Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide

Did I learn anything new? Nope. Did I feel comfort in knowing I'm not alone in being a crazy bastard obsessed with a book that has a tainted reputation? Sure. Was that enough? Yes.

THE DOG IS CHEWING HIS BONE AGAIN

1) American Psycho has provoked, I think, the most discussion of any on Goodreads. Okay, maybe this one and Ayn Rand. And Twilight. Lots of people give AP one or five stars. It’s really hard, I find, to even begin to clear the undergrowth of prejudice and preconception away from one’s mind to even be able to discover what the issues are which provoke such extreme opposition.

2) We could start with this : AP is satire of the vicious bitter unforgiving kind, like, say Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which, in a perfectly earnest manner, he proposed to solve the Irish famine and the Irish population problem at a stroke by pointing out how tender and delicate the flesh of young children is when lightly braised for two to three hours. Now, Jonathan Swift wasn’t being serious and neither is BEE. It’s a satire. Hmmm. But it’s easy to see where the joke (serious joke though it may be) is in Swift. And it’s easy to see where the jokes are in AP too, in fact the “making fun of the vacuous yuppies and the turbocharged capitalism of 80s America and so forth” aspect of the novel is really quite broad humour – I might venture a criticism that there’s way too much of it, that it’s laid on with a trowel, but I think BEE might say “yes it is, and that’s the point”. So we get the humour but the laughs rapidly die away, we may all agree, when the violence begins. Is it still being satirical then?

3) I wasn’t aware until I read this guide that swathes of AP consists of BEE rewriting advertising copy, brochures, record reviews and porn. I.e. he didn’t make up a lot of this stuff, he scissors-and-pasted it and then gave it a light rewrite. I don’t have a problem with that, I just wasn’t aware, although in retrospect it’s obvious.

4) AP fits in to a rage-against-the–machine sub-genre of American fiction. Chaplin in Modern Times and Michael Douglas in Falling Down show guys being turned into cogs in the big machine and finally freaking out and rebelling. Patrick Bateman is a cog and he doesn’t rebel so his frustration and anger is internatised and expressed in the violence. Hmmm – is that right? It’s a little crude. AP’s novelty is to show how the awfulness of capitalism pertains even in the upper classes, that their humanity is robbed and traduced. But this calls to mind a comment by either Tallulah Bankhead or Joan Crawford who said

“I’ve suffered poor and I’ve suffered rich, and let me tell you honey, rich is better.”

5) I struggle with the violence supposedly representing the vileness of capitalism internalised within our antihero. Murphet spends 10 pages (39-49) explaining carefully that in various ways the violence is not to be taken “literally”. For a start, Wall Street guys are not serial killers, ask any policeman. There is no known example anywhere of a rich dude serial killer. So Patrick Bateman is a completely fictitious character, not “realistic”, he’s a representation, a summation, he’s the yuppiness of all yuppies made flesh. In this sense the violence isn’t supposed to be taken as “real” within the book. It’s flagged up all over the place as imaginary. BEE points out in the text in many places that this or that murder couldn’t have happened (logistics, the victim has been seen alive only yesterday, etc). The violence is therefore – do we agree here? – symbolic. This is Patrick Bateman’s exterior – all lovely clothes and male fragrances and restaurants – and this is Patrick Bateman’s interior – chop chop, spurt spurt. This is capitalism’s exterior – the sleekness of the new model, the pleasure of the purchase, the pornography of the packaging – and this is capitalism’s interior – the third world sweat shops, the child labourers, the grinding trade treaties.

6) Murphet here suggests that the violence is Bateman’s imagined revenge for his horrible life. So BEE writes a book in which his protagonist indulges in fantasies of extreme violence against women, in exactly the same way that the Nottingham Waterstone’s guy did (see my actual review of AP for that anecdote). BEE allows his male readers the luxury of permitted sadistic fantasy. Do we all have a little Bateman within us? (I really hope not.)

7) But Murphet has to admit – and here we’re getting towards my problem with AP – that in the most important sense the reality or not of the violence within the text is entirely by the by :

“Of course, at the level of textual reality, the violence ‘happens’; we are obliged to read through sentences detailing appalling acts.”

“Obliged” is an interesting choice of word. He continues:

“But the question is : what status do these sentences have?”

