Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ ½
Genre: Modern Classic + Thriller

Patrick Bateman is an attractive and handsome man in his twenties. He works on Wall Street. Despite being attractive and intelligent, he is a big psychopath. This is his story, and you should expect lots of narcissism, dark comedy, and selfishness.

This is my first time reading this book, as well as anything else by this author. I knew this was a modern classic, and it has been on my TBR for a very long time. I have watched the movie adaptation a few times, and it is among my favorites. After reading the book, I think it was the charm and intelligent acting of Christian Bale that made the movie work for me more than the book.

This was a five-star prediction read for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations. The main character has a very annoying personality. I know, this is what he should be, but I just couldn’t tolerate him. He wasn't as endearing as Christian Bale made him out to be. He was a big narcissist. I really wanted someone to slap him hard! Lol. Furthermore, he was also a pretty shallow individual who just cared about his brand-wearing and outward appearance. He got on my nerves a lot, like really a lot! I think the first-person narration style played a big part in my not liking him. The book does have some funny moments to lighten up some very dark and tense events. Also, you need to check the trigger warnings, because there are many. American Psycho is an entertaining book, but you will not miss anything significant if you skip it. Choosing between the book and the movie, I would recommend the movie over the book.

Violência Asquerosa e Perturbante


Este é daqueles livros que aconselho a ler lado a lado com MindHunter, só para investigar até que ponto a realidade supera a ficção e vice-versa.

É uma leitura pejada de cenas de violência sádica, altamente perturbantes!

Enfim!... Trata-se da mente dum Psicopata!... Que outra coisa seria de esperar?!...


Nota: Devo confessar que a leitura deste livro foi uma sucessão de batalhas entre a minha curiosidade (avança!... ) e uma tempestade de sentimentos negativos (larga essa m***a!...)!
Está bom de ver quem ganhou a guerra!...

Damn this book is graphic!
It's the 1980s and the rich keep on getting richer and the poor keep on getting poorer. Patrick Bateman is bored of his humdrum life on Wall Street. Nothing seems to excite him more than stopping people and ripping them apart. We follow his quick descent into madness as Ellis gives us in a blow-by-blow fashion.
With the exception of a few scenes, the movie is pretty much true to the book. They cut out a lot of the sex as well as the killing of a child and a dog. They also toned down the gore substantially.
I can see why people hate this book. Patrick Bateman and his "friends" are a pack of egotistical and extremely self-centered pricks. I mean it's supposed to be American Psycho, not American Douchebag right?
However sexist Bateman is not. And I will tell you why... he looks down upon everyone. Women are either trash or hard bodies or they are deemed as unfuckable and are completely in love with him. Men also fit into three categories for Bateman: friends/business associates, not from America, and faggots. He even looks down on animals LOL. Bateman is a case where he in discriminately looks down upon everyone that is not him.
I will warn you eager readers, this book is EXTREMELY graphic not just in gore but also with the sex scenes. As the somewhat rational person that I like to think I am, I have a hard time thinking that another human being could actually put pen to paper the way that this author did with some of these scenes. It kind of makes you sick. like I got a lump in my throat reading it knowing that I'm reading a book and that someone has written this book from their own imagination. That's how sickening it is.
With all of that aside the book is rather a boring read. The Douchebag Circle is constantly talking about the hard bodies they want to fuck or the new things that they bought or who is sleeping with who or the drugs they can score and where. All of it is extremely monotonous and takes up more than half of the book in all. It gets rather annoying.
With everything considered I would have to say this was an okay read. However I wouldn't really recommend this book because of the extremely graphic scenes and apparently obvious tendency to piss people off for one reason or another.

You can also watch my review of this book on YouTube here:
https://youtu.be/a1WwzH-O9GM

I don't usually bother giving negative reviews here, but I feel it's time to nail my colours to the mast and identify a few problematic titles. Problem #1: American Psycho.

It's funny how many people qualify their glowing reviews of this book with the words 'I didn't enjoy it but...,' as if it contained some bitter but necessary medicine. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I would have thought even a disturbing book, movie, song or painting should at least be enjoyable on some level if it's to gain its audience's love, and if it can't gain that love then it's certainly not worthy of glowing reviews. To me, American Psycho is damn near loveless, its murder scenes especially, and I don't buy the line that there's anything medicinal in those scenes either.

