Review: American Psycho

Bret Easton ELLIS, American Psycho, Picador/Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2000.

Octavo; paperback; 399pp. Moderate wear; covers rubbed and edgeworn with some creasing; text block and page edges lightly toned. Very good.

This book first appeared in 1991 and it was a headache from the word “go”. Due to the content, it was required that the book, when sold new, had to be enclosed in shrink-wrap, so that no-one could just browse through it inadvertently and be offended. This had an impact upon retailers’ attempts to reduce their carbon footprint – causing some distributors to fork out for shrink-wrapping equipment – and the costs were necessarily passed on to the consumers. A buzz soon generated and for many - at least here in Australia, anyway, where our bullshit threshold is particularly low – it seemed as though this was just a marketing strategy to boost notoriety and, therefore, sales. You can bet that every major bookshop in the world though, had an opened copy tucked away somewhere that had been ‘accidentally’ damaged down at the receiving dock and which did the rounds of the staff.

For me, I had just slogged through the crapulous fascination, generated in the 80s and pushed on into the 90s, for serial killers. We had been thoroughly saturated with the life stories of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, presented to us as super-beings and whose evil existences had been strip-mined to produce Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, all of Patricia Cornwell’s books and even the “X-Files”. Deranged multiple murderers were everywhere, and the concept was becoming stale and had started to devour itself. So, the last thing I wanted to do was to read yet another book about a psychotic repeat killer. As far as American Psycho and I were concerned, my only role was to make sure it stayed like Laura Palmer – wrapped in plastic.

Then of course, the movie came out and the book was re-launched, this time without the gloomy Francis Bacon cover. I was once more convinced that the plastic wrap schtick was just hype – if the book was so notorious, how come it was allowed to be filmed? – but the headache over ‘to wrap or not to wrap?’ was back and I was grateful to be working in a part of the book world where such things were not an issue. To this day, I have been unsure about whether – as a secondhand book dealer – the rule has to be followed within my area of expertise. Given that most injunctions of this nature in Bookland are rarely, if ever, policed (with the sole exception – in my experience – of the timed release of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels), I’ve always assumed that it doesn’t apply if the book is being sold used; however, the book so rarely shows up on the secondhand market that it’s not really been an issue.

(This is a disturbing thing, in and of itself. There are books that are sold new by the millions that almost never get surrendered to secondhand dealers – the complete works of Sir Terry Pratchett for instance – and the assumption is that they are always read into the dirt and so are only ever thrown out as unusable, or are so wildly popular that readers refuse to give them up, or are so outrageous that no-one really wants to be identified as having read them. I’m assuming that American Psycho fits into the latter category – any thoughts otherwise are too horrible to contemplate.)

The other week however, a copy did materialize from somewhere and, after I spotted it on the ‘specials’ table out in front of the shop with a $5 sticker on it, I withdrew it from sale and my boss and I had a conversation about it, mainly about whether it should be wrapped up or not. We agreed to differ, and I decided to take the book home with me – it’s a perk of the job being able to take any of these well-used books home if they catch my eye. I chucked it on a shelf and forgot about it until the recent bushfires demanded that I do something to distract myself from the enclosing ring of flame that seemed to be pushing inevitably towards my home (it’s alright now; the worst has passed). Here are my thoughts:

This is a terrible book. It’s also a horrible book, in that it deals with horrific and horrifying things, but it’s a terrible book in that it is a thing designed to instill terror – terrible in the Old Testament sense, in other words. It’s a book that can be read on multiple levels and – like all such things – it is dangerous in the hands of those who approach it in the wrong way. This is not a story about a young would-be Hannibal Lecter committing crimes in New York and getting away with it; this is absolutely not a Patricia Cornwell slick and sassy serial killer “airport read” or potboiler. This is an unflinching condemnation of an entire lifestyle and attitude to existence that Easton Ellis was vilifying in the 80s and which we are heirs to right now. In that it veils its message in copious amounts of sexual and violent pornography is truly worrying and, having now read it, I see that the decision to shrink-wrap this monster was more than just a sales ploy.

