Product Description

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 a 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.

‘Serious, clever and shatteringly effective’ Sunday Times

‘American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel . . . The novelist’s function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he’s done it brilliantly . . . A seminal book’ Fay Weldon, Washington Post

‘For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards’ John Walsh, Sunday Times

‘That the book’s contents are shocking is downright undeniable, but just as Bonfire of the Vanities exposed the corruption and greed engendered in eighties politics and high living, American Psycho examines the mindless preoccupations of the nineties preppy generation’ Time Out

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2068 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of five novels and a collection of stories, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. He divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.

Customer Reviews

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Let's get one thing clear, American Psycho is a comedy - that needs to be understood before you read it. It's a comedy about yuppies, and how empty-headed and essentially shallow they are, about how far too much money coupled with far too little imagination can cause you to begin to shrink your world, until you live in such a self indulgent cocoon, you cannot even spot the raving, murdering lunatic in your midst. That is effectively what Easton-Ellis is telling us - yes, Yuppies are THAT shallow.

This is a well constructed work; it actually causes the reader to suffer from the same syndrome that grips the minds of most of its characters - only in reverse.

We have the self-obsessed city-boys, only interested in the correct clothing labels and getting reservations at the right restaurant, and us, the readers, obsessing over the violent scenes of rape and murder, and missing the point entirely. The violence and murder are simply incidental to the plot, they are not the point. They serve just the same purpose as a piece of misdirection performed by an illusionist. Just as you look the wrong way, the conjurer pulls a stroke.

Patrick Bateman - the protagonist - is as hilarious as he is twisted; a perfectly tanned, toned and attired Metro-Sexual killing machine; drowning with pleasure in the very selfish excess that he despises, and yet must conform to the rules of. He maintains the required trophy girlfriend and keeps up to date with the latest men's fashion, has membership of the most exclusive fitness club, styles his hair with a surgeon's precision and forces rats into the vaginas of his victims - a man of many tastes, indeed.

His circle of co-accused are just as lacking in any sort of meaningful mental programming, treating the New York they live in as one huge private boys' club, with membership relying on ticking certain financial and fashion based boxes on a seemingly ongoing basis. Most of the men in this work are successful, rich and hilariously stupid, and that is certainly the point. A second point - which feeds the previous one - is that they never step out of the world in which they consume space, therefore never catch a glimpse of their own vulgarity, and consequently, are unable to change for the better, or indeed, want to. They are the small obnoxious building blocks, who together, make the impenetrable wall of arrogance and snobbery that protects their false, built-on-sand world.

Even between themselves, in packs of their own kind, these men are only half aware of each other, do they even know who each other really is? They all have adopted the habit of addressing each other by their surnames, at least a large majority of the time. This is not so worrying until a particular character is introduced, and he starts referring to Bateman by the wrong surname. Why should this be worrying? Because Bateman responds to the surname as if it were correct, unable, due to the particular etiquette at work in their society, to offer a correction. This small, comical component offers to the reader some very disturbing questions about - if you will - the depths of their shallowness. When Bateman addresses an acquaintance, does he use the correct name himmself? Are they just humouring him, shackled by the same etiquette? Is any of the group of friends Bateman surrounds himself with the people he thinks they are?

This question is thrust at the reader, when after killing Paul Allen, a man he has been obsessing over for sometime, Bateman learns that the very same man has been seen in a restaurant in London. This is a confirmed sighting because Bateman is told by his victim's dinner guest, no less! So who on earth has he killed?

This particularly gruesome murder offers Easton-Ellis the chance to have another subtle kick at the world he is cleverly ripping to pieces. The killing happens in Allen's own plush apartment; and upon returning to clean up the mess, Bateman - armed with a surgical mask to cope with the smell - has a brief conversation with a real estate agent who is re-selling the expensive property. The agent spots the surgical mask, and Bateman spots the mysteriously clean apartment. Their brief exchange involves the agent saying she doesn't want any trouble and that Bateman should just go. So he does, walking away from the scene of his crime utterly bewildered, his already fragile mind ever more damaged.

It is exchanges like this that allow us to wonder if Bateman has actually been created by the world he lives in. Is the "Greed is good" culture causing his psychoses? What could happen to a person's view of what's acceptable, when that person lives in world that utterly lacks substance and any shred of morality, a world where even murders can be cleaned up if there's a possibility of profit? Is Bateman the ultimate avenger for the self-indulgence of the slick-haired city boys and their air-head women? It's possible, though I believe that Easton-Ellis lets Bateman loose on this world because he simply thinks they deserve it.

