I’m Psycho for this Book

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of its publication.  I think it’s just about the greatest book to come out the last half of the century, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.  It was published in 1991, but I didn’t read it until ’94.  I was a junior in high school when this divine novel graced my naughty, sweaty palms.  I recall opening my new paperback at the start of my first and only Saturday detention, for skipping a class too much called Early Childhood Development, basically free daycare for parents in a certain network of neighborhoods near our school in Glastonbury, Connecticut.   Three- to five-year-olds were to be “studied” during first period, and I cut the class because I couldn’t stomach incessant crying at 8 a.m.  I had liked Ellis’s Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction.  I unwittingly began reading for the first time a book I would read dozens more, around other naughty kids and my freshman Spanish teacher, Mr. Cortez, who pulled the short straw that week in the faculty lounge, I imagined.

Saturday detention lasted four hours, but I was awestruck by the first bathroom break.  I wouldn’t realize the relevance of the book’s opening quotes (Dostoevsky, Miss Manners, and the Talking Heads) until I was finished, but even these were brilliantly chosen.  American Psycho is written in the present tense.  Patrick Bateman seems so normal at first.  It’s the late 1980s, and it seems everyone in Manhattan is extremely rich or extremely poor.  Patrick Bateman and his friends are young, insincere Wall Street assholes.  Like everyone else he knows, he is manically preoccupied with his tan, his stereo, his favorite trashy talk show, securing a good table at the newest good restaurant, scoring good coke, smoking good cigars, his clothes and other people’s clothes, and literally, his wallet — gazelle-skin —t hat he reminds the reader was $850 at Barney’s, again and again throughout the text.  But Patrick Bateman also kills people.  No one is spared for any particular reason.  Nothing matters: age, race, class, gender (though most victims are women).  And it is gruesome.

The violence in this book cost Ellis a publisher.  Simon and Schuster dropped it, but Vintage picked it up.  The violence is horrific.  Tortures and mutilations are detailed for paragraphs, pages.  As much as I love this book, even I can’t reread some sections.  Once was enough.  To be honest, once might have been too much.   I’ve read interviews with Ellis, and writing these scenes was very difficult for him. 

But it had to be done this way because everything in the book is meticulously detailed.  Everything.  It’s ridiculous, disturbing, and just so damn smart.  People are cold.  People are shallow.  People are greedy.  People are cruel.   And believe it or not, it’s funny. 

…the temptation to kill McDermott is replaced by this strange anticipation to have a good time, drink some champagne, flirt with a hardbody, find some blow, maybe even dance to some oldies or that new Janet Jackson song I like.

See?  Funny.

Patrick Bateman’s thoughts are everywhere, and whose aren’t?  One paragraph might go from his shoes to someone else’s shoes to bottled waters to Bon Jovi lyrics to what happened in the porn flick he watched that morning.  The sex is also graphic in this book, but after the orgasm Patrick pulls out a nail gun or severs some limbs, so don’t get too… comfortable.

The man can string a sentence together.   Ellis’s writing is exquisite, beautiful.  I do like his other books, but nothing comes close to this.  I think the rhythm of the language in this book might be the biggest influence in my own work.   At the very least, it has taught me to take risks when telling a story.   Art can happen without taking risks; great art can’t.  American Psycho offends so many people, but so many people love it.   I promise we’re not all harboring terrible fantasies.  Not that I haven’t done some bad things in my life, like cutting class, but I served my time. 

Class.  I cut class, not people.  Even though I kind of wanted to kill those little fuckers crying at 8 in the morning.