What we have here is 2 books, or better, a book and a bunch of uninspired self-consciously provocative crap tacked onto it for the sake of controversy. Ellis said it himself: for the most part, American Psycho was just him writing out his frustration at his life, which corresponded closely, for the most part, to Patrick Bateman's; the murder scenes were added later. This is a telling admission. While there's something mildly enjoyable about Ellis ripping apart (in prose) the yuppies he obviously knows so well, the tone changes entirely every time a character is ripped apart for real. Satire? Yeah, parts of American Psycho are satirical, but not the violent parts - they are flat, vacant, bland. And it's a sad thing, that this young, lost, numbed writer felt the need to dress up his comedy of manners in wolf's clothing. You can imagine why he did it. Not for money necessarily, but from the same misguided notion that leads his fans to believe there is something medicinal in torturing themselves by reading this shit: the poor sap thought he was writing something 'important'! Well I'm sorry, but the only important thing about American Psycho is that it illustrates - by its existence, by its success - something deeply wrong with the society that gave birth to it. Any dickhead with a halfway decent grasp of prose could have written this splatter-porn; on the level of artistry it's dull as dull can be. But it illustrates something: the banality of evil. Brett Easton Ellis is no more a psycho than you or me, nor does he demonstrate any deep knowledge of what a psycho might be. But by parading his numbness, his naivety, his insensitivity, he demonstrates how a human might unwittingly do evil. And to my mind, there is something evil in what he's done, by seeking to legitimise this shit. In the end, there's only one question that's important here: does the world need more violence-for-violence's sake? I say absolutely not. And this is coming not from a wowser or an anti-violence lobbyist, but from a diehard fan of Clockwork Orange and Reservoir Dogs. One reviewer points out that the uproar over American Psycho is ridiculous given the number of malevolent, misogynistic slasher films on constant display in our culture, and to an extent I agree. But what I find reprehensible in American Psycho is the pose - that this is somehow above those slasher films - when Ellis himself has admitted that all the conceptual justifications only occurred to him after he was demonised, as a way to talk himself out of trouble.

Is Brett Easton Ellis a mysoginist? To me he's more like a parrot, repeating the refrain of a sick culture. Well if you need a parrot to remind you what's wrong with clinical descriptions of excessive violence towards women then this is the book for you. For my part, I'll take Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me any day if I feel like a glimpse inside psychosis. And - wrong as this may sound to some of you - I'll enjoy it. Because art is meant to be enjoyed. Yes, it can change you, hurt you, get under your skin, but only if you love it. Personally, I wonder how anyone could love American Psycho. An absolute piece of shit and probably the worst book I have ever bothered finishing.

jason, an old high school buddy, knew i was in manhattan for a few nights and asked to meet up for dinner. fuck it, i'm a sentimental guy, and it's nice to catch up -- even with a wall street douchebag. jason told me that lisa, another old friend, would be joining. here's the conversational breakdown at dinner:

20 minutes: comparing features on their new blackberries.
40 minutes: the new zagat guide and the city's best restaurants.
20 minutes: glib commentary on people we grew up with.

lisa leaves and jason asks me to walk a few blocks and check out his new apartment "fucking sick pad, bro, sick" -- unable to deal with any more of this shit without backup, i text the address to bryan and john; they meet up and we sit in jason's super large, super minimalist, picture-window-overlooking-the-city apartment shooting the shit and drinking johnnie walker blue label. jason is quickly bored and calls over two hookers. he hits the bedroom with the cuter of the two; me john and bryan sit at the living room table and drink blue label with the other one. five minutes passes and we hear this from jason's bedroom:

jason (screams): 'get off! get the fuck off!'

we're all wondering what it is, exactly, she is on that he wants her off of. and if we should go in there and see if everything's ok. and then again:

jason: 'get the fuck off!'
hooker: 'shut up!'

the door busts open and the hooker storms out with a very angry jason behind her ranting that she took a phone call while giving him head and carried on a conversation while licking his balls.

so it's a moment of hilarious revelation when we realize that what jason wanted her to get off of, of course, was her phone.

