American Psycho

Patrick Bateman är snygg, framgångsrik och välutbildad. Han har ett bra jobb med en lön som betalar för all den absurda lyx han är van vid i de fina kretsarna han rör sig i. Han är mannen alla hans manliga vänner kommer till för att få klädesråd och tips om nyaste modet och vad som går ihop med vad – eller ännu viktigare, vad som inte går ihop. Han är en charmig prick som flyter in i mängden av yuppies på Manhattan som spenderar tid på fina klubbar och restauranger för att diskutera pengar, kläder, sina haff och annat som tycks vara viktigt för deras status.

Men under ytan finns mycket mer än en endast en annan rik ung bankman; där finns en hänsynslös seriemördare vars offer oftast endast råkar vara på fel show more plats när han är på rätt humör. Ingen går säker; allt från tiggare till bekanta från hans eget kontaktnät. Han är brutal och oberäknelig; det är snarare känslor och impulser än strategi och logik som styr hans gärningar.

American Psycho är möjligtvis den mest brutala bok jag har läst. Jag förväntade mig inte någon godnattsaga när jag började läsa då jag hört mycket om den men jag var ändå inte riktigt förberedd på just hur brutal den skulle vara. Det mest bisarra var dessutom hur den kunde gå från noll till hundra under samma mening. Lättsamma kommenterar om tortyrporr, sexscener som går från heta men ändå sex med samtycke till våldtäkt och tortyr. Det var svårt att veta vad som skulle hända på nästa sida, vilket både var nervkittlande och spännande. Även om det tog lång tid att läsa klart boken på grund av dess brutala natur så var det en läsning jag sent glömmer av fler skäl än endast obehaget den gav mig. Man vet verkligen inte vad som döljer sig inom en annan människa.

Det finns dock en sak som är ännu mer intressant med denna bok... är ens något av det Bateman gör sant? Jag vet inte riktigt vilken version jag vill tro mest; att den sociala krets Bateman lever i är så homogen att alla misstas för varandra och den är så förutsägbar och ytlig att det inte är någon som ens reagerar när han erkänner sina mord bara så där... eller att inget av det faktiskt händer på någon annan plats än i Batemans huvud. show less

Of course I was warned in advance about this book. However, after actually reading the nasty, upsetting torture scenes, the cruelties become unbearably real and horrible. Patrick Bateman is a psychopath, a serial killer continuously going further and further in his sexual escapades and torture practices, eventually engaging in raw cannibalism. The detailed and emotionless way all the horror is described is nauseating. I can imagine many readers throwing this book away.

But ... at the same time, it remains a very intriguing book that I could not put down. On the one hand, there is humorous aspect: Bateman is portrayed by Easton Ellis as an incredibly funny exaggeration, all the clichés about the Wall-Street-yuppies of the '80s are show more magnified to the absurd (the endless lists of the designer clothes and the discussions on how to wear them, the constant wandering between luxurious restaurants– where barely anything of the exquisite dinners is tasted-, the constant hunting on lines of cocaine, fitness addiction, obsession with beggars, and the ubiquitous elitism, sexism and racism).

Exaggeration is probably the predominant style element in this book: in the nasty passages on torture, of course, but also in the general image of women: the women who appear in this book are almost all flatly stupid, they are treated as cattle (or worse) and end up almost all smeared over the walls and floors of Bateman's luxurious apartment.

Another style element is that of contrast: the contrast between the Bateman who tries to fit in the world of his fellow yuppies and the Bateman that revells in orgies of violence; the contrast between the insensitive, inhuman Bateman and the Bateman who with much subtlety and nuance discusses the music of Whitney Houston, Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News. And so on. In a literary point of way American Psycho certainly is not an ordinary crime-booklet. It really is a sublime (although absurdly exaggerated) sketch of the yuppie environment in the 1980s in the US, and an overwhelming pastiche on the serial killers genre.

