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Book Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

An over-the-top satire on Wall Street culture, rife with brand name obsessions, spectacular misogyny and, of course, murder.

About the Book

Title: American Psycho

Author: Bret Easton Ellis

Published: 1991

Genre: fiction, horror, classics, modern classics

My Rating: 4/5 stars

The Premise

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America’s greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.

My Thoughts

I have mixed feelings on this book.

American Psycho is one of those books that I’ve been meaning to read for ages, due to the seemingly endless pop culture references to it, but never got around to. On some level I was avoiding it because I knew the subject matter and sure enough though I consider myself fairly desensitized to all manner of things, I found some scenes in this to be veritably stomach-turning. As I said to my friend, if you don’t want to read incredibly sick descriptions of violence against women maybe uh don’t pick this one up. On the whole, though, I was not surprised by the violence nearly as much as I was surprised by the humor. American Psycho is a surprisingly funny book. It is more clearly satirical than I was expecting.

Taking place amongst the insufferable social arena of 1980s Wall Street brokers, the novel is filled with plodding accounts of dinner reservations at high-end restaurants, rattling off brand-names and characters always on the search for attractive women and good ol’ cocaine. Though you might expect a life like this to be moderately exciting, decadent as it is, the novel quickly becomes repetitive and the reader begins to settle into the mundanity of life as Patrick Bateman lives it.

Patrick Bateman: Psychopath, Materialist, Chameleon

So let’s talk about Patrick, the unreliable narrator and disturbing character study to which the story is primarily devoted. A 26-year-old Wall Street broker with psychopathic tendencies, he meticulously details the events of each day, down to the brand names of every piece of clothing he and everyone else around him wears. It is our first glimpse into his materialism. With nowhere else to direct his energy (besides murder, it seems) he worships the material.

He is comically obsessed with outward appearances, and this is where much of the book’s humor manifests. Patrick’s priorities are extraordinarily mixed up. He details the murders he commits in excruciating detail, yet with zero emotion. The only times in the book where he displays any sort of human feeling is when his material vanity is disturbed, such as the “business card scene”, or when he can’t get a reservation at Dorsia. Another example of absurdity in the novel is Patrick’s constant pleas for attention and acknowledgement; he practically begs to be caught. He drops confessions into the vapid conversations he has with his business partners and girlfriends, which go unheard. Simply, no one cares about his life. Everyone is so absorbed in their own world of vapid obsession that Patrick’s comments about “I like to dissect girls. don’t you know I’m utterly insane?” go entirely unnoticed. This is another point of humor in the book that is nearly constant. It almost makes you feel bad for him in some twisted sort of way.

Patrick’s shallowness is not limited to his obsession with material wealth and possessions, however. Another constant theme in his character is his desire to fit in. He does this by obsessively consuming popular culture, and the novel has several chapters devoted to his bizarre reviews of popular music artists, like Huey Lewis and the News, and Whitney Houston. Often these are interspersed right after intense descriptions of his brutal murders and mutilations.

At the beginning of the book, there is a scene where Patrick is having dinner with some friends, and he goes on an odd rant about the current problems in the world, essentially reciting the most uncreative and standard political opinions that he thinks will be accepted by the social circle he is with. He has no opinions of his own, and when he does, he’s painfully hypocritical, changing his outward positioning based on what is more socially advantageous, or what will make him look most “like a normal person.”

Patrick Bateman has a vision of the kind of person he is which is incongruous with his actual behavior, and he hates to be called out on his hypocrisy. He shames his friends for making racist and anti-Semitic remarks, yet his internal monologue is itself virulently racist, homophobic, and of course misogynistic. He constantly makes fun of smokers for their “disgusting habit”, yet on several occasions he smokes cigars. He also looks down on people who use drugs, but he himself is constantly high on cocaine and benzodiazepines. Brett Easton Ellis has said that this book is based on his young adult life in New York. My interpretation is that American Psycho is that nihilistic, materialistic and identity-less existence as he felt it, taken to a gory extreme. The book is less about the brutal acts of violence that Patrick Bateman commits and more about the disturbed psyche behind the murderer himself.

Overall, it was a very unsettling read that I can’t say I’d like to re-read, as diving back into the twisted mind of this character is like hanging around the worst people you know, times a million.

Have you read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis? If so, what did you think? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

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American Psycho

By bret easton ellis.

Since its publication, Bret Easton Ellis' novel, 'American Psycho,' has received the praise and ridicule of many people.

About the Book

Written by Joshua Ehiosun

C2 certified writer.

With intense action-filled scenes, great dialogue, excellent characters , and an intricately designed storyline, ‘ American Psycho ‘ has become an undisputed modern classic of American literature. Since its publication, it has attracted many critiques who have expressed a stunning similarity between the society created by Bret Easton Ellis in his fictional world and that of the modern real world. Though the novel split its audience, it is undoubtedly one of the most critical stories about American society, capitalism, and consumerism.

‘American Psycho’ tells the story of investment banker Patrick Bateman as he struggles to gain control over his dark desires. Narrated from Patrick’s point of view, the book shows how a decadent and consumerism-focused society forces Bateman to begin seeking an avenue to express himself. Unable to emotionally connect with any human, Patrick gives in to his dark desires and becomes a serial killer.

He captures, tortures, rapes, and kills many, including homeless people, Paul Owen, Bethany, Christie, Elizabeth, a five-year-old child, and some prostitutes. With each kill, he plunges deeper into madness, and when no one listens to his confession, he goes on a rampage, killing strangers. Unable to help himself further, Patrick confesses all his crimes to his lawyer Harold Carnes. However, he gets shocked when he learns he never killed Paul Owen.