phone girl looks to blue label girl: 'you ready to go?'
blue label girl: 'you get paid?'
phone girl nods.

jason (angry): 'you're not going anywhere! i fucking paid for two girls! all we got was a half!'

the girls pause and give us the once over, i imagine, to gauge if we're the kinda guys to get violent or to let 'em just walk out with jason's money. they're professionals and know their shit. they walk out.

jason lamely chides us for not getting his back.
me bryan and john go down to von for a beer.


i recently re-read american psycho only a few weeks after returning from jason's (second) wedding in a vineyard in napa. they wouldn't allow any alcohol other than their own wine to be drunk, so everyone compensated with dimebags and eightballs. and i spent hours talking to all these coked-out shitbags (and, yeah, i guess i was a coked-out shitbag, but in an entirely different non-patrick-batemanesque way) -- here's the wedding conversational breakdown:


- new gadgets (iphones, stereos, flatscreens, cars)
- we are at the top of the system because we are the smartest and most shrewd and if obama is going to regulate us and put more money in the hands of the poor, we will be forced to prey on the poor… good job obama, you just fucked the poor in a way bush never could have.
- is jay-z the 'new sinatra'?
- vacation spots. (st. barts, maui, etc)
- can we get more coke?
- you know how much money greg has? fucking sick, bro. you know he took a fucking private helicopter here, right?
- jason's stepsister is kinda hot. you think i can fuck her?



easton ellis's book isn't really much of an exaggeration. what it is: controlled, hilarious, horrible, tragic, honest. and he employs some great little warholian tricks (whereas andy lined up pictures of mao, marilyn, & minestrone, easton ellis clobbers us with a quick repetition of interwoven, passive-voiced, flattened-out sentences about daytime television, anal rape, and fashion tips) to accent his truly mad book.


but the big question: is american psycho a book that hates women? i guess. I mean, it's about and for a culture that hates women, no? now, i don't really wanna defend the book against these charges; more fun to wonder what those who view american psycho as woman-hating or anti-feminist make of the dozens (hundreds?) of panty-sniffing television shows, movies, graphic novels, books, and video games that blanket pop culture?

consider, as a mild example, Law & Order: SVU.
here we have a show in which every episode is about an underage girl raped. or a coma victim raped. or an old woman raped. written, shot, and ingested as titillating panty-sniffing nonsense. less offensive because it takes itself so seriously? because one of the cops is a woman? or because it's able to take a preposterous and unrealistic moral standpoint in 'punishing' the crime/criminal by having them jailed or killed? or, in those rare occasions when the rapist isn't caught, we're given a profound & poignant & important commentary on violence and crime and the justiceblahfuckingblah.

or do CSI, SVU, COLD CASE, etc. get a pass because they're low art, light entertainment, 'not taken seriously'...? the shit's backwards, yo.

to be totally honest, i have a hard time seeing how one views (as so many do) american psycho as 'woman hating' or 'anti-woman' or 'anti-feminist' -- i suspect that easton ellis is so good at what he does, his depiction of violence so visceral, excessive, and demented that it literally pushes people to a point in which they must either reduce the book to a 'commentary on society and consumerism and capitalism' (ugh) or to the point at which the excess drowns out any point easton ellis imagines he's making.


and then there's a complaint best made by David Foster Wallace:

"I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that."


while i find his stance admirable and elegantly stated, there's so so so much i disagree with here -- i guess it all comes down to an ear-drum shattering 'NO!' i do not believe that 'in dark times the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements.' i believe that could be a definition of 'good art', but not the definition. norman mailer (who tried, and failed, to create an american psycho type book with his an american dream) complains that easton ellis offers no alternative to the 'flat, insipid' life of patrick bateman... DFW and mailer seem to suggest that we need two things from art:


1. we need to follow a traditional model of literature which presents the good contrasted against the bad (i.e. tolstoy, dickens, etc); an art which offers an alternative morality, a way out, a 'CPR', something better... this is, of course, reactionary nonsense. what's good for leo, charlie, dave, or norm ain't necessarily good for the gander.


