American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
So, today, on the train back from Sheffield, I FINALLY finished reading American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis. Having read The Rules of Attraction last summer and enjoyed it, I thought the same would be true of this. How much more wrong could I have been.
I started American Psycho feeling quite positive about it. I found the attention to minute detail quirky; the way Bateman, the protagonist, seems to have a confused and loose grip on reality somewhat fascinating; the characters and culture to pinpoint a particular era spectacularly well. But all that changed.
Somewhere around page 126 (in my copy), Bateman gauges out the eyes of a tramp, and breaks the leg of his dog. While I wasn’t exactly unprepared for this - ie. with a title like American Psycho, what more could one expect? - I found the scene so appalling that I wanted to “bring the knife up and push the tip of it into” my OWN eye socket, just so I wouldn’t have to read any more. But, never one to leave a book unfinished (ironically, since I never finished a book while at university…), I persevered.
After this point, my opinion of American Psycho changed drastically and instantaneously. What was originally deemed a quirky attention to detail rapidly became tiresome as I realised I did not care AT ALL about what each individual character was wearing on any given occasion in the novel, or what they eat on any given night, or where they eat it from. The constant name-dropping of restaurants and brands quite quickly becomes grating and the sort of writing one tends to just skim rather than pay attention to. Most of the designer ranges referred to, while vaguely familiar as brand names, must have been very specific to the particular historical context of the novel and, as a child of the 90s, were unfamiliar to and therefore lost on me.
Particularly, the detailed references to technological items make the novel seem entirely dated and trapped in its own period, lacking the timelessness that is so essential to good literature. The violent murder scenes, after the initial shock of the mutilation of the tramp, have no further impact at all, perhaps with one exception, which, since it is first and foremost a sex scene and a scene of torture only second, has an entirely different impact on the reader. While still sickening, the prevalent emotion during these scenes was one of mindlessness. I found myself skimming them simply because the graphic detail did not grip me. The plot becomes increasingly thin as the novel progresses; characters are mentioned once and then never again; and it seems that on the whole, American Psycho is an entirely pointless piece of literature. What purpose does it serve? Even Ellis/Bateman’s constant shifting of tenses eventually began to wind me up, especially any instance where he writes in the future tense. I have always despised writing in the future tense, much the same as people tend to hate when others speak about themselves in the third person.
What irks me most about this novel is that, prior to reaching that vital turning point of hate at page 126, I actually recommended this novel to a good friend of mine who was looking for something a bit different to the conventional literature student’s reading list type of novel to get stuck into. It’s a good job his opinion of American Psycho is completely the opposite of mine, otherwise, in addition to regretting my recommendation enormously in secret, I would have openly had to feel like a complete numpty.
Reference: Ellis, Bret Easton [1991] American Psycho (2006) London: Pan Macmillan