The story of ‘American Psycho’ is a peculiar one. The author uses the first-person perspective to give the reader a front seat in the protagonist’s mind. Then as the story progresses, the reader gets forced to witness Patrick’s degrading sanity.

With each chapter that passes, Patrick confesses he is nothing but a shell and repeatedly tells the reader how much he feels like killing someone. Then the story places the reader at the center of the brutal tortures and murders Patrick performs. Like a cinematic masterpiece, one gets forced to witness how elated Bateman feels with every kill he makes. The story forces its reader to become an unwilling witness to a crime.

Another crucial aspect of Bret’s novel is the alternating tone of the story. When Patrick is not committing a crime, the story seems slow-paced, panned-out, and borderline boring; this is to show how dragged out the protagonist feels his life is. Then when the tortures and murders begin, the story lights up, as if a spark gets ignited in Patrick.

At the climax, Bateman feels like he is in a Hollywood blockbuster showing how much he wants to be the center of the action. The story forces the reader to witness and experience the protagonist’s emotions as he scampers to safety.

Though ‘American Psycho’ made its characters stereotypically uninteresting, some may say it was intentional. In a world where materialistic value matters more than personality, robotic-dressing and sounding individuals become the norm; this is the case for most of the characters in the novel. Patrick Bateman, his friends, and his colleagues are all one-dimensional people who value nothing else but their status, possession, and image.

Most of Patrick’s friends and colleagues look and dress like him, and the women seem to act the same. The only breath of individuality portrayed in the novel came from characters like Christie and Jean. Also, the minor characters seemed more mentally and emotionally stable than the primary characters. Though Christie and Jean were nobodies according to Wall Street standards, they had more depth than the mindless people they worked with and for.

Though ‘American Psycho’ had good dialogues, the best took place in Patrick’s mind. Most of the time, he conversed with himself in a manner that seemed like he was talking to someone, the reader. Patrick makes several internal dialogues about his inner desire to mutilate people, to feel something, and to be human.

He expressed intense anger at society for being unable to see his pain, and he justified his crimes by stating he wanted others to feel how bad he felt. The conversations between Bateman and himself, or the reader, showed how desperate he needed a person who could sympathize with him.

‘American Psycho’ features grotesque action and violence. Throughout the story, Patrick indulges in torturing and murdering people. With each action scene, there is a very delicate and detailed description of the events that occur. It is as if Bateman wants the reader to visualize and enjoy what he is doing.

When he goes on a rampage, Patrick gets chased by cops, and the world becomes a Hollywood blockbuster. He gets chased by a helicopter but miraculously escapes. The intense focus and description of the action scenes in the novel created a divide among readers. Years later, Bret Easton admitted he wrote ‘American Psycho’ loosely inspired by his life but was too scared to admit it because of how much backlash the brutality of the violence portrayed was.

After the novel’s climax, Patrick meets his lawyer Harold Carnes but gets the surprise of a lifetime; Paul Owen is alive. With such a conclusion, the reader begins doubting everything Bateman claimed he did, as he becomes an unreliable source of information. One may conclude that he was imagining everything and that none of the murders occurred.

American Psycho: Unsettling Brilliance

Book Title: American Psycho

Book Description: 'American Psycho' chronicles Patrick Bateman, a Manhattan banker with a facade of luxury, who descends into murder, beginning with the killing of his colleague, Paul Owen.

Book Author: Bret Easton Ellis

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Vintage Books

Date published: March 6, 1991

ISBN: 978-0-679-73577-9

Number Of Pages: 399

Lasting Effect on Reader

American Psycho Review

‘American Psycho’ is a novel that follows the life of Patrick Bateman, a Manhattan investment banker. With a knack for materialistic vanities, Patrick starts thinking about killing and torturing people. After he meets a colleague, Paul Owen, he lures him to his home, where he brutally murders him. From then, a serial killer gets born.

The story is refreshing and well-constructed.
The sense of detail in fashion is impeccable.
The climax is incredible.
The story places the reader at the center of the action.
The book is very violent.
Not suitable for people with a fear of blood, death, and torture.
Depicts cruel scenes of rape and mutilation.
The characters may appear one-dimensional.

About Joshua Ehiosun

Joshua is an undying lover of literary works. With a keen sense of humor and passion for coining vague ideas into state-of-the-art worded content, he ensures he puts everything he's got into making his work stand out. With his expertise in writing, Joshua works to scrutinize pieces of literature.

Cite This Page

Ehiosun, Joshua " American Psycho Review ⭐️ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/bret-easton-ellis/american-psycho/review/ . Accessed 3 April 2024.

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Michael Byers

The Savage Ethics of “American Psycho”

What bret easton ellis’s novel teaches us about capitalism.

By John Paul Rollert
November 08, 2016
CBR - Economics
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As trigger warnings go, it’s hard to imagine what more an author might do than title his book American Psycho . And yet the advance notice didn’t prevent the controversy surrounding Bret Easton Ellis’s infamous novel from blossoming into full-blown outrage when it was published in the spring of 1991. The previous fall, Simon & Schuster told the hotshot author he could keep his $300,000 advance for a book they absolutely refused to publish. By the time the novel finally arrived in bookstores after Vintage Books, a division of Random House, brazenly purchased the rights, bootleg copies of the manuscript had been floating around for months, filling the news with snippets of the sadistic behavior of the book’s protagonist (and said psycho), Patrick Bateman.

