Book Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

TW: discussion of violence and sexual assault

In the evening light of a July sunset, this is how I spend a few hours: I read my paperback copy of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, published by Picador. I have a cup of tea made from Earl Grey teabags from Twinings, which I drink out of a white mug I bought from Sainsbury's. If it's late in the evening I would usually drink Clipper's organic white tea, but it is still early now so I am drinking Earl Grey instead. I use some cushions from Asda to prop myself up and put a fleece blanket from Primark over my legs. Primark is a good place for blankets because the fleece they use-

Okay, I can't do this anymore. How did you feel, reading the passage above? Vaguely amused? Confused? Bored?  If you felt any of those emotions, then you have some idea how I felt while reading American Psycho. To spoil the end of this post: I didn't like it.

You might be familiar with the plot of American Psycho from the rather famous 2000 film adaptation, which starred Christian Bale. Fun fact: Christian Bale's stepmother is Gloria Steinem, who apparently opposed the book based on its graphic depictions of violence against women. To be fair to Steinem, there is a lot of violence in the novel, which follows Patrick Bateman - Wall Street yuppie and titular, self-declared "psychopath" - as he alternates between living a life of extreme materialism and decadence among his other young, wealthy friends, and brutally torturing and murdering innocent people. Ellis writes all of this in what has become an iconic style: a coldly detached, stream-of-consciousness narrative littered with brand names and 80s references. I have made a poor attempt to satirise it in the italicised paragraph at the top of this post, but to get a real taste for it you only need to find a copy of the book, open it, and read a page at random. One good thing I can say about Ellis is that it must have taken a fair amount of dedication and focus to maintain that narrative voice for the entirety of this almost-400-page novel.

Unfortunately, it's that same commitment to one particular gimmick that ultimately costs American Psycho its appeal. When I first started to read the book, I was rather charmed by its style. I thought it was a great example of "Show, Don't Tell", very clearly showing the reader how extreme Bateman's obsession with material goods was without explicitly stating it. Ellis is quite good at depicting the world Bateman inhabits, of shallow fixations and excess, which he is able to render humorously yet believably. It's not the sort of lifestyle I have any experience with, so I can't say how accurate Ellis's version of Wall Street's yuppie world is, but I know that Bateman's interactions with his peers were some of the most entertaining parts of the novel for me. I enjoyed reading the original "business card scene", in which Bateman and his colleagues exchange cards and obsess over minor differences in font and background colour, that I had previously only been aware of through the film adaptation. A prolonged section of dialogue in which Bateman and his friends make a futile attempt to decide where to eat one evening was also amusing. Episodes like these are where Ellis is at his best, depicting a world where the characters' preoccupation with absurdly trivial details, like the font of a business card or which restaurant to have dinner at (taking into account where is considered trendy or where they have been seen recently, rather than something less important, like the food). It's funny and clever enough to be a relatively good satire, and it is scenes like this which give me some idea of what Ellis might have been aiming to achieve in writing American Psycho.

That said, the aforementioned scenes only come to maybe a dozen pages in a book that is nearly 400 pages long. I have referenced the length of the novel before, and I stress this point because it is the root of many of the problems with American Psycho. I was entertained by the first few chapters when reading, but the charm started to wear a little thin by around the 50 page mark. Ellis does well to skewer a particular brand of 80s consumerism in those first 50 pages - the problem is that he then continues to stab at it for the next 330. This brings me to the other infamous aspect of the book: the violence. The problem I have with American Psycho's violence is more or less the same issue I have with its attempt at satire: after a while, it's just a bit boring. The only difference is that where Ellis's yuppie meet-ups are unsettling insofar as they depict a group of nauseatingly privileged people, whose hobbies include tormenting the homeless and cutting lines with their American Express cards until the coke stops them working, the murder scenes are disturbing because of their explicit and sadistically creative brutality. Different, but ultimately the same; they're both unpleasant, and they're both fairly uninteresting.

Since it has been the subject of feminist criticism in the past, I'd like to take a slight detour from the body of this review to address the nature of the violence in American Psycho. First of all, I fully agree with claims that the various scenes of murder, torture, and sexual assault have an unmistakably misogynistic angle to them. Most of Bateman's victims are women and much of the violence in the book is heavily sexualised. This is not to say that misogyny is the only type of hatred driving these crimes - Bateman gets his fair share of racism and homophobia in as well - but violence against women is by far the most frequently and explicitly depicted. The descriptions of Bateman's murders are disturbing enough in their own right, but they would be even more horrifying if I felt that Ellis had written them purely as filler scenes for the readers to get some sort of enjoyment out of. ("Oh, he's torturing that woman with a live rat? How delightful!"). Thankfully, I don't think this is what Ellis intended - although a quick scan of reviews for the book on Google will show that many people do in fact get some kind of perverse pleasure out of these scenes. Rather, I think he wrote them to prove a point, which most likely goes something along the lines of: consumerism is so bad that an incredibly wealthy man like Bateman has become so emotionally numb that he's actually become a serial killer. Something like that. Wikipedia has a whole section devoted to themes and interpretation of the book, but it all comes down to a similar argument. 

To clarify: I'm fine with violence in media, but it has to serve a purpose. Broadly speaking, that purpose can either be: 1. to entertain and/or amuse (as in Tarantino's over-the-top, comic violence in his films), or 2. to prove an ethical or thematic point (as in most media which chooses to graphically portray aspects of the Holocaust). The cardinal sin of American Psycho, in my opinion, is that it fails to do either particularly well. I'm willing to admit that the more gruesome parts of the book made me feel nauseous, as I imagine and hope they were supposed to. I have read plenty of other books which disturbed and horrified me, but they usually felt like it was in service of something. When I finished reading this novel, I just felt that I'd repeatedly put myself off my dinner for no real reason. Maybe I am being too shallow, but it seemed to me that any point Ellis was trying to make could easily have been achieved in a short story, and it needn't have been dragged out and flogged to death over the course of an entire novel.

In short, I didn't like American Psycho. Although there are a few examples of wit that shine through, most of the book alternates between being tedious, gross, or both. I might have been able to understand the violent misogyny and general hatred depicted if it had been done well or for a good reason, but it comes across as the half-baked attempt of a young writer using sensationalism to establish himself as his generation's literary enfant terrible - an attempt which, by many accounts, was bizarrely successful. Sadly, reading the result of this attempt feels like being forced to watch torture porn narrated by Ronald Reagan, while simultaneously being whacked over the head with a copy of The Great Gatsby - not fun, not subtle, and not particularly clever.

Verdict: 2/5 stars