and obscene language that adds nothing to the story. I'm no prude but I think loaded words should be used with a purpose rather than been slanted all over the pages. Some might think that's what make anstöt dark, grim and intense but only a few writers i e read have been successful using that kind of strategy and Bret Easton Ellis is not one of them. The overall story does not hold it either, I just found it to be a bloody mess without having a scary nor nail-biting feeling at all. Have not seen the movie and most likely won't.
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I got little less then 5 hours left of this audiobook but I've decided I need to put it down for good. As beloved the book and movie are it's to much for me and I'm not finding anything positive continue with the story. It rather make me feel a bit uncomfortable.

Patrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s now-iconic 1991 novel “American Psycho”. I’m just throwing that fact out because it seems significant.

Indeed, Ellis’s novel—-controversial when it was first published—-still seems significant now, in 2023, for reasons that are not dissimilar to the reasons cited 33 years ago.

I did not read the book 33 years ago. I was graduating high school when the book came out. My summer of ’91 was occupied with packing for college and living with that nervous excitement that precedes a major life-change: freshman year of college. I didn’t have time to read it, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. In fact, the book was never really on my radar.

Oh, I had heard about it, and when I arrived on campus and met new friends, many of whom were far more literate than myself, I overheard the conversations about how misogynistic and racist and homophobic the book was, and how vile Ellis must be. I would never read such a book, and anyone who did (and, God forbid, liked it) must be the worst kind of disgusting monster, the type who probably voted for George H.W. Bush and liked war and date rape and celebrated awful holidays like Columbus Day, which was nothing more than a celebration of imperialism and genocide. (This is how I talked in college. Not because I actually necessarily believed this shit, but mostly because I was trying to get cute college girls to play with my penis, and most of them talked like this, too.)

It would be three decades before I picked up “American Psycho” and actually read it. And, weirdly, liked it.

Nobody told me that it was hilarious. The fact that it is a very funny, very dark satirical comedy seemed to have been skipped over or ignored in the many conversations I had had about the book.

Also, I was old enough and mature enough as a reader to now distinguish the fact that the virulent misogyny/racism/homophobia evident in the book was not coming from Ellis but was, in fact, a symptom of the protagonist’s psychosis. Ellis did such a good job of getting in the head of a deplorable, soulless, homicidal monster that, I now recognize, many readers came away thinking that Ellis was the monster. People also often forget that Frankenstein was the name of the monster’s creator and not the monster itself.

Being more well-read than I was as a freshman in college, I saw the blatant allusions to Jane Austen, and how Ellis was painting a satirical picture of the vapid and shallow consumer culture of the “Me-First” rich white upper class. I saw in Patrick Bateman the parody of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street”, in which greed and self-interest is played up as a virtue in Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko. I understood where the obsession that Bateman had with serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy came from, as serial killers were kind of all the rage in the ‘90s.

I even saw the parallels between “American Psycho” and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, in which Bateman—-clearly Ahab—-suffers from an obsessive-compulsive quest to find his own white whale: a conscience or any kind of emotion that would make him feel human in some way. New York City and Wall Street become, for Bateman, the rough seas that he must sail. His vicious and inhuman murders become a kind of religious rite he uses to summon something—-anything—-lurking beneath his superficial existence. I even understood the three chapters in which Bateman extolls the discographies of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News: three of the most popular and, in many ways, vapidly commercial artists of the ‘80s. They are the epitome of shallowness, which describes Bateman to a ’t’.

And, of course, the constant references to Trump (which, since the book was written 20 years before Trump had any vocal designs of being President, is simply bizarrely prescient), a man who, even at that time, was a human imprimatur of everything sleazy and gauche regarding the wealthy, are voluminously apropos.

The book still shocks. For today’s post-Trump post-Covid audience, that’s definitely a good thing. If the book didn’t shock or disgust readers, that would be too horrible to contemplate.

I can understand why this book is much loved and much hated. It’s not a book that would engender mild feelings of indifference or “meh” in anyone who reads it. One either loves it or hates it.

I’m on the “love” side, and it’s because I understand what Ellis was trying to say. He was expressing a disgust and hatred for a warped sense of reality and dark side of humanity that he saw hiding in plain sight and that could only grow into something more dangerous—-and, in fact, did under Trump’s presidency. For this reason—-and all of the others previously cited—-“American Psycho” is, in my opinion, a vital American literary classic.

The Correspondents #3

Dear Patrick,

I read your novel American Psycho the other week and I must protest. Firstly, Genesis’s shining moment is the single ‘I Can’t Dance’—a beautiful admission of terpsichorean ineptitude that most unpopular white males can sympathise with—not the early prog LPs like Foxtrot et al. But I write today with a more practical request in mind. I cannot pick up chicks, Patrick! I think the problem lies in my appearance. I am a wearer of spectacles and as we know, ladies dislike eyewear on a male because she sees a self-loathing nerd and not a fertile future husband. What they like are muscular jowls and handsome cheekbones! So what I have done, Patrick, is I have injected my cheeks with botox and padded the resulting balloon-like bloats with polystyrene. My complexion resembles the actor and human man Mickey Rourke, whose physique was once described as a condom filled with macadamia nuts, and sculpted my cheekbones to resemble ski slopes. Currently, in my encephalitic state, I am finding it difficult moving in and out of rooms, my head now resembling the posterior of a rhino in terms of girth and heft. Since ladies are so obliging to you when you pick them up on the street and pay them (they even let you eviscerate them with coat hangers!), I was hoping for some tips, my good friend?

