I almost never say I hate any book - especially one this popular - because I can almost find the redeeming quality that endears it to people in the first place. But I need to make an exception for American Psycho, a novel I truly did hate.
It wasn't just the unspeakably depraved violence, although I'll admit that's part of it. The movie, which I liked well enough but didn't love, was violent and depraved in its own right so I figured I more or less knew what to expect going in. If you know what American Psycho is and then you complain about the violence, it's kind of your own fault, right? Except that the book is far worse. It cranks the violence and the sex (which is always disturbing and never sexy) up to eleven. The murder scenes, especially those involving women, are more horrific than I could have imagined, richly detailed, and much, much longer than they need to be. I almost "rage quit" every time I got to one, then willed myself through it, then decided I was in too deep and had to finish reading. It wasn't easy.
As much as a problem as the gratuitous violence though is the novel's length and its repetitiveness. After one hundred pages of its four-hundred-page length, it had emptied its bag of tricks. Everything I needed to know about Patrick Bateman, a vessel for Brett Easton Ellis's commentary about eighties materialism, was already behind me. The final three quarters of the book were just variations on a frequently unpleasant theme.
If reading were conducive to such a thing, I would propose an American Psycho drinking game. Drink every time Patrick Bateman exhaustively lists clothing designers. Drink every time he launches into a catalog of luxury items. Every time he uses the word "hardbodies," to refer to attractive women. Every time he praises Art of the Deal-era Donald Trump. Drink every time tells us what was on the Patty Winters show. Drink every time Patrick mentions Les Miserables. Drink every time he describes some bizarre or obscure modern dish at one of the fancy restaurants he frequents.
There is virtually no plot here and almost no characters to speak of. Misidentification is a running motif: the people of this world are so lacking in distinguishing features or personalities, they are virtually interchangeable. Which I get as social commentary, but which makes for some really uninteresting scenes any time we're in a restaurant or a club or a party (which is like more than three quarters of the book).
Virtually everyone who didn't like the movie probably had to endure one of its fans telling them they just "didn't get it." I know I did. I'm sure the same is true for people who didn't like the book. So let me clarify that I do in fact get it: I get that American Psycho is obviously satire and its ideas are more important than its characters or its plot. I'd further argue that the weird deification of Patrick Bateman by a certain sector of bro culture proves that the movie's fans are the ones who miss the point.
I can get it and still not like it. Both things can be true. Even as social commentary, it fails.
Here's the gist of the social commentary:
Yuppie culture of the 1980's is shallow, superficial, nihilistic. Its disciples, typically Wall Street finance bros, who proliferated during the decade, are vain and materialistic, misogynistic, racist, classist, and xenophobic. The ethos of the decade fosters and may actually reward these antisocial impulses, which are adjacent to the impulse to rape and murder. So even if Bateman didn't do all the things he claimed to have done (and honestly I don't care to engage in the tedious question of whether he did or not), he still feels the impulse to do them.
It's not that the idea is uninteresting. It's that it's established within the first chapter and the rest is either disgusting or just boring. And anyway, when you're reading the grossest possible descriptions of body mutiliation, the social commentary sort of feels beside the point.
Anyway, I'm glad it's over. I'm now reading a novel by Nick Hornby, who is one of my favorites. It's kind of like drinking cool filtered water to wash down a vat of sewage.
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| I don't like him. Not even ironically. |
