American Psycho

I have just finished reading American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, I saw the film when it was originally released in 2000 and vaguely remember thinking it was a bit sick but reasonably enjoyable, I have mixed feelings about the book though.

Initially the book is hard work, there seems to be no punctuation and it progress feels very slow. There is an awful lot of time devoted to the detail of what Patrick Bateman and his 'friends' are wearing, whole pages are given over to describing the clothes and who designed them. Now this may be a literary device designed to show the attention to detail of a psycho and how meaningless and shallow he is, but it was so boring I nearly gave up a few times. My brother, who lent me the book, said few people finish reading it but mostly because its quite gory and I've got a bit of a stubborn streak so wasn't going to be beaten by a book!

Some mini chapters are given over, at random intervals, to describing the music of Whitney Houston or Huey Lewis and the News. We find out about their early albums and how their music has matured, the different producers and their effect on the sound of each album. What this is doing in the book I'm not really sure but I read the chapters very quickly.

About a third of the way through Bateman finally gets round to the business of being a psycho and again there is a lot of attention paid to the detail of describing what he does to his victims. It is pretty gruesome and Bateman's torturing is probably the reason most people don't finish the book. Interspersed with the violence are sex scenes - the kind of sex you might see on one of the videos Bateman rents and returns so frequently in the book, they usually lead into some horrific torture though.

At times we are shown a more human side of Bateman but the veneer doesn't hold for long and underneath is an empty black space devoid of humanity. He plays at being normal, which doesn't seem to last long as he is unable to enjoy others emotions, unless its their terror, and remains emotionally cut off from his 'friends'. But as the book comes to a close we see less of the psycho, though we still find evidence of his actions, and a bit more of Bateman as a person. Throughout the book he seems to have been trying to reach out to people around him, by coming out with blatant admissions of his violence, though his friends laugh them off as him being 'funny'. If I were being sentimental I would say that, through Bateman, Ellis is trying to warn us about how having money doesn't make you happy or that the material world, inhabited by the main characters (all yuppies), isn't all its cracked up to be, but I doubt that is actually the case.

Overall I'd give the book 6/10, I did enjoy it and towards the end found myself reading faster and faster to get to the end and find out what happens, though I cannot excuse the boring descriptions of designer clothes and pointless descriptions of discographies. Will I be reading Lunar Park, also by the same author, that my wife assures me is a great book... No, I'd rather read Dickens!