Hopefully,

MJ

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I would write a review, but I have to go return some videotapes.

*******************

OK, I was gonna let the inside-joke above stand, but I guess I do feel like getting some thoughts down about America's Next Top Psycho.

At this point I'm sure it bores everyone to dredge up the whole misogyny question again, but it still puzzles me that smart people who must certainly know not to confuse the character's perspective with the author's continue to pull the concern-troll card here. Like, it's perfectly valid if you think the satire in the book fails, or even if you think the violence is overwrought, but anyone who thinks this book is misogynistic must also believe that Mark Twain was racist for using the word "nigger" repeatedly in Huck Finn. You can't and won't convince me that there's any meaningful difference.

Of course, what's unfortunate about the "does this book hate women" discourse is that it blocks discussion of the hundreds of pages of this book that do not contain violence towards women or men. One thing that surprised me (going in, as I did, with various preconceptions) was that Patrick Bateman is not really the cartoon character that Christian Bale portrayed in the movie. I mean, my memory of the film is dim, and I know that Bale was great in it, but on the page Bateman is a lot scarier because he's self-aware. You can't just dismiss him as an easily mockable artificial construct or a satirical avatar of Ellis's anti-yuppie vitriol, because you're living inside his head for 400 pages, and it's clear that he knows exactly what he is -- and, more disturbingly, he seems to be the only character in the book for whom this is true. I think that's the elephant in the room that people who talk about American Psycho either don't understand or don't wanna face: Bateman, as monstrous as he is, is actually the hero of this story. He's the only one who speaks directly and listens to people, while everyone else is off in their own solipsistic haze; he's the only one who seems to have any interests beyond the rank materialism of snazzy clothes and trendy restaurants, it's just that those interests involve sadistic torture and murder; he's the only one with any apparent concerns about the world and his place in it. Given the utter voidlike vapidity of every single person in this novel, it's not unreasonable to say that Bateman is the only one with a soul. That is the truly frightening thing about this book, moreso than any of the torture-porn scenes.

Personally, I prefer the tragic simplicity of Ellis's Less Than Zero. Psycho can be repetitive and, I think, inconsistent -- is the eloquent, charming Bateman of the first chapter's dinner party really the same guy as the Bateman who can't complete any basic social interaction without begging off to go return some videotapes? Maybe it's just his descent into total madness, but something about the evolution of the character felt improvisatory on Ellis's part. The other thing that's mostly missing here, which is why I think it's ultimately inferior to Less Than Zero, is the subtly calibrated pathos that made the earlier novel such a knockout. Without resorting to speeches or explanations, Ellis expressed in Less Than Zero a deep sadness that belied the narrator's affectless tone. In American Psycho, there was really only one moment that felt like the kind of grace note I loved in the earlier book, and I'll paste it here: We had to leave the Hamptons because I would find myself standing over our bed in the hours before dawn, with an ice pick gripped in my fist, waiting for Evelyn to open her eyes. That's the most beautiful sentence in either book, maybe the only truly beautiful sentence Ellis has ever written -- his strengths as a writer do not really include handsome prose. It's such a chilling image -- not a visceral horror like the infamous rat scene, but something that hits you right in the soul, something that, again, makes it impossible to domesticate Bateman by laughing at him. I wish there was more like it.

But in the absence of that, there is plenty to laugh at; I loved the book's comic centerpiece, an all-night conference call between Bateman and a few of his buddies as they spend hours trying to figure out where to eat dinner. It's the kind of marathon absurdism I love, like Mr. Show's Story of Everest bit, where you can't believe how long the joke is being dragged out, and eventually the dragging-out becomes the joke, to the point that you get irritated, but then the joke laps your irritation and you find it hilarious again. Bateman's lone encounter with law enforcement (actually a P.I.) is played for laughs instead of suspense (a smart move given Ellis's total lack of interest in any kind of narrative momentum), in one of the weirdest and funniest of the dialogue scenes. And it never stops being funny when Bateman will straight-up admit, in plain English, that he is a mass murderer, and his conversation partner will not register his confession at all -- because Ellis's most abundantly clear point is that people in this culture did not (do not?) listen to each other, at all, even a little bit.

So nah, I don't think this is a Great American Novel, or the Great Gatsby of the late 20th century (as one Goodreads reviewer floated), although I do think that's what Ellis was going for, in his own sick way. But twenty years later it's still stirring up debate, and if that's not a mark of good litterachurr I dunno what is.