Review of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho
By
A few months back I reviewed the film version of American Psycho for our movies section. I found the film enjoyable, both dark and funny, disturbing and entertaining. So I recently decided to read the book on which the film was based.
Whoooo boy.
American Psycho, the novel, is much, much darker than the film. Scenes of such brutality I have rarely encountered. We’re talking nail guns, wire hangers, blades of various kinds, a few guns, flame . . . all used in horrifyingly creative ways to ruin the human body, mostly the female body.
Patrick Bateman, the psycho in question, is definitely a misogynist, a racist, a classist, just about every sort of –ist that you could imagine. Worse, he’s filthy rich. He’s a Wall Street broker, and his family is wealthy enough that he doesn’t even need to work. What this means is that Bateman has unlimited time and resources to victimize people, ranging from beggars in the street—whom Bateman and his yuppie crowd have a particular hatred for—to old school acquaintances.
In Bret Easton Ellis’ hands, Bateman is perhaps the most desensitized character in history. He kills, according to his own probably unreliable testimony, to share his pain with the world, but when reading the novel you may wonder if he truly feels pain, or anything else. The only real emotion he seems to feel is greed—a lust for more death, more electronic gadgets for his apartment, better dinner reservations, a better suit than his business acquaintances. Love, honor, sympathy, compassion—all these emotions are absent in his life, completely absent.
One theme that runs through the novel, and one reason for Bateman’s complete lack of empathy, is the depersonalization of life in the 80s, especially in the upper class. Bateman travels from nightclub to nightclub and from restaurant to restaurant in a blur of activity, running with a group of companions who are interchangeable and basically faceless. Bateman himself is equally faceless; other characters call him by several different names in the book. This inability of the characters to remember or care about each other is contrasted with Bateman’s flawless memorization of what everyone is wearing and what designers created the garments. Ellis, then, seems to be juxtaposing the materialism of the Reaganomics era with the utter loss of human sympathy.
Not that the book can’t be funny. Some scenes are really hilarious, such as a late chapter in which Bateman and two of his friends spend hours on the phone canceling and remaking dinner reservations, completely unable to decide where they should go or whom they should invite. Of course, even these scenes are a bit hard to take, since our “protagonist” is usually sitting amidst decaying corpses and bloodstains.
I’m serious, folks, when I say that reading American Psycho is an emotionally draining experience. I haven’t really said a lot about why the novel is good or not, mainly because I haven’t really decided. It’s a hard book to wrap your mind around. The book gives perhaps the most over-the-top indictment of materialism and isolation that I’ve ever read, and on that level it succeeds. On the other hand, the scenes of brutality are so hard to take that many readers may give up before they can digest any of Ellis’ ideas.
I think that, if you read this book all the way through, you’ll have a picture of upper class New York that you’ll pray isn’t accurate. You may love this book for its offbeat humor and its no holds barred look at yuppie culture. You may hate it because of its scenes of violence, many of which may seem gratuitous. You may feel uncomfortable with its protagonist, a rich white guy who hates and murders not only everyone he can find who isn’t a rich white guy but also some of his rich white guy friends. Bateman spares no one his carnage.
What I don’t think you’ll feel for this book is apathy. I don’t think you’ll read it and say, “Eh. Whatever.” I think you’re likely to have a stronger reaction, whether it be a positive or a negative one. On that level, at least, Ellis has succeeded.
But I find it hard to get past the abattoir that is every chapter to get to the story and the ideas it presents. It’s possible, but it’s hard, and not in a “complex text” sort of way. I think that Ellis has written a book that is in some ways important, a book somebody needed to write. But I’m not certain it’s a book that handles its subject matter in the best possible way.
Those that know the Doc know that I’m not squeamish, that I don’t look the other way when tough issues are in debate, and that I don’t have a problem with using ugly clay to mold a work of art. But I don’t appreciate gratuitous, purposeless ugliness. And I’m just not sure that all the specific depictions of violence are necessary to make Ellis’ novel work, to get across his “points,” whatever you believe them to be. Perhaps one or two scenes of brutality are necessary to show the audience just how destructive and aloof Bateman is, but scene after scene after scene—why? Hey Bret, we get it.
Or maybe Ellis is trying to desensitize us to the violence, to make us identify with Bateman. If so, he fails on this level, at least with me. This was one of the few books I had to put down and walk away from, one of the even fewer that I had genuine trouble picking back up again—not because the writing was bad but because my inner humanity was so bruised by the images. I never became desensitized; I literally had nightmares.
If that is part of Ellis’ design—and I don’t pretend to know if it is or not—then, again, he succeeds. But I ask the question here—why would you want to?