Classic Book Review : Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho (1991)
American Psycho is (arguably) one of the most important novels of the last 50 years. Canonized nine years after its publication by a now iconic movie adaptation, it has been hailed as the ultimate indictment of the hypermaterialism of Ronald Reagan years and corporate apex predator it have birth to. Today, Patrick Bateman is revered as this ultimate theoretical example of how rich and successful people are all secretly psychopaths and that you need to be a psychopath to get rich and successful. What if I told you we had it all wrong?
What if I told you we’ve canonized a novel based on an erroneous reading, but that it deserves to be canonized anyway?
In case you've been living under a rock since the turn of the millennium : American Psycho tells the story of a twenty-six years old Wall Street executive named Patrick Bateman, who lives the most glamorous lifestyle money (and his soulless job) can afford him. He eats in the best restaurants, wears the most prestigious designer clothes, frequents only the elite of the elite, etc. He's also beating off to horror movies and nurturing deviant fantasies when no one is looking, which doesn’t any problem until it does.
The Disease of Conformity
What I think is the biggest analysis mistake everyone made when discussing American Psycho is quite simple: Patrick Bateman is not the vessel of author Bret Easton Ellis' anger at the soulless American of the eighties. He's the target of it. He's not a super predator who gives himself permission to rape and kill because he's a rich and successful white dude living in the eighties, he's a hyperconfortmist weirdo who rapes and kills because it's the only way he can feel good. But he tries to feel something all the fucking time.
If you consider Bateman in his natural habitat, the satire becomes obvious (and really funny in a tongue in cheek way): he's hanging out with other man who are interchangeable to a point they constantly mistake each other for one another, they’re all going the exact same job (VP, Merger & Acquisitions at Pierce & Pierce) and they even fuck one another's wives. On page 237, he tells Bethany straight up that the entire purpose of his elaborate lifestyle is to try to fit in. Patrick Bateman is a sexy and desperate geek.
Ellis didn't mean to paint the Wall Street type into an apex predator, he wanted to point out how fucking silly they were, all looking the same and all wanting the same thing. I believe this erroneous reading of American Psycho we all share (consciously or not) stems from the fact that a flashy Wall Street exec is still very much a symbol of success in twenty-first century America and the idea of them literally being predators is a simplistic, but empowering metaphor for whoever worships this image.
In other words, we saw what we wanted to see. We weren’t ready to spit on this holy image of corporate, secular America.
But it is good?
Well, it sure is as pertinent as ever because although American Psycho created an image that became worshiped out of context, we have not learned anything from it in over thirty years. So, Bret Easton Ellis' observations are eerily still very accurate today, although we worship conformity even more than ever. That said, it's somewhat of a chore to read at times with the endless enumeration of brands, which inevitably start repeating themselves after a hundred pages or so. It’s challenging and totally by design.
Reading American Psycho is a much different experience from watching Mary Harron’s movie. The point that Patrick Bateman’s lifestyle is mind numbing and unsustainable is made much better. He also seems more fragile and vulnerable in the novel than he does being interpreted by sex machine Christian Bale. But Bret Easton Ellis isn’t quite the snarky, wisecracking Hollywood dandy we've made him out to be. His vision is much more singular and challenging than we’ve ever given him credit for.
Ellis is a dystopian writer who chronicles who happens to people who "make it" in America. How wealth and privileged rot the heart of men and how even worse it gets for their progeny. It's still not something we're ready to hear.
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Bret Easton Ellis is an elite American writer and although we're almost constantly wrong about what he writes and what messages he's trying to get across, he didn’t steal his status. The man is great at what he does and he's also still an elite provocateur today, in an age where it's a more dangerous art form than ever. I don’t think American Psycho is his best novel by a long shot, but it's still the one that resonates the most over thirty years after its publication and that means something. It’s a novel that should keep being read.