The publication of the novel did not initially prove sweet vindication for Ellis. As a literary offering, American Psycho found few defenders—most notably Norman Mailer, a man who had made a fine career courting controversy—but Roger Rosenblatt of the New York Times spoke for most critics when he called the book “the most loathsome offering of the season.” As a cultural referendum, the decision was even more decisive. The National Organization for Women threatened a boycott of Random House, at least one executive at Vintage Books received death threats, and Germany banned the work outright. Ellis himself became the most divisive figure in the literary world this side of Salman Rushdie.

Time has proven a better friend to the book. Twenty-five years after it was first published, American Psycho is now a canonical work of social satire, widely regarded by gender theorists and feminist critics alike as a scabrous assessment of modern masculinity run amok. It has sold over 1 million copies, been successfully adapted for the big screen and Broadway (as a musical, no less), and, in an achievement shared by only a handful of American authors, bequeathed a character of such salience that he has been thoroughly appropriated by popular culture. As Ellis told Rolling Stone in 2011, “I cannot tell you how many times young men have come up to me and showed me on their phones pictures of them dressed as Patrick Bateman for Halloween.” One wonders if the same may be said for Huck Finn and Captain Ahab.

American Psycho also remains, to my mind, the single most damning critique of the cultural consequences of contemporary capitalism. By drawing a parallel between the ritualistic displays of domination on Wall Street and the predations of an actual psychopath, Ellis not only shows how soft sadism shades into truly violent behavior, he suggests that the peculiar customs of the commercial elite can blind us to the difference.

Ellis didn’t set out to write a satirical cri de coeur . By 1987, the 23-year-old author had already published two novels about the carnal recreations of spoiled college students, and in search of a third storyline with something of an adult setting, he found himself drawn to the gold-plated phantasmagoria of the go-go 1980s financial sector. Initially, Ellis said in a recent interview, he envisioned “a much more earnest and straightforward novel, akin to what the movie Wall Street became with the Bud Fox character being seduced by Gordon Gekko.” His time among the legion of young bankers who arrived in lower Manhattan each fall changed this ambition. “[T]he longer I hung out with these guys that I was researching to write the book,” he said, “the more the aspect of the serial killer came into view. I don’t know why; I just suddenly thought, ‘Oh, my God. He’s going to be a serial killer.’”

He, of course, is Patrick Bateman, “Mr. Wall Street” as one character dubs him, though on the surface he doesn’t seem any different from the other bankers around him. In fact, throughout the novel it’s a running joke that all of the 20-something professionals so closely adhere to the same lifestyle aesthetic that they are constantly mistaken for one another. “[H]e looks nothing like the other men in the room,” Bateman sniffs early on in the book, noting an artist who has invaded a social gathering. “[H]is hair isn’t slicked back, no suspenders, no horn-rimmed glasses, the clothes black and ill-fitting, no urge to light and suck on a cigar, probably unable to secure a table at Camols, his net worth a pittance.”

What is striking about the young men of Ellis’s world is less that they are superficial, per se, than that they are strictly conformist in their superficiality.

The pathological obsessiveness of Bateman and his ilk with a gilded persona (and, given their affinity for tanning beds, a bronzed bottom) reaffirms Ellis’s stated aim of describing “a society in which the surface became the thing only.” And yet, the author goes above and beyond a satire of simple narcissism or even consumerism in the extreme by the straitjacketed quality of the young men’s commercial proclivities. They all favor the same high-end designer labels (“Price is wearing a six-button wool and silk suit by Ermenegildo Zegna, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar, a Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rossetti”); they all frequent the same carousel of culinary hot spots (Pastels, Thaidialano, Crayons, Bellini); and they all crave the newest high-tech toys (“You’ve got to have the Infinity IRS V speakers”). This in addition to the fact that they all attended the same schools, sleep with the same women, and share more or less the same profession.

If you watch a few minutes of footage from one of Andy Warhol’s Factory parties, you will be reminded that a superficial bent hardly requires a stunning lack of imagination. To that end, what is striking about the young men of Ellis’s world is less that they are superficial, per se, than that they are strictly conformist in their superficiality. A walking reference book for the finer points of tasteful excess, Bateman himself is constantly being canvassed about fashionable behavior, everything from the titivations of tieholders (“Choose a simple gold bar or a small clip and place it at the lower end of the tie at a downward forty-five-degree angle”) to the scruples of sparkling water (“But only buy naturally sparkling water” because “that means the carbon dioxide content is in the water at its source”).

In Class , Paul Fussell’s gimlet-eyed de gustibus published a few years before American Psycho , the curmudgeonly social critic said that such painstaking attention to the punctilios of appearance was a telltale sign of an excessive concern about “status slippage.” The “perfect shirt collar, the too neatly tied necktie knot, the anxious overattention to dry cleaning,” Fussell wrote, “all betray the wimp.” No doubt, among the bankers in Ellis’s book, there is certainly the talcum whiff of wimpiness. All of them are eternally worried that their failure to precisely observe some cultural practice will see them regarded with the same scornful glances they casually inflict on others, and insofar as their understanding of status is inseparable from a stale assessment of youthful beauty (“‘Was I really not that tan at Harvard?’ I ask mock-worriedly, but worriedly”), the young men surely make for a fey portrait of fragile masculinity.

And yet, “status slippage” alone doesn’t explain the incessant one-upmanship that spurs the consumerism of Patrick Bateman and his band of brothers (and sparks so much of the novel’s humor). A century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber contended that, whereas the engine of the Protestant ethic had once kept the wheels of capitalism turning (think God helps those who help themselves as the lynchpin of a complex social theory), that force had ebbed over the course of the 19th century. What replaced it? “In the field of [capitalism’s] highest development,” Weber wrote, “in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.”

The iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen had reached something of a similar conclusion not long before Weber. For him, however, rather than replacing a divine injunction, the sporting quality of contemporary capitalism had more to do with a vacuum left by a world that was no longer characterized by the barbaric practices of pillage and plunder. When those undertakings gave way to the hustle and bustle of business, he said, the predatory instinct was turned into pecuniary drive.

Veblen described this transformation in his foremost book, The Theory of the Leisure Class . “Gradually, as industrial activity further displaces predatory activity in the community’s everyday life,” he said, “accumulated property more and more replaces trophies of predatory exploit as the conventional exponent of prepotence and success.” For Veblen, even if the trophies themselves changed over time, in their social significance, they were no less essential to the quainter precincts of Palo Alto than they once had been in the fashionable farmsteads of a Viking village.

To demonstrate your superiority was the motivating force of modern capitalism, and the opportunities that provided for it might be sportive in nature or something more ominous.

Accordingly, throughout the book, Veblen conjures the constellation of contemporary practices, which, like a peacock’s plumage, signal unmistakably an individual’s financial fitness. Importantly for him, the semaphore of elite social standing was not merely a by-product of commercial accomplishment, it was the very aim of such striving. The claim to dominance in the modern world did not reside in having money, but in making that fact widely known by means of (Veblen’s most abiding expression) conspicuous consumption.

Nevertheless, such command was not established simply by the ability to consume, but to consume nicely. The wealthy man, Veblen notes, assisted by an education in refinement and the opportunity for leisure, “becomes a connoisseur,” exercising his purchasing potential with an exhaustive knowledge “in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and narcotics”—a list, like so many of those in Ellis’s book, that brings to mind the late French philosopher Henri Bergson’s quip that the only cure for vanity is laughter.

Less laughable, no doubt, is the green-eyed monster that inflames the acquisitive instinct even when it is placated by garish excess. Jealousy is the consequence of domination as well as the spur to its achievement. For Veblen most certainly, and for Weber in his own way, to demonstrate your superiority was the motivating force of modern capitalism, and the opportunities that provided for it might be sportive in nature or something more ominous.

Journalist Michael Lewis described the latter possibility in his memoir, Liar’s Poker , when he introduced his readers to the trading floor of Salomon Brothers, where he worked as a fresh-faced kid from Princeton in the mid-1980s. The “chosen home of the firm’s most ambitious people,” the trading floor was “governed” by a simple belief: “Eat or be eaten.” As such, it was a work environment with “no rules governing the pursuit of profit and glory,” one in which savage expressions, which always accompany even the most staid visions of social Darwinism, were wholeheartedly welcome. To be on the losing side of some transaction, Lewis soon learned, was to have your “face ripped off”; to get the better end of some deal, especially a big one, was to “blow up” a customer.

Released just two years before American Psycho , Liar’s Poker reads something like a sly sociological study to Ellis’s social satire, and it substantiates the psychological predicates of the latter’s character study: captive ambition (“I narrowly escaped imprisonment myself”), overwhelming cupidity (“I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished”), and crippling jealousy (“‘You don’t get rich in this business,’ said Alexander when I complained privately to him [about the size of my bonus]. ‘You only attain new levels of relative poverty’”). In the voice of Patrick Bateman, Ellis’s diagnosis is far more succinct: “There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, disgust.”

Applied to any actual person, such a judgment would be highly simplistic, but Ellis is a novelist, and he freely typifies in service of his creative aims. In their gourmandizing, determined drug use, sartorial self-indulgence, addiction to high-tech knickknacks and “for-men” frippery, and in all their libidinal excess, to say nothing of their scorn for penury and perceived weaknesses (a favorite game involves dangling a dollar bill before a homeless person before gleefully snatching it back), the satellite characters of Ellis’s novel seem merely the mundane fulfillment of Weber’s prophecy, that modern capitalism would nurture a generation of “sensualists without heart.”

Patrick Bateman, of course, is a breed apart from his fellow bankers, but (and this is the novel’s most haunting suggestion) only by evolutionary degrees. When the mayhem begins, it is presented as nothing more than another instance of sybaritic excess. “I feel heady, ravenous, pumped up,” Bateman says after slicing up a homeless man. “As if I’d just worked out and endorphins are flooding my nervous system, or just embraced that first line of cocaine, inhaled the first puff of a fine cigar, sipped that first glass of Cristal.” Ultimately, the act of murder is merely an exercise in the most self-indulgent display of all, savage dominance, and if it steadily becomes more elaborate and ornate (which it notoriously does), that is because, like ambition, the thrill lies not in the act itself but in the knowledge that it doesn’t suffer by comparison.

It needn’t be said that physical violence occupies a separate moral plane from the mischief of Liar’s Poker . Having your “face ripped off” and having your face ripped off are certainly not identical. Still, the celebration of unabashed sadism in service of superiority and personal success, a spirit that contemporary capitalism seems to tolerate and even abet, is what unites the two books, and one might be forgiven for wondering the degree to which it has contaminated the broader culture. In The Big Short , Lewis says that, while he had always viewed Liar’s Poker as a cautionary tale, not long after it was published he began receiving fan mail from college boys who had read the book as “a how-to manual,” and between them and the aforementioned Halloween revelers, one suspects more than a little overlap.

If the first wave of readers missed the moral conundrums of American Psycho , it may be because, like Lewis’s pen pals, they mistook a catalogue of outrage, excruciating in detail and description, for an endorsement of carnal extravagance. If so, it is a tribute to the salacious subtlety of Ellis’s novel, which, like Liar’s Poker or, for that matter The Great Gatsby , blinds more than a few readers by its meretricious glint.