Having been exposed to ‘serial killer chic’ through everyday media, we know – whether we’re conscious of it or not – a lot about how the psycho-killer’s mind works. We know that they display a distinct lack of empathy, or ability to relate emotionally to those around them, despite being able to hide their true natures with relative ease. We are aware that they tend to be hyper-intelligent and that they display ritualistic behaviours and “magical thinking”. We have learned that they escalate their behaviour over time becoming more reckless, in tune with their growing sense of being immune to consequences. What Easton Ellis is trying to show us with this book is that all of those traits and mannerisms are alive and well in the business culture that grew and perpetuated in the 80s. Yuppies – especially New York Yuppies – are trained to be sociopathic monsters by the very nature of the work they do and the institutions which support them. In making one of their breed a serial killer, he highlights this parallelism and displays the consequences to our culture and our society of this attitude.

Patrick Bateman – the serial killer in this novel – is a merchant banker (although he doesn’t need to be – we learn that he is supported by a massive trust fund and has never needed to work) and spends his days working out at the gym and spending time lunching at various fashionable eateries across New York, often well into the night. He spends time in the company of his peers, well-dressed young men with whom he vies to appear to be the most conspicuously wealthy and well-appointed, in terms of everything from their haircuts to their girlfriends. In his circle, he is treated as something of an authority on fashion and answers many mind-numbing queries as to the required width of braces or the appropriateness of a pocket square. In detailing these endless useless conversations, Easton Ellis shows us how Bateman’s mind works:

We never get a description of anyone in the story – no faces or discussions of height or weight are provided, rather Bateman provides excruciating detail about clothes and who’s wearing what: designer names; styles; materials – it’s an eye-glazingly endless list of brands. So too are descriptions of meals, apartments and other environments – brand names, food and fashion trends occupy Bateman completely. This shows us that he never actually thinks of people in terms of who they are, just what they have. The Yuppie obsession with conspicuous consumption is paralleled with the serial killer’s lack of empathy with clinical skill.

Society is also given the serial killer treatment: Bateman’s peers are all identical to himself, therefore he regards them as equals (although he is first among them, in his own opinion). Women with whom he dines are all potential girlfriends – if they are also employed by financial agencies, or come from money; otherwise they are “hardbodies”, if sexually stimulating; “girls” if they are about to be tortured and killed by him; or else, invisible – and definitely better off that way. His bigotry extends even further, and he displays an open hatred of Jews, blacks and homosexuals. Waiters, taxi-drivers and doormen are all treated with disdain and the poor and homeless are scorned, vilified and randomly tortured and/or murdered. In Bateman’s world, money and power are the only roads to success and he fights a constant battle to ensure that he is on top.

According to criminologist and former prison governor David Wilson in his work A History of British Serial Killing (Sphere Books, 2009), such killers are promulgated in societies where certain elements of society are promoted over, and at the expense of, others, meaning that some sectors of the community are not privy to the protections offered to others and have had “bonds of mutual support … all but eradicated”. He says that such groups as the elderly, the poor, racial minorities, religious groups, sex workers, the homeless, even children, consequently don’t get the protections that they deserve or need. This view is more than adequately depicted as real and functioning in this book, where white, male, privilege is tacitly (and not so tacitly) supported at all times. Bateman kills and tortures just about everybody – women, men, children, animals – and he gets away with it all because the world around him lets it happen.

That I think is the most disturbing thing about this book: he gets off scot free. Towards the end, I was turning pages in the increasingly forlorn hope that someone would see what he was doing, that someone would call the police, and that Justice would be seen to be done. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t happen. So hollow, so ethically and morally barren is this book, that Bateman just enters a new decade (the 90s) with no comebacks, and no consequences for his repellent actions. Nothing. By the book’s end, Bateman is so repulsive to us that even his friends and associates can’t help but be tainted by his career of evil – we simply cannot believe that they can be so blind and so they must be complicit. As are we all, since, apparently, we’ve all ignored the call-to-arms that this book represents.