2. we need a representation of the 'good' in our art to show the reader an alternative or a means to break free. bullshit: while orwell needed a winston smith in order to achieve the intended effect of 1984, i cannot conceive of an american psycho with a moral voice. the moral voice comes not from the narrator or characters within the novel, but from the reader herself.


and look -- most of the shit i dig tries to do just this: "illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it" -- finding a means to live with integrity in a world of shit is an underlying theme in most of the shit i respond to and/or create. but, again, this does not mean that it is the author's job (or the creator of 'good art') to proceed along those lines. in fact, what i most appreciate about easton ellis is his refusal to trace over pre-defined lines.


as helpful, at times, as it might be to read litcrit and reviews which approach the novel as a kind of book-shaped container meant to convey certain ideas, standpoints, or commentaries... as a reader (for me, at least), it's a killer. deadly. american psycho is a great book in that, yes, there's lots of serious shit going on in there that lends itself to term papers, academic essays, and the like; and, yes, it succeeds wonderfully in defining a particular point in american history... but also because it transcends all that. it creates (here goes my generalization), as does all 'good art', the ineffable feeling only able to be expressed through that particular work. no other contemporary writer (except, perhaps, delillo at his best) is able to infuse a work with such dread. the dread that easton ellis creates in this book goes far beyond DFW's simple assertion that american psycho 'does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is.'
transcendence through dread, baby.

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

Next
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This is a DNF and even a DNS for me. I read about it years ago and avoided it because of all the stories or gore and misogyny associated with it. Then, I heard friends discussing it less critically. So, when the library opened after the holiday break, I took it home...and didn’t read it. I mean, I opened it to a random page and the first word I saw was “cunt”. That threw me off as an evil portent. Not that I am queezy about harsh language, just that that word for me conjures the same negativity and images of slavery (sexual in this case) that it seriously put me off. So, I dove into a bunch of GR reviews both praising and vilifying the book, and I decided that:
A/ I should NOT leave this lying on my shelf where my 12yo could pick it up
B/ even those who liked it admitted that it was glorified snuff movie material
C/ i already get a healthy dose of misogyny from reading about everything that the orange smegma says and does that this would likely cause me to be physically ill
D/ apparently, even Ellis felt he went too far and wrote a book later as a sort of mealy-mouthed apology
E/ i already know that books that praise rape and violence against women like Boris Vian’s J’Irai Crache Sur Votre Tombe just engender feelings of anger and rage in me
F/ I already loathe the spoiled frat boy mystique and already blame it for many of the evils and certainly most of the violence voiced in Dump’s hate rallies, for the pathetic horror movie that was the Kava hearings (himself being a believable stand-in for Patrick Bateman with his stupid smirk and pathetic calendar) that it would only increase my feeling of alienation and sad, introspective rage to read the woman-hater’s Ayn Rand which this novel most certainly claims to be with a certain machismo and pride.

In the incredible comment stream below, there is a feeling on the part of some that I missed the point of critiquing the hollow aspect of 80s America. In my defense, I'd say that books like Lolita, Rabbit Redux, and Sabbath's Theatre all were dealing with subjects considered sexually deviant and yet still come off, for me, as better critiques of the "american way of life" without the abject violence. Anyway, for each their own, right?

So, this one went back, unread, to the library. I am reading the gory strange Bunny by Mona Awad as penance.

This book is TRUE. I live on an island of bankers, investment brokers and trust company lawyers and all of them are drunken, mad psychopaths with Jack Nicholson laughs and a propensity for getting into a lot of trouble at weekends.

They drink and they snort and they screw and they sail and they make loads of money and every now and again some of them disappear never to be heard of again. The women, the secretaries and admin staff come out from the UK husband-hunting but quickly find they are the rare prey of these mad psycho partiers and they too tend to disappear.

Deported or murdered? YOU decide!
__________

The investment bankers from the Swiss VP Bank were by far the worst. Going drinking with them usually ended up with some of the guys diving naked off the side of someone's yacht and then screaming they've lost their Rolexes. Several local divers made quite a good living diving close to the party boats and recovering watches, wallets and rings on Monday mornings. If they knew who owned the property, they'd get a reward, if they didn't they sold it. I used to enjoy all that. Now I have a bookshop, but then I had a bar. I kind of wish I had a bar, that kind of bar again.

Oh, book review. I did enjoy the book and later the film. So true to life... except for the murders, I think.