Such subtlety, substantial not stylistic, is a hallmark of exceptional imaginative literature, which so often contributes to ethics by making everyday discernments seem slightly more ambiguous. The enduring significance of American Psycho is not that it demonstrates the obvious, namely that between the casual cruelty of the Salomon trading floor and the extravagant barbarity of Patrick Bateman there is a point at which the sadism stops being funny. (This should be clear, and clearly felt, to anyone who is not an actual psycho.) The achievement is simpler and more straightforward, and ultimately sharp as a stiletto. To ask, as a matter of moral reckoning: Between the two, what’s the difference?

John Paul Rollert is an adjunct assistant professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth.

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The Literary Edit

Review: American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

My lovely friend Ben recommended I read American Psycho while he was visiting Sydney from Chicago last summer; I bought a copy soon after he left in January but it wasn’t until the approach to Hallowe’en that I decided to read it. Little did I know how apt my timing would be; and that I would finish Ellis’s most famous novel a matter of hours before the election results were announced. As people the world over reacted with shock and despair to America’s new president, I wondered what central protagonist Patrick Bateman – who has a warped fascination with Trump – would have made of the day’s events, twenty-five years after the publication of the book.

While American Psycho certainly isn’t the kind of book I would have normally picked up, reading my way through the BBC Top 100 taught me the importance and benefit of reading beyond your normal genre, and knowing little about what lay ahead, I was intrigued and compelled to read on from the get go.

A narcissist of the most potent form, Patrick Bateman is young and successful, with a superior self-worth and a compulsion to kill. And despite the goriness growing greater as the novel progressed, I found the novel almost impossible to put down.

Disturbing, dark, and – in parts – downright nauseating, American Psycho is an insightful interpretation of the life of a serial killer that serves as a critique of both culture and masculinity, where other people’s thoughts and feelings are second to your own desires.

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Guardian book club: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho

It's almost pointless, blogging on American Psycho . Most people made up their minds about Patrick Bateman and his murderous progress through the New York yuppie scene long ago. It might be best to write, simply: "Discuss." I'm not going to change your position, am I?

Having said that, it is interesting to note how much more favourable modern opinion is towards the book than it was back in 1991. I'm guessing your comments will be much more appreciative of Bret Easton Ellis's efforts than they would have been 20 years ago. Now that American Psycho, which is the subject of this month's Guardian book club , has become an established feature of the literary landscape and is generally acknowledged as a modern classic, it's fascinating to go back through the archives and discover how much critics hated the book when it first came out.

The Guardian's digital archive, for instance, features a review by Joan Smith, who described the book as "nasty, brutish and long". She noted, with inadvertent hilarity, that it was "unconvincing" in its depictions of murder and concluded that it was "an entirely negligible piece of work, badly written and wholly lacking in insight or illumination". Andrew Motion in the Observer meanwhile lamented that the book was "throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety."

To describe such reviewers as suffering from a sense of humour failure is almost as much of an understatement as the following delightful assessment I came across on Wikipedia: "Bateman's mental state appears increasingly questionable."

But the reviewers were minor players when it came to hating the book. Its troubled emergence into the world is well known. Simon and Schuster refused to publish at the last minute and let Ellis walk off with his alleged $300,000 advance. They claimed editorial objections; Ellis claimed that they feared commercial reprisals. Spy magazine had just written an excoriating article about the way Bateman likes to rip the skin off women, and the LA chapter of the National Organisation of Women had started sharpening their knives (branding the work: "a how to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women") and threatening a boycott of whoever dared publish it.

Luckily, Sonny Mehta, the president and editor-in-chief of Knopf (a division of Random House), purchased the book for Vintage, defending his decision on the grounds that Ellis's novel was "serious". The boycott did indeed take place, the critics savaged the book, and only a few lone voices spoke out against them (like Fay Weldon – also in the Guardian, redeemingly – who described it as a "beautifully controlled, important novel").

As they nearly always do, the boycott-and-ignore lobby brought the book fantastic publicity, it sold in the hundreds of thousands and has remained essential reading ever since. Ellis's evisceration of the creatures that roam around Wall Street seems more relevant than ever in the face of the recent world recession. The motif of the serial killer working in plain view because none of his contemporaries was prepared or able to look beyond his haircut, his clothes and his pay cheque seems horribly prescient in the light of Enron and the great sub-prime Ponzi scheme. Sonny Mehta was right. It is a "serious" work: seriously funny, seriously sharp, seriously sick, and, to borrow Andrew Motion's construction, seriously serious.

It's also a significant work of literature. The collision of absurd reality and deranged fantasy still works a treat. Bateman's voice – obsessive, and only a very small fraction of a degree madder than the average style magazine – is a superb achievement: equally unsettling when he describes a suit, the "emotional honesty" of Phil Collins, or doing unspeakable things to prostitutes. There's also the disturbing uncertainty of the whole thing. Should we believe anything Bateman says? Does he actually look good? Does he attract hardbodies as easily as he makes out? Is he really a killer? Do cash machines really demand that he feeds them cats? It's impossible to tell. But there's no doubt that it works as an indictment of a culture.

Yet to talk of such weighty matters hardly does justice to the most significant aspect of the American Psycho reading experience: the fact that it's hilarious. As well as being a repulsive nightmare, Patrick Bateman is a comic creation of the highest order. His snobbery, his bad taste, his obsession with Les Mis and ability to take Huey Lewis and the News seriously, his terror when someone has a better business card than him, his constant worry that he has "to return some videos" all add up to one of the funniest comic creations since Bertie Wooster. True, he isn't quite such pleasant company as Bertie, but what did you expect? He's a psycho.

