American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Too many reviews seem to judge a work based on whether it is true or not. Taken literally, this story is ridiculous. Taken metaphorically, it may be truer. But truth is pretty irrelevant. What matters more to a story is how it allows to navigate a new world… and from that new world understand our current one.
This book is disturbing. Horrific. In a way, it’s meant to shock, disgust, titillate. So in that sense it is a shallow story. What makes the story unshallow is that you realize in the end that all the characters, even the women, are predators. They may not kill, but the dismantling of women into sex objects where the narrator uses the bodies of women for his own designs (against their will) and then takes from them everything (he debases them, to put it lightly) is a major part of the critique. In fact it seems to be the most outlandish direction of the novel. But it’s not. What is most disturbing is the overdetermined emphasis on superficiality. Name brands, images, looks, having a good time. Women are part of the furniture, part of decorum. Everything in this world is simply going out to eat, seeing and being seen. There is no future here, there is only the repetitious, nausea of endless drive to consume (murder, rape, debase) and then do it over and over again. Everything becomes a simulation, a dream, to follow the violence of capitalist consumption so does Bateman carry on violent consumption.
In a very strange way though, Ellis takes some of the easy way out. He shows women as sex objects by presenting them as sex objects. He shows us the horror of rape by presenting rape. He shows us superficiality by pushing on us the superficiality of the worlds we navigate. The disjointed dialogue, the inability of the characters to feel or understand one another. Ellis could have shown this to us in a variety of ways but instead chooses to do so with many winks and nudges. Hey, isn’t it horrible that this attractive woman is being mistreated? Lets mistreat her in the text by describing her untimely demise. The debasement of women though, is okay, because it’s not anyones fault but this despicable Bateman fellow.
Additionally, the inability to maintain coherent subjectivity, arguably the most interesting parts of the story seem only to be best played at the end, when Ellis ends the story just when the language and narrative break up seem to be getting the most interesting.
I admit. I was colored by the movie. I expected an ambiguous ending, one where it didn’t happen and it did happen. There is none of that. There is only the beginning of an interesting disarray and then the story ends, as if it can’t get any worse. Ellis took the entire 400 pages to get us to the font of what this is and then leaves us there, as if the indictment was enough, he doesn’t want to tell us what any of it means. Perhaps he doesn’t know what it means either. Perhaps he has no idea what to make of this, he’s just trying to entertain us.
I don’t think he only wants to entertain. I think he wants to illuminate us. If that’s so, he did a nasty job of it. He took way too long to get to this point, as if he blew his load way too soon and decided to cover it up by ending on a few statements from the narrator. The narrator’s decay at the end is never brought to full bloom, he is never allowed to completely fall apart.
That is a weakness. It’s a powerful tale (now that you’ve gotten us with the debasement of beautiful women, of yuppie self indulgence and confusing narrative) but so what? Are we to expect that Bateman is now the new boogey man? That he is going to continue on and on forever? Bateman is an unreliable narrator. I can’t help but think that Ellis did a poor job framing the entire story; that even with an unreliable narrator, Ellis could have found a truer beginning that is an opening and thus a greater finish one that closes off the opening. Instead we have a dinner party that goes nowhere but annoy and a lunch whose conversation is completely vacuous.
Sure feels like a cheap shot at yuppies (no doubt a story about even vacuous people shouldn’t be vacuous) with a lot of empty entertainment (as rape and snuff fantasies). Lord knows yuppies can take a cheap shot, but only if you don’t already think they are capable of being much more.
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