(another update incorporating comments about BEE's latest novel - apparently he's still at it!)

Before we start - a quote by Norman Mailer about Bret Easton Ellis : "How one wishes this writer was without talent!"


*********

People think the pages and pages of descriptions of hacking and chopping up women are ironic.
Well, in one sense they are, but in another sense they aren't.
People who like this book should ask themselves why they want to read pages and pages of descriptions of hacking and chopping up women (with the occasional man thrown in, but all the lavish descriptions with rats and nail guns and so on are just for the ladies).
I don't think people can tell what's misogynistic and what isn't any more.
Here's a real life anecdote. A couple of years ago I went into Waterstones in downtown Nottingham, and mooched around. In this shop (probably others too) the staff had put various books on display with their own handwritten enthusiastic recommendations underneath. Well, that was nice, I liked reading them, until I came to the handwritten card under American Psycho. It said something along the lines of : “after a night of getting knocked back by various women in Nottingham hostelries, what better than to pick up Bret Easton Ellis’s 80s classic and get some of my own back”. Wow! That was a little like a guy working for Waterstone's recommending “Commandant of Auschwitz” by Rudolph Hoess, with the comment “After a day of having to deal with members of the Jewish community, what better than to sink into an armchair with this book, and get some of my own back”. Believe it or not, my GR friends, I actually wrote a protest email to the manager, who wrote back with an apology and said he'd removed the tasteless comments.
You know, this book reveals how much of a different planet some people are on than the one I'm on. It's not a good feeling.

UPDATE : FROM THE PAGES OF YESTERDAY'S SUNDAY TIMES

there's this review of "Imperial Bedrooms" which is BEE's latest novel. The reviewer is Theo Tait, I never head of him and it isn't an anagram of Paul Bryant, and I am not Theo Tait, let's get that clear. So imagine how the following remarks warmed the cockles of my heart:

At 400 pages, American Psycho is probably unfinishable except by adolescents and sociopaths...[Imperial Bedrooms:] descends into a phantasmagoria involving torture, online snuff videos and the appalling abuse of prostitutes and rent boys. Ellis claims to be a moralist, by which I guess he means that it is the emptiness of the modern world that causes his characters to behave in a spectacularly louche and/or homicidal fashion. But as with many satirists, it is unclear whether he is criticising the horrors he depicts, or simply wallowing in them. Either way, Ellis's determination to rub the reader's face in the gore carriessome heavy costs. Many people have no strong desire to read sustained passages of pornographic and misogynistic violence, in which, for instance, masked men urinate on a bound actress...[other examples omitted:]... these sequences also chip away at the novel's realistic texture and leave you wondering if Imperial Bedrooms has any meaning beyond that of the average slasher film.

"I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where."

Patrick Bateman is handsome, well educated, intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

Where to begin... first of all, let me preface this review by giving a trigger warning for almost every possible trigger you can think of: rape, animal abuse, torture... this book is not for the faint of heart! This book stands head and shoulders above the rest as the most disturbing book I've ever read. But, I absolutely loved it. Not because of how disturbing it was (although I did find that mostly entertaining), but because I've never laughed out loud so much whilst reading a book!

I LOVED getting inside Bateman's head, a true glimpse into the mind of a psychopath. He is severely deluded, shallow, neurotic... and yet I could happily read about his beauty routine and gym workouts forever (whilst making some notes of course - if only I had multiple hours to spend in the gym each day!!). In particular, I was sincerely impressed by Bateman's ability to identify exactly what designer you're wearing by sight alone - I mean, surely he is wasted in his job as an investment banker?! There must be some way he can make use of this incredible talent!

People had previously commented about how annoying it was when the book goes off on random tangents where Bateman breaks down different musical artists' careers. I found this weirdly enjoyable - particularly the chapters where he discusses Genesis and Whitney Houston in great detail. Although I was not too impressed when Bateman described Bruce Springsteen as overrated (but he made up for it by later telling a stranger on the street that Brilliant Disguise by the Boss was the happiest song he could think of - how depressing and sad is that song... LOL). Bateman's obsession for serial killers also reminded me of myself, he would slide that chat in anywhere he could. Although he did get one of his quotes wrong, attributing a quote by Ed Kemper to Ed Gein - easily done I guess *shrugs*

I can understand why the repetitive nature of this book would be annoying for some - Bateman's life is basically a cycle of brutal murders/torture followed by him and his fellow investment bankers trying to decide where to make reservations for that night - but ultimately I found it strangely captivating. It's just so funny and full of satire that I couldn't NOT love it, it really appealed to my dark sense of humour.

