Recommendation: American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis’ appalling, controversial, and viciously satirical novel American Psycho, published in 1991, follows the exploits of trust fund yuppie Patrick Bateman. By day, he’s a hotshot investment banker with a penchant for haute couture fashion and a passion for pop music. By night, he masquerades as a psychotic serial killer whose unslakable bloodlust propels him to commit increasingly depraved — and increasingly preposterous — murders of co-workers, escorts, the homeless, and more.

What killed: Bateman’s narrative voice, which is written in the deep first-person and sails along in the present tense, is banal, debauched, grotesque, hilarious, shocking, and unforgettable. The story bounces haphazardly from tedious explanations of men’s fashion (e.g., Bateman’s tutorials on when to wear pocket squares, sweater vests, and argyle socks), to deep dives on eighties pop music (e.g., Bateman’s technical yet whimsical discographic analyses of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News), to visceral and utterly unhinged descriptions of torture and murder, which escalate in depravity and intensity as the story unfolds. To be clear, the violence described in American Psycho is horrific and demands a strong constitution to process. That said, what starts as standard slasher prose eventually becomes so disgusting, so reprehensible, and so vile the reader stops taking the novel seriously and starts laughing along maniacally. By slowly inuring us to Bateman’s outrageous and psychotic behavior, Ellis depicts the villainous protagonist’s descent into madness and cleverly critiques the inexorable, inescapable horrors of rapacious, unregulated capitalism.

What dismembered: The novel not-so-subtly satirizes the excessive consumerism and materialism of the eighties by having Bateman obsess over the clothes and fashion choices of the people around him. In every scene — even the mutilation and murder set pieces — the narrator describes each character’s coat/jacket/dress, tie/blouse, slacks/skirt, and socks/shoes, plus any pertinent accessories, while always denoting the style and name-dropping the designer. It’s a fun gimmick at first, but quickly becomes cumbersome.

What repulsed: I could stomach the breathtaking misogyny, the virulent racism, the repugnant homophobia, and the revolting violence, but the aspect of the novel which totally disgusted me was Bateman’s repeated Stanning of POTUS 45/47-elect. The sociopathic narrator fawns over the present-day leader of the MAGA movement’s every move and clearly views the past and future POTUS as an aspirational figure. In context, during the late eighties and early nineties, this makes sense. With his hot wives, salacious sidepieces, and ostentatious displays of wealth, the former reality TV star was once a mainstay of New York City nightlife and a “Page Six” staple, and young, impressionable men widely regarded him as someone worth emulating. Nonetheless, reading a more than thirty-year-old novel and still being burdened by the Fox & Friends superfan’s overbearing presence proved disconcerting. It reminded me of just how long the profitless purveyor of steaks, vodka, and casinos has been a blight on American culture. Worse still, today’s lonely, disaffected young men continue to view the angry orange boomer as an avatar for success, which makes American Psycho a distressing, disturbing, and topical read.

Final verdict: I quite enjoyed American Psycho, but I’m also deeply, deeply unwell. If you’re put off by graphic violence, this novel is not for you. That said, if you look past the cartoonish and nightmarish prose, and interrogate the wicked satire beneath the surface, I think you’ll find a lot to love. If nothing else, the novel is unique in the truest sense, and that alone makes it worth a look.

Related media: The film adaptation of American Psycho was released in 2000 and rocketed Christian Bale, who played Bateman, to superstardom. I remember watching and hating the movie when I was in college, but after reading the original source material I suppose the film deserves an encore viewing. In any case, the novel — like all great novels — probes deeper into Bateman’s motivations and psyche and is surely the superior vehicle for his story.