I get stuck on the question whether there really is a deeper layer in the book. Easton Ellis certainly gives the impression that there is more than meets the eye: he shows upsettingly how communication between people fails (in the sometimes very long dialogues the characters hardly listen to each other; even the countless "confessions" by Bateman to his colleagues and friends are just not heard or taken serious). Especially towards the end, the author outlines Bateman more and more as a tragic figure: our psychopath seems to acknowledge his deeds are evil, he even is trying to find the source of it (his inability to attach to real feelings), but he finds he cannot possibly curb his "inner urges".

Is Easton Ellis trying to tell us something about man in his time? Is it a 1980s version of Camus' The Stranger (who also commits a crime, just like that, from a deep alienation)? Or are all the cruelties just happening in the head of Bateman? I honestly don’t know. There are too many ambiguous signals in this novel, especially by the way Easton Ellis has highlighted the cruel scenes. In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the crime (also not very neat, by the way) has a functional purpose in the story of personal catharsis. In American Psycho, there is no such function, the violence seems nonsensical.

Maybe that's the power of this book: that this ambiguity is not resolved, and no definitive answer is possible on the question of what this novel actually tries to tell. show less

American Psycho gets five stars from me purely for Pat Bateman's critical exegeses of Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis, each one somehow even more exquisite than the one before. They're pop-cultural shitposting at its finest, and to me funnier and maybe more macabre than anything else in the book. If Bateman is the acme of post-60's American reactionism, the needle-point convergence of Nixonian paranoia (the Fisher account; the dread of being reservationless at dinnertime) and Reaganite consumerism, then these three paeans to musical conformity and commerciality are the only true statements of his credo. Plus it just simply fires me up reading something that its author (Ellis, not Bateman) obviously had such a blast writing and show more then successfully inserting into a novel.

But there are so many lovely things about the book. Here are three: the backdrop of Les Miserables imagery — its tunes on every yuppie's lips and Walkman (the original cast recording is the only acceptable one), the ubiquitous handbills and billboards for it punctuating Bateman's Manhattan peregrinations. PB's sweet, starry-eyed obsession with Donald and Ivana Trump, caricatures even then, and seemingly the only people the equally two-dimensional Bateman has a non-predatory interest in. The business card scene, choreographed to perfection as it is in the film, and its laser-guided symbolism — the business card as the only tangible expression of identity in a world of interchangeable job titles, restaurants, couture, even names.

Actually, here's a fourth: Bateman disparages someone as "a total Canadian".

It's not as well edited as the film, and it doesn't have Willem Dafoe, but it makes up for those shortcomings by dialling up the gore to a level of cartoonishness that dispels any lingering reliability in the narration, and by making a prose-poem both epic and comic, tragic and absurd, out of the litany of designer brands that gets inevitably diluted on the screen.

I think you can also read it as a satire on diarists, or maybe a tribute to them, or both. Inkblot Bateman in his namelessness and facelessness can take a lot of shapes, but in his untiring cataloguing of his daily routine, his attunedness to status symbols, his wanderings by night and day through the world's financial omphalos — through the guts of Mammon — he's not a million miles from Pepys. The best diarists are the totally unconscious ones, the ones who don't expect their diaries ever to be read, and that's how PB is, howling his psychopathic (but actually normal) need for significance into the hollow, dehumanized spaces of Yuppie Manhattan. This (good) kind of diary is, after all, a person talking to themself — long a byword for insanity, until normalized with the advent of the cellphone (right around when this book came out).

Pat Bateman's an Underground Man without an articulable grievance (like Dosto's antihero, he styles his narrative as a "confession"); a first-person narrator who isn't a person; a voice that only gets more disembodied as the bodies pile up in its wake. And in the end he's abstracted into impotent thirdpersonhood, hovering over the impenetrable banality of his world like the ghost of one of his victims, not even at the center of his own story.