American Psycho also provides a really disturbing social commentary on the upper-class in Manhattan in the 1980s, a society full of racism and sexism, where a lot of emphasis is placed on image and wealth. Bateman has a crazy obsession with Donald Trump - a real representation of the times - and it honestly baffles me that this man is now President of the United States. Ellis really succeeds in painting a rather despicable picture of consumerism in America.

The murders and torture are brutal - consider this a warning! It's graphic and detailed, and the creativity and originality that Ellis manages to bring to some of them is staggering. The sex scenes are pornographic in terms of the level of the detail included, and I actually found these much more uncomfortable to read than the murders.

This book won't be for everyone, and it's one of those books that although I enjoyed almost every page, I would feel cautious recommending it to others. Just prepare yourself if you decide to pick it up! And please don't think of me as one sick puppy for enjoying this satirical masterpiece.

4.5 stars.

The Good:
This was scathing and brilliant and often absolutely hilarious. It managed to make me nostalgic for the 80s. Hell, it made me nostalgic for New York and I’ve never even been there. The infernal setting here really consists of the horde of awful, vacuous men that look exactly like Duncan McDonald or Boris Cunningham, and who might be dating Nina Goodrich while her fiance is out of town. It was all so incredibly well written I could almost see the tortured human being inside Patrick Bateman. For all these reasons I give this an unreserved five stars.

The Bad:
Graphic sexual violence, torture, animal cruelty, human degradation and suffering, this was the most horrible book I’ve ever read. And to be honest I’m still not fucking sure what happened at the end. This is a truly dreadful excuse for literature and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. If I could give it less than one star I would, and if I ever see Bret Easton Ellis I’m going to punch him in the mouth.

'Friends' character the protagonist is most like:
There is no protagonist in this book. Abdullah maybe? He’s a thieving vigilante like Phoebe.

Literature's pivotal rule is that the people populating the novel must change by the end of it. American Psycho is none of that. Patrick Bateman, 26 years old, Harvard Graduate, working in Wall Street, remains unchanged from the first page to the last. It is a novel about insight. About a certain type of people living a certain kind of life. The said people are hedonistic and morally deprived/ bankrupt. Their only true purpose in life is to chase pleasure/happiness although their idea/definition of pleasure is unstructured, fleeting and uncontainable within the moral limits of reality...

I wasn't really around when the novel came out in 1991 nor did I have a palpable conscience when the movie came out but American Psycho has left an indelible impression in the vast pop cultural scene. That said , in a very unsettling sense, American Pyscho seems more prescient now than ever. Early in the novel there is an entire chapter dedicated to the morning routine of Patric Bateman and all one has to do is go on YouTube to find a plethora of these. The novel consists of more than 35 chapters and roughly half of them is Bateman dining in the top restaurants in Manhattan. Well, there's nothing wrong in seeking a good life, one might argue, sure, but one would also ask ruminatively if this is actually a good life or an aesthetic lifestyle being sold as a good life. How much is too much/ enough. It's a bottomless pit.

Bateman's worst nightmare at any given time is if he'll have to buy mineral water sold in plastic bottles instead of glass bottles because plastic oxidises the taste of the water within and ruining the original benefits of even drinking this water. This came casually after he went on a killing spree without an ounce of moral conscience bearing heavy on him. A black comedy but brilliantly executed.

Throughout the novel Bateman gets mis recognised as someone else by people who "know him". The privilege and the senseless hedonistic pursuit is so lacking of nuance or thought, one is indistinguishable from the other in this part of the world. All through Bateman's disastrous deprivation the author doesn't take a single moral view, which is the novel's biggest success.

It's a novel about depersonalisation and desensitisation of a life that gets emptier as one acquires more materialistically. Whilst much of pop culture now primarily serves as crass escapism, American Psycho, runs face first into the unsightliness of bottomless materialistic clinginess. A seminal work.