This is the question indeed. What are they there for? Fans of AP point out that the violence is only 10% of the novel – i.e. around 40 pages. But once you’ve done one extreme scene, why do another? Why not do a representative one each – Bateman might kill a black guy, a gay guy, a child and a woman – reasonable cross-section, you may think. But no, BEE throws in page after page of this chopping up women stuff. So, it’s gratuitous. Surplus to requirements. Unnecessary. One grisly scene would do – say, Lunch with Bethany. I’d bet that BEE and his fans and Murphet would all say “no, you’re wrong, all the gruesome scenes were essential”. I don’t get that at all. So from my point of view, it just seems like BEE got a taste for all that chopping up women stuff. Which is a serious charge to make! And more : that the fans of this book also got a taste for it - reading the violence through their fingers, wincing as they read it, but reading it all anyway. As I say, that’s what it seems.

8) So it seems that if AP is on the side of the angels and is making a great howl of protest and rage and satire blah blah, BEE is in the position with his 40 pages of ultraviolence of – let’s say – a campaigner against child pornography who publishes a book which includes a hundred pages of child porn photos. He’s being very naïve. BEE was interviewed after the storm of controversy broke upon him, and was asked about the violence, and he said :

“I didn’t think there was enough in the book to make it that shocking.” (p67)

Blimey! So I think we may place him next to Salman Rushdie who also, clearly, didn’t think there was that much in Satanic verses for Muslims to get offended by – after all, the insults to the prophet’s wives were in a dream and the violence in AP is probably imaginary
… Wakey wakey, authors! Come down from your towers of literature! Or do you not mind being so misunderstood? Are all the misunderstanders lowbrow cattle who should be shooed mooing away? When Roger Rosenblatt excoriates AP for misogynism, Murphet says :

“Rosenblatt would appear to have forgotten the simple distinction between the “gratuitous degradation of human life” and an act of literature which wants to denounce that very degradation.”

There’s the rub, I think, the divide between the AP-haters and the AP fans. The haters think that the way BEE denounces such “degradation” in AP is in itself degradation, and that in his blindness BEE did not realise. Murphet goes further in excoriating the excoriator here:

“It is the very culture whose ‘standards’ Mr Rosenblatt wants to see preserved that is making sure ‘Patrick Bateman’ can exist as a potential reality.”

Really? The protestors against AP’s violence against women are in this doublethink way recast as covert enablers of violence against women because they attempt to stifle the kind of free expression of extreme violence against women we find in AP. This thinking is grotesque. On p 71 Murphet describes BEE’s mortification that AP was so misunderstood and vilified : “if fiction is not to probe and lance the boils of contemporary society, then literature will amount to nothing but a sop to the status quo.” How puerile – did we see howls of horror and mass boycotts when Cormac Mccarthy published The Road or when Jonathan Littell published The Kindly Ones? Of course not. Were they sops to the status quo? No.

9) AP is recognised as a modern classic - is it taught in colleges yet? I bet it is. So, I must accept that I'm in a minority. Doesn't stop me yapping on and on monotonously about it though!

This little study of both the book and the film is really interesting. Very perceptive author.

This is a short, quick, nerdy lit-crit of Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho", a woefully misunderstood novel that's known primarily for the graphic violence it contains. As this criticism points out, the violence is a very small part of the book (about five percent), and the rest is actually a well-written satire of Reagonomics, conspicuous consumerism, the disconnect between men and women, class warfare, and yuppie culture.

I really do understand why many people disliked "American Psycho", but maybe "Reader's Guide" might bring to light some of the details that were overlooked in the (admittedly horrific) violence sequences.

This book helped me learn the historical context about American Psycho. Knowing what was happening in NY, particularly regarding homelessness and gentrification, made the critiques leveled in Ellis's book much clearer. If you're going to teach American Psycho (which I have), this book provides invaluable background information and context.

I'm happy I never have to read another description of character's designer outfits again. This book is dark, sinister and hilarious.

I did find this book funny, in a sick sort of way, funny like a David Lynch movie

For someone who knows basically nothing about literary analysis or critique, I found this a really useful and engaging read, that was fairly easy to get into and understand, that let me appreciate American Psycho a lot more than I originally had.

It made me understand some themes and delve a bit deeper.

Quick read and worth a shot if you want to truly get more out of AP.