It was people of this kind that Brett Easton-Ellis was mixing with during the second half of the Eighties; he saw their world from the inside, the celebrity and credibility of being a writer allowing him rare access. He has stated that the time spent mixing with New York's Yuppie elite, convinced him that they were the sort of people he would hate to be like; though they certainly left a lasting impression on the man, and this work demonstrates that impression. He didn't like them much.

I said this book is a comedy, and so it is. Consider this scene. Finally snapping and deciding to kill a chap whose attentions our psycho is sick of, he strides into the men's room to confront his intended victim, his black-gloved hands ready to strangle the life out of this irritating man. As Bateman's hands grip the man's throat, the victim starts to smile, feeling the first stirrings of sexual desire. The victim is secretly gay (and must enjoy his own dark pleasures behind closed doors, it's implied, if strangulation turns him on), and Bateman's hands gripping his throat confirm Bateman must be as well. At last, the façade is dropped, now they can be together!

The comedy runs throughout this book. A urinal cake, taken from a men's room, coated in chocolate, and then offered as a present, provides hilarity as the trophy girlfriend attempts to eat it. Bateman dropping his veil of normality and telling people directly what violent acts he'd love to perform on them (no-one really listens to each other, so he gets away with it), whilst the empty heads just nod along, paying no attention. Yeah, yeah, man. Sounds good, let's touch base, oblivious that Bateman is telling them he wants to dig out their eyes. Again, telling us just how dumb and ignorant these people are.

The laughs are there, just so long as you don't allow yourself to be tricked into paying too much attention to the violence. There's plenty of it, and a lot is incredibly graphic, but it's there to catch your eye - to keep you from the seeing reality; just like the soulless drones that populate the book can't see it either, they're too busy obsessing about designer labels to be able to.

Gag
This book....well. On the one hand, I can understand why it's well known, as it's an astute commentary on the shallow lives of the rich. This is a book of things. There's an endless litany of who's wearing what designer, who bought what artist, or what exercise machine, and who's eating at which hip restaurant or bar. As I have zero knowledge of such things, I ended up skimming the paragraphs that were lists of names I had no knowledge of. The main character, Patrick Bateman (reminiscent of Norman Bates from Pscyho) is an affluent man who works for a firm on Wall Street. This life is so shallow and monotonous that he ends up going over the edge and killing others, perhaps to actually feel something. He stabs a homeless person in the eye (hatred of poverty), tortures two prostitutes, one from the streets and one from a high-class escort service (hatred across classes), kills an old girlfriend (envy), a fellow colleague (envy), and ends up torturing and killing numerous other women (greed, lust).

This book was awful to read. The lists of possessions became monotonous, and the descriptions of killing (usually precluded by kinky sex) was foul. I've read a lot of horror and books with erotic scenes in my time and usually don't bat an eyelash, but I actually had to skip over some of the killing sections because they were so graphic and disgusting. Do not read this book if you have a weak disposition.

If I had to summarize the book, here's how I would do so:

"So-and-so is a hardbody wearing a wool-crepe dress by so-and-so and such-and-such shoes. We had reservations and so-and-sos and the bill was $514.72. After that we went to so-and-sos and did coke." Over and over again, interspersed with detailed, gory violence.

I only ended up reading until the end because I wanted to see if he would be caught, and even the ending was disappointing. I'll never touch this book again.

Not for the faint hearted!!!
This book is a fabulous satire on upwardly mobile, shallow yuppies. Its sarcastic and ironic humour had me laughing till I nearly cried. It really tears into those who are materialistic above all else and makes them look ridiculously foolish. The worst thing is I know, and I'm sure everyone knows, people exactly like this. Pat Bateman is an excellent character, a perfectly normal, arrogant, irritating businessman by day and an absolute lunatic on his own time. Be warned, the violence is hideous, truly horrific and if you don't have a strong stomach then don't read this. I feel strange saying this given how bad the violence is but it seems like the perfect balance to Pat's consumerism and concern with all things new and expensive. If you read it you'll see what I mean. I've been told the film isn't very good so I'm going to give it a miss as I enjoyed the book. I recommend it.