Funny as fuck, original, fully committed — American Psycho is tied with To The Finland Station for my book of the year so far. show less

When I read this book, I, as other reviewers, had to put it down for several days at a time to recover. The brutal depictions of rape, murder, torture, and callousness affected me deeply, and for several months following the finish of the book. I was irritable, quick to anger, and overslept.

When a friend of mine brought up the topic of the book two years later, I had a reaction I was not expecting. Two years after I put the book down forever, I had a memory of one of the scenes that I tried VERY hard not to remember, and tried VERY hard not to think about. The scene haunted me for hours after the conversation.

I had such a strong reaction to words, formed into sentences, structured into paragraphs; the affect of the book on my psyche is show more nothing short of amazing. I hate this book so much.

There are few things I wish could be unlearned. I wish I could unread this book. Future readers be warned. show less

Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, perfectly encapsulates Merriam-Webster's definition of psycho: "[a]...cruel person not endowed with the power of reason". His first-person narration about his late 80s Manhattan life reveals a wanton man dangerously drifting in and out of reality.

Bateman's confusion becomes the reader's as well because Ellis refuses to clarify whether his protagonist is a sadistic womanizer and serial killer or just a delusional, self-absorbed malcontent bored with his materialistic life. Even towards the end of the novel, when Bateman is shown as a shallow, insincere megalomaniac who has the good sense not to marry the girlfriend he doesn't love, who wastes hours on the telephone show more with his Wall Street cohorts carelessly making and unmaking evening plans, and who listens inattentively to his worshipful secretary confessing her love for him, we are not certain what to believe. How many of his previously portrayed sexual encounters actually occurred, with or without the violence most end in? Has he in fact killed anyone?

While the book leaves these questions unresolved, the scenes referenced above lend credence to a less phantasmic interpretation. In comparison to his ultra-violent trysts with prostitutes and the girlfriends of his supposed buddies, this Bateman is believable, relatable; he elicits a surprising degree of sympathy for a character whose actions heretofore, regardless of their basis in reality, have been deplorable and quite frankly repulsive. In the monster's place is an insecure man incapable of understanding himself or relating to others.

I chose American Psycho for my themed reading list under the category A Banned Book, a fitting consequence of its disturbing depictions of violence. Admittedly, I skipped over multiple scenes because their graphic descriptions go beyond any obligation to portray Bateman's depravity and in my mind detracted from the book. Yet despite the off-putting sadism in which Ellis traps his protagonist, the book also provides a powerful statement about the consequences of the soulless worship of wealth. Not an uplifting moral; more like a warning. show less

This book is still one of my absolute favorites. The satire feels all the more important today, especially in light of our post-bailout, raging-consumerist society. But also, something I missed on those first few go-rounds with the novel, as a younger man: the mental health aspects. It's a deeply unsettling thing to associate even slightly with a character like Patrick Bateman, but being 26 years old (the age of Bateman and most of his cohort when the novel begins), it's hard not to, just a little. I'm not going to start snorting coke off a Huey Lewis CD while torturing somebody, but I question my relevance in society and the reality of my relationships in the same way he does. It's the point of satire that it goes beyond the pale, show more pushing towards some kind of asymptotic extreme, but it should still ring home somehow... and, uncomfortable though it may sometimes be, this novel does.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/01/12/american-psycho/ show less

I really don't care if some people find this book horrifying, as I actually find it borderline genius. This is not about decent people trying to make a living. This is a story about self-absorbed yuppies who agonize over designer clothes, personal hygiene rituals, power lunch wars and business card stationery. Taking it to an absolute extreme, Ellis chooses to symbolize the blatant boredom and bleakness of such a lifestyle by creating a psychopath killer: Pat Bateman. And a psycho he truly is - Bateman is the narrator of the book, but he might as well have been referring to someone else he never met on the other side of the planet. His detachment, his flat tone, his coldness - Ellis combines all these elements to create a portrait that show more is at the same time surreal and completely believable. show less