review live on show by Beth Hilton on 24th Jan 2013
American Psycho was
published in 1991 and was made into a successful film starring Christian Bale in
2000. The story is set in Manhattan
during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s and is told from the first person
point of view of Patrick Bateman, a yuppie investment banker in his 20s. He
basically narrates his daily activities in a stream of consciousness style,
right from his morning routine to going out to restaurants and clubs with his
yuppie friend where they snort cocaine and criticise other people's dress sense,
to his dates in restaurants with his fiance to picking up prostitutes and
murdering people in the most savage way possible.
All of this - whether its
his skin care routine or beating a tramp to death - is described in a very
matter-of-fact, emotionless, blank manner which is indicative of the emptiness,
superficiality and pointless hedonism of the lives of the people its describing.
They're all completely obsessed with who's wearing what and who has the best
business card and where their next cocaine hit is coming from. All this
narrative is occasionally broken up by chapters in which he directly addresses
the reader in order to discuss the work of 1980s musicians like Whitney Houston
and Huey Lewis and the News.
The book generated a
great deal of controversy before and after it was published. Andrew Motion of
the Observer said when it came out that it was "numbingly boring, and for much
of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but
disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a
way of earning its author some money and notoriety."
But opinion has mellowed
a lot and it's now generally regarded as a modern classic. I personally think
it's an amazing book and an extremely clever satire, made more so by the fact
that Bret Easton Ellis was only 26 when it was published. It is gratuitously
explicit in terms of both sex and violence. I really can't emphasize that enough
so don't for god's sake read it if you're easily offended. Ellis was asked why
it's so explicit and he said because the way these characters are - i.e. totally
devoid of feeling - it stands to reason that Patrick Bateman would describe his
killing sprees in the same matter-of-fact way he describes every other part of
his life. He wouldn't be coy about it, and I think that makes sense.
As an indictment of the
empty superficial lifestyles of yuppies during the Wall Street boom, it's very
effective. It's also extremely funny. A review from the Guardian says: “As well
as being a repulsive nightmare, Patrick Bateman is a comic creation of the
highest order. His snobbery, his bad taste, his obsession with Les Mis and
ability to take Huey Lewis and the News seriously, his terror when someone has a
better business card than him, his constant worry that he has ‘to return some
videos’ all add up to one of the funniest comic creations since Bertie Wooster.
True, he isn't quite such pleasant company as Bertie, but what did you expect?
He's a psycho.”
I've read a lot of Bret
Easton Ellis's work and this is actually the only one I like. That’s because all
his books depict the same thing - the empty lives of young people in
America. After a while you think is this satire or is this
just a description of the life he actually leads? It all gets incredibly
depressing after a while because the characters are so superficial and
unlikeable. and he admitted it, that this is his life, he knows its ridiculous
but he can't seem to stop.
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