(And speaking of complicity, I’m amazed that this book wasn’t suppressed upon release, not because of its content – which is truly vile – but because of who it ropes in through association. There are extended discussions of noted musicians of the day – Genesis and, by extension, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and Mike & The Mechanics; Whitney Houston; Talking Heads; INXS; U2; Belinda Carlisle; Huey Lewis & the News – movie stars – Tom Cruise: Bateman has a chat with him in an elevator; Sylvester Stallone – and political figures – Ronald Reagan; Oliver North and George Bush – none of whom are painted particularly sympathetically, since they all share in Bateman’s approval. I guess they (or their agents) all decided that any promotion is good promotion. It should surprise no-one that Donald Trump is an inspiration to Bateman and that his name crops up all over the place as the object of Bateman’s fawning adulation: I’m pretty sure that Trump wouldn’t choose to see a negative spin on his depiction in this work; I’m also pretty sure that Trump hasn’t even read this. In fact, if he ever did, he probably wouldn’t see anything wrong with it.)

(Actually, the resounding silence from all of these performers and their agencies says more about the prevailing attitudes represented here than anything else. If these people had a moral core - or even a defensible position upon their involvement - they would have spoken up well before now.)

Easton Ellis uses a particularly pared-down style in this work. It’s no-nonsense and clinical, spared the need of descriptive passages or internal struggle. The constant litany of clothing types styles and brands, along with lists of furnishings, accoutrements and restaurant dishes, is designed to blunt the reader’s sensations, causing a kind of comatose state that is often, startlingly broken when Bateman pulls out a knife and gets to work. Even here though, the clinical and often off-hand lists of ruination and dismemberment are coloured by this pedantic background of wardrobe identification and dissection: Bateman works both literally and metaphorically. Drugs, cocaine and prescription brands (brands, brands, brands!) are crucial to Bateman’s world and his struggles to dose himself into acceptability, or out of his meltdowns, is the closest we see to anything resembling his inner emotional state.

There are some problems, not least of which it’s way too long: at three points in the novel, chapters appear that provide a complete review of various musicians and their bodies of work throughout the 80s. These are seemingly randomly thrown in and, except for the last of these chapters which focusses on Huey Lewis & the News, don’t overtly seem to originate from within the mind of Bateman. In the context of the material which bookends them, they are disturbing and partake of the clinical mentality that inexplicitly drives them (ie., Bateman’s) but just one of these would surely have been enough (if only because I won’t be able to hear any of these performers without this context from now on!). Too, an extended passage occurs when Bateman shoots a busking saxophone player in the street during which his silencer fails to work and the noise of which summons two policemen driving by. The ensuing mayhem as Bateman desperately flees capture is pulled out of the first person perspective into the third person point of view, obviously designed to display the psychological disassociation which Bateman feels at having made an error in judgement; however it reads like the bad narration of a sequence from an action movie and jars as a result. So too, do a lot of the sex scenes which unfold across the book, reading like third rate porn for the most part before descending into infernos of splatterpunk excess. There are sex scenes which involve Bateman and potential girlfriends (or the girlfriends of his so-called friends) which are quite different in tone to these other brutal dismemberments. Easton Ellis obviously chose a technique with which to relate his narrative; he should have stuck with it doggedly, because these excursions and deviations come across as obvious tricks and defeat the intent of his not-so-obvious ones.

There is some confusion too. It becomes clear to the reader at some point in the narrative that Bateman is using pseudonyms to hide who he is from many of the people he encounters. Most people call him "Patrick" or "Bateman", some call him "Marcus", others call him "Davis". Given that Bateman often misidentifies people he sees across crowded rooms, and that no-one of his acquaintance is given a physical description to personalise them, the reader is often at a loss as to who is saying or doing what to whom, and when it's a case of Bateman being deliberately misleading, the problem compounds and confusion reigns. 

I hate this book. I think it’s disgusting and repulsive. That being said - and given where we are as a society these days (Trump! President!) - I also think it’s an important document, a searing alarm-call to action which was ruthlessly ignored and watered down by the Powers That Be. I think it needs to be handled carefully and read with a measuring eye – if anyone came up to me and tried to tell me how “cool” they thought Patrick Bateman was, I would punch them in the nose. In fact, I still think it needs to be shrink-wrapped, secondhand or otherwise. You may not agree with me; that’s your right. Regardless, there’s no going back after having read this, so choose your next step wisely.