Comments will be most appreciated, as they'll help inform John Mullan's final book club column this month.

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American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

In Hindsight, an ‘American Psycho’ Looks a Lot Like Us

By Dwight Garner

March 24, 2016

When Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” was about to be published in 1991, word of its portrait of a monster — an amoral young Wall Street serial killer named Patrick Bateman, who nail-gunned women to the floor before doing vastly worse to them — was met with outrage.

There were death threats. A book tour was scuttled. The Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women proposed a boycott of the novel’s publisher. An advance review of “American Psycho” in The New York Times Book Review was titled “Snuff This Book!” Some stores refused to stock the novel.

I didn’t read “American Psycho” at the time. I was two years out of college in 1991, and while I’d eagerly ingested the stylish mid-80s debuts of the so-called “brat pack” writers, of which Mr. Ellis’s novel “Less Than Zero” (1985) is a crucial artifact, I’d moved on.

Yet it disturbed me that, in the moral panic over “American Psycho,” so many smart people made a rookie mistake: They’d confused author with character. Bret Easton Ellis and Patrick Bateman were pariahs.

Flash forward 25 years, to 2016. Lo, how things have changed. Over the past decade or so, Bateman has become a pop something, a grinning, blood-flecked national gargoyle. A brash new musical based on “American Psycho” is set to open on Broadway. You can purchase Bateman action figures . Bateman memes — photographs and GIFs from the director Mary Harron’s excellent 2000 film version of “American Psycho” — splash across every corner of the web. (“I have to return some videotapes” is among the movie’s indelible lines.)

[Read about Benjamin Walker, the star of the Broadway musical adaptation of “American Psycho.”]

Each Halloween, there’s at least one Bateman at the party, some fellow with a gleaming ax and a raincoat, his hair slicked tightly back in that cretinous late-80s style still favored by Donald Trump’s sons.

How to fathom the second coming of Patrick Bateman? The cult following and gradual critical embrace of Ms. Harron’s film, which starred Christian Bale, has played the primary role. Ms. Harron recognized the coal-black satire in Mr. Ellis’s novel and teased it to the surface. In her “American Psycho,” dire comedy mixes with Grand Guignol. There’s demented opera in some of its scenes. The film, like a painful zit on one’s lower lip, pops.

That Mr. Ellis’s novel, alleged by some to be among the most misogynistic books in American lit, was coaxed to cinematic life by a woman adds Möbius-strip layers of cultural complexity. Film and gender scholars will be off in the corner, continuing to untangle the knots, for at least a generation.

With time, the book itself has picked up a good deal of grudging respect, too. It’s seen as a transgressive bag of broken glass that can be talked about alongside plasma-soaked trips like Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) and Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” (1985), even if relatively few suggest Mr. Ellis is in those novelists’ league.

I read “American Psycho” for the first time recently, and this is certain: This novel was ahead of its time.

The culture has shifted to make room for Bateman. We’ve developed a taste for barbaric libertines with twinkling eyes and some zing in their tortured souls. Tony Soprano, Walter White from “Breaking Bad,” Hannibal Lecter (who predates “American Psycho”) — here are the most significant pop culture characters of the past 30 years. Along with Bateman, they comprise a Mount Rushmore lineup of the higher antihero naughtiness. (Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is among the too-rare rejoinders to a world in which men can brutalize women without regard.) Thanks to these characters, and to first-person shooter video games, we’ve learned to identify with the bearer of violence and not just cower before him or her.

Mr. Bale’s role in Bateman’s liftoff is impossible to underestimate. You can trace the character’s ascent along the arc of the actor’s career. (Bateman, Batman, Bale, baleful — there’s a malevolent linguistic richness in this subject matter.) He’s slowly become recognized as the dominant actor of his generation. This lends Ms. Harron’s film backward flowing gravitas.

Picking up “American Psycho” now, you can’t help but ask yourself: Do people get outraged by books anymore? Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” aside — it was published three years before Mr. Ellis’s novel — it’s difficult to recall a recent novel that was so arduously condemned.

The battles over books like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lolita” are far back in the rearview mirror. The complicated misogyny and Islamophobia that flow through the French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novels are greeted with a wink and a shrug.

Reading Mr. Ellis’s novel today, the hysteria of 1991 is almost inexplicable to me. It’s apparent from the start that Patrick Bateman is a sendup of a blank Wall Street generation. He’s a male mannequin, the ultimate soulless product of a soulless time, Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” come to howling fruition.

The New York Times Book Review piece was written by Roger Rosenblatt. The novelist John Irving, also writing in the Book Review, correctly called Mr. Rosenblatt’s essay “prissy enough to please Jesse Helms.”

Bateman is a serial killer. He’s also an Exeter and Harvard grad, a gourmand, a tanning enthusiast and a ruthless fashion critic. A common literary-world rap against this novel was frustration with its endless litanies of what people wear. (Typical sentence: “McDermott is wearing a woven-linen suit with pleated trousers, a button-down cotton and linen shirt by Basile, a silk tie by Joseph Abboud and ostrich loafers from Susan Bennis Warren Edwards.”)

I found these litanies shrewd, a signal that Bateman is all about surfaces. They also feel like Mr. Ellis’s satire of writers who fill their pages with descriptions of trees and birds and insects. Clothes are Bateman’s pileated woodpeckers.

It’s impossible, in 2016, to talk about “American Psycho” without mentioning Bateman’s hero-worship of another well-tailored suit: Donald Trump. Bateman keeps a copy of Mr. Trump’s magnum opus, “The Art of the Deal,” on his desk. His dream is to be invited on the Trump yacht.

