What a waste of paper (American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis)

Member Name: h.rayfield

Product:	American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Date:	26/09/00 (322 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: waste of valuable time, money and effort

American Psycho is billed as a black comedy, but quite frankly there is nothing amusing about Patrick Bateman or his twisted and very sick pass times. This book, amongst other things, is boring. Patrick Bateman is obsessed with what people are wearing, what they are eating and where they are eating it. This means that American Psycho is pages and pages of description about clothes and food (with a whole chapter thrown in on Phil Colins - oh joy). Dull, very dull. Then, he decides to murder another woman, child or homeless person in just about the vilest way possible. The book follows a progression something like this: clothes, restaurant, food, booze, murder, sex, murder. This all makes for very boring reading. I read a lot of books and this is one of the few that makes me kick myself for bothering to finish it. I kept turning the pages hoping that something would be explained, that a genuine effort would be made to identify, or even justify, the causes of Bateman's insanity. I was mistaken. Easton Ellis seems to have decided to write a book about a madman, without deciding the causes of his insanity. The whole book sits on the fence, even Bateman doesn't try to justify or explain his feelings. Now maybe that is the point and I have missed it.

I found this book very tedious. American Psycho is not worth the paper it is written on, either in monetary terms or in terms of a contribution it makes to literature.

Overall, I found this a book that left me irritated. The book makes statements without anything to back them up and obviously just assumes the reader will unquestioningly accept this. It asks the reader to accept Bateman's growing psychosis without question; to accept that he never gets caught - as an intelligent girl I found this impossible to do.

This book has been discussed and debated in my office where three quarters of the staff have read it and the debate focuses on why any of us bothered to read
it.

I intend to read another book by Easton Ellis as I do not feel his literary abilities should be judged by the weaknesses and flaws of American Psycho.

Summary: