American Psycho is not a comfortable read. As the protagonist and narrator, investment banker Patrick Bateman, horrifically tortures and murders seemingly at random throughout the book, it isn’t hard to see why Bret Easton Ellis’ third novel caused such outrage on its publication twenty years ago. But despite the unflinchingly graphic nature of American Psycho’s murder scenes, it would be a great disservice to label this book as torture porn.
At the centre of the novel is Ellis’ chilling depiction of American society during the Wall Street boom of the late 80s: a world of designer labels, chic restaurants and top of the range hi-fi systems. For the cast of American Psycho a man is defined by what he owns, and Ellis leaves intentionally ambiguous the question of whether Bateman’s compulsion to precisely describe every aspect of his AV systems, his record collection, his colleagues’ outfits (just about anything that carries a price tag) is a result of some psycholgical need on his part, or has been forced upon him by the consumer-centric nature of his environment.
This destructive obsession with material possessions and social status is at the heart of Patrick Bateman’s descent into madness, memorably stating that he has ‘not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.’
Bateman’s resulting alienation from the outside world is explored masterfully by Ellis without ever resorting to emotional pathos; a theme of mistaken identity runs throughout American Psycho as Bateman and his colleagues struggle to distinguish between any two people with a similar taste in Valentino suits, and the starkly clinical, unfeeling nature of the narrative is reflected in the awkwardly robotic interactions that take place between the characters.
This all lends a curiously comical feeling to the book; Bateman’s narrative exists in a sort of exaggerated reality, a surrealist dream world where everything feels slightly out of proportion.
The reliability of Bateman as a narrator is still a fiercely debated topic amongst critics, and it is tempting to say that many of the reported events are simply fantasy but, when faced with the entirety of Ellis’ disturbing vision, this point seems rather moot. Never does Ellis portray Bateman as external to his environment or wildly different from those around him; rather his grotesque murderous desires exist as a logical extrapolation of the grotesque selfishness of the society in which he is trapped. Perhaps this is the most pertinent, and lasting, message of this bold and terrifying cult classic.