This is probably the place to point out that a recent issue of New Statesman, the British weekly, had a drawing of Mr. Trump on its cover with this headline: “American Psycho.”

Bateman asks his girlfriend, “Why wasn’t Donald Trump invited to your party?” She replies: “Oh god. Is that why you were acting like such a buffoon? This obsession has got to end!” It provides a sense of this novel’s offbeat comedy to print Bateman’s response to this: “‘It was the Waldorf salad, Evelyn,’ I say, teeth clenched. ‘It was the Waldorf salad that was making me act like an ass!’” Who isn’t driven to the brink by a Waldorf salad?

This food talk is a reminder that “American Psycho” has yet to receive its full due as the most wicked and sustained mockery of the late-80s restaurant scene that we have in our literature. Bateman and his friends are forever sitting down to meals like eagle carpaccio and free-range squid and gazpacho with hunks of raw chicken in it.

The book’s consumption gets darker. By the end, Bateman attempts to turn a dead woman into meatloaf. Here we approach the grisly and infamous portions of “American Psycho.”

There are only a handful of torture scenes. This novel is not wall-to-wall mutilation; it’s wall-to-wall moral vacuity. Still, these scenes are brutal in their exactitude: There are power drills and chain saws and lips snipped off with nail clippers and vaginas cut out to store in gym lockers.

Mr. Ellis told The Paris Review he consulted an F.B.I. textbook about serial killers to come up with some of this stuff. I sometimes had to read between my fingers. Yet there’s also a comic book texture to the literal and figurative overkill.

Here again, Mr. Ellis was racing ahead of the culture. Something has happened since 1991 to our response to violence, especially when it is seasoned with a shake of wet or, especially, dry humor. Increasingly inured to the mess, we’ve learned to savor the wit.

The catharsis that horror can provide now travels on a second and more intellectualized rail. Whether this fact will save or sink us, morally, we do not yet know.

Shortly after the book’s publication, Mr. Ellis spoke words to The Times that he shouldn’t have had to speak: “I would think most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate between the writer and the character he is writing about. People seem to insist I’m a monster. But Bateman is the monster. I am not on the side of that creep.”

The writer Donald Barthelme once put this same idea more memorably: “Don’t confuse the monster on the page,” he advised, “with the monster here in front of you.”

“American Psycho” is, in its way, strangely moving. The novel is streaked with Bateman’s attempts to confess his crimes. He lusts for genuine contact. He tells one woman to go home because he thinks he might harm her. “I think,” he says, “I’m losing it.”

Writing in Town and Country , Mr. Ellis said recently that if he had composed the novel in the past decade, Bateman might be “palling around with [Mark] Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.”

Swipe left, young ladies.

Alive today, Bateman would also probably stand at the back of a Trump rally and — if he could find a designer version — pull on a red cap that reads: “Make America Great Again.”

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Book Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

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American Psycho

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

American Psycho: Introduction

American psycho: plot summary, american psycho: detailed summary & analysis, american psycho: themes, american psycho: quotes, american psycho: characters, american psycho: symbols, american psycho: theme wheel, brief biography of bret easton ellis.

Historical Context of American Psycho

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Full Title: American Psycho
When Written: the late 1980s and early 1990s
Where Written: New York City
When Published: 1991
Literary Period: Contemporary American Fiction, Postmodernism, Satire
Genre: Novel
Setting: New York City, the late 1980s
Climax: Bateman’s police chase and his confessional voicemails to his lawyer, Harold Carnes
Point of View: First-Person

Extra Credit for American Psycho

Take Your Money and Go. American Psycho was originally slated to be published by Simon & Schuster. However in November of 1990, the company, citing “aesthetic differences,” dropped the book over its graphic and misogynistic content. Bret Easton Ellis got to keep the money anyway. Later that year, it was picked up and published by Vintage Books.

Is He or Isn’t He?. Bret Easton Ellis revealed in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone that he’s never made a firm decision about whether or not Patrick Bateman is truly committing the heinous crimes he describes in the novel, saying, “That was what was so interesting to me about it. You can read the book either way.”

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American Psycho. Hardcover – Import, January 1, 1998

Print length 416 pages
Language English
Publisher Picador
Publication date January 1, 1998
Dimensions 5.12 x 1.46 x 7.76 inches
ISBN-10 0330372483
ISBN-13 978-0330372480
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; New Ed edition (January 1, 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330372483
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330372480
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.17 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 1.46 x 7.76 inches
#3,294 in Dark Humor
#7,295 in Fiction Urban Life
#13,251 in Fiction Satire

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Bret easton ellis.

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories; his work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Greg Staples, best known for his work on Judge Dredd and as a concept artist for Magic: The Gathering , brings his realistic painterly style to capture the likeness of Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman. See Patrick Bateman's infamous New York City killing spree from a brand new perspective as a familiar character from the film is revealed to be much more than they appeared. Witness the greatest hits of Patrick's murderous rampage while exploring new revelations in the world of American Psycho, in this story that'll make fans see Patrick's bloody story through a whole new lens. This limited series also begins the journey of an all-new psychopath as social media obsessed millennial, Charlie (Charlene) Carruthers, goes on a downward spiral filled with violence. Drug fueled partying leads to bloodshed as Charlie leaves a trail of bodies on her way to discovering the truth about her dark nature. more

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American Psycho #1 is an impressive comic book that does the movie and novel justice. Michael Calero's writing, Kowalski's art, Brad Simpson's colors and Myers' lettering are superb, providing us with a similar feel to the feature film. The story is fresh and exciting, with new revelations to keep us engaged. We cannot wait to see where this story is going. Read Full Review

AMERICAN PSYCHO #1 offers engaging mysteries, a gritty atmosphere, and brutal violence, aligning with expectations for a psycho-themed comic. However, the lack of clarity in the connection between timelines may leave readers perplexed, requiring a deep understanding of the film for full comprehension. The reliance on prior knowledge can be both an asset and a drawback. Read Full Review

American Psycho #1 isn't a bad comic but it just doesn't deliver the same witty commentary of its source material. It's just the first issue though and this is likely going to be a miniseries that'll have to be judged on the whole and not individual parts. Read Full Review

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Book Review – American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis is a 1991 psychological thriller novel about a young man named Patrick Bateman. He is 26 years old, was born into great wealth, and currently works on Wall Street. He is smart, sophisticated, handsome, and in great shape, focusing much of his attention into cultivating his looks into a model of perfection. He is also a psychopath, having depraved fantasies that he increasingly cannot resist acting upon, sating his blood lust on innocent people he considers beneath him.

This novel has been something of a white whale of mine for a long time, as I’ve owned a copy for well over a decade now but have procrastinated actually reading it. Numerous times I’ve added it to yearly to-read lists, but it was passed over. I had heard a few details that made it sound like the book might be a slog in some ways, but I wasn’t really deterred by them, I just wasn’t very compelled. Now that I have read it, I can say with confidence that it was a reading experience unlike any other that I’ve had.

It’s hard not to bring up this early how at odds I found myself to be with this book. On the one hand, giving credit where it is very much due, Ellis’s skill as a writer is undeniable in this book. For instance, Bateman pathologically fixates on superficial details, which he does throughout the book. I had thought going in that this would be a chore to read, but it is written in such a way that I always felt fairly immersed in his twisted stream of consciousness. Although there is very little in the way of a plot to speak of as well, I never felt like my time was being wasted either. Ellis is putting a very specific facet of Western society under a microscope in this book and, with some exceptions, everything felt necessary to putting together what he wanted to represent.

On the other hand, I found many sections of this book deeply unpleasant, to the point where I took a lot longer finishing it than I otherwise would have. Like I’ve already said, Bateman fixates a lot on fine details, and this is perhaps most impactful during both sex scenes and gruesome murder scenes, which often coincide. Described explicitly yet in a very matter-of-fact way, the former are pornographic without being erotic, and the latter are downright sickening, escalating with each encounter. Though it is clear that Ellis is doing more than just trying to be shocking or scandalous, I really cannot stress how unpleasant a lot of this book was to read.

Unpleasantness aside for a moment, the bulk of the book really follows Patrick through his life as a professional on Wall Street, where he has a high-paying job yet seems to do little to no actual work. He spends his time obsessing over the finer things in life simply because they are expensive, such as fretting over dinner reservations and fancy dress etiquette, and he obsesses over his looks. He is pathetically superficial and without depth, the novel doing a good job of capturing how the ultra rich and successful often seem to live a life detached from reality and real struggle.

A factor related to this superficiality that resonated most with me is his constant obsession with listing the products he buys and uses, the art he hangs on his walls, the designer clothing he and everybody else is wearing. I don’t believe Ellis is inventing products or brands, but in the moment I had no real way of knowing without looking them up, but I quickly realized it didn’t really matter. Bateman wants them because he has been told they’re luxurious and they’re expensive. There is no depth to it, he cares little for them beyond that, the same as everybody else in the book. Their obsessions are all very hedonistic and meaningless.

This actually ties into something that struck a chord with me with the violence in this book too. Though this feels a little peripheral to the ideas that the book is pursing as a whole, at one point during a one of his murders I was struck by how vapid it and all the others were. There is no suspense, no tension, and no stakes. It is just Patrick Bateman getting his kicks brutalizing a new victim, having his nasty little thoughts while he does it. His mundane superficial life is pathetically surface-level and so too are these psychotic fantasies he’s fulfilling.

It made me think of some people’s more gauche or distasteful fixations on true crime and serial killers. Sometimes, both fans of and the media representing serial killers seem to try to represent them as more than what they are, like they’re villains from a horror story. Patrick himself tries to bring up details about serial killers with his friends, but he is always rebuffed. So, what I started to find meaningful about how Patrick’s murders were written, despite how discomforting they were, was the fact that they were utterly vacuous. There’s nothing complex or deep about his behaviour, he doesn’t have some sort of twisted insight into society, and they weren’t even compelling as narrative. He just views some people as meat because he is a sick man. The unpleasantness, though off-putting, is the point.

Final Thoughts

American Psycho opens with the words “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here” from The Divine Comedy , which is rather apt. Within, you are treated to a modern world of excess devoid of personal connections beyond anything surface-level; half of these people cannot even identify each other properly and they do not seem to care. Almost all the central characters (I do not count victims, who I see more as bystanders to Patrick and his world) engage in faithless behaviour; there is no loyalty to their friendships or romantic connections, except for maybe one poor soul. Patrick’s crimes are sometimes mentioned, but largely and inexplicably ignored, if they really happened at all. Patrick himself is a woefully unreliable point-of-view character, leaving you wondering how much really happens, yet you can’t escape the feeling that at least some of it must have.

If you have the stomach for it, I recommend checking the book out. It is definitely a piece of literature that accomplishes more than just being shocking. However, by my own metrics, I cannot rate it especially high, as I can’t get past the fact that its most unpleasant sections made for a relatively miserable reading experience for me.

My Rating: 3 out of 5