Jeffrey Dahmer's Best Friend (American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis)

Member Name: TheQueenBee

Product:	American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Date:	18/08/01 (234 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: shocking

Disadvantages: a bit boring sometimes

I've read "American Psycho" by B.E. Ellis, ten years after its publication. I don't know why I've been waiting for such a long time before reading it but when I saw the trailer of Mary Harron's movie I said: "I must read that book".

While reading I was always guessing how that book could be put into a film. That's because it's a kind of a diary or of a confession or of an autobiography but, certainly, not a conventional story with a plot. So, I thought a film taken from this novel, could be boring or unconnected - and, as a matter of fact, the novel is unconnected but it's obvious as it is a novel about a mental unconnection.

The main character is Patrick Bateman, 26 years old, from New York, graduated at Harvard, job in Wall Street, flat in Manhattan - he lives in the same building where Tom Cruises does. His life is very engaged: breakfasts, lunches, dinners, after-dinners, gallant rendez-vous, gym, shopping, phone calls but he never lacks time for his favourite hobbies - cocaine and violence.

Patrick is a psycho, indeed, a schizophrenic. He has a double personality - a kind of a modern Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And he's, fundamentally, a sadist. He makes people suffer to enjoy. There's no ethical aim in his torturing and killing praticals but only hedonistic purposes. The number of his victims is nearly endless and the macabre practicals he uses are described with a maniacal precision but there's no horror or not only horror. There's a mix between horror and grotesque - even if some scenes are nearly frightful, think of mice!

The beginning of the novel is a bit boring. It's a continuous introduction of anonymous characters, defined by their clothes and accessories. You can forget someone's name but not his look. So, Manhattan population is described as pale, plain, wan, an endless series of clones, all the same. And appearance is the real essence.

Bat
eman's personality is revealed by some conversations in the development of the novel. But people seem to be blind and dull. He's always considered quite an ordinary man and his cynism and fierceness are mistaken for sense of humour. Bateman often expresses his hatred for clochards and some scenes remember "A Clockwork Orange" but Bateman is different from Alexander Delarge. Unlike Burgess's and Kubrick's character, Patrick lacks humanity.

The more the novel goes on, the more it becomes interesting. There's a balanced alternation of chapters about Bateman's social life and Bateman's private life. So, no more just the ordinary man but the psycho, too. There's the charm.

Bateman's favourite victims are young women. He usually kills them after making sex but what is important is not murder but torture. His home is a kind of horror museum, you can find cut off heads on the table and remains of intestines in the fridge - Patrick is a cannibal, too, he often eats his victims' flesh and it's not ucommon as most of serial killers do.

The soundtrack of the novel is the one of "Les Miserables", the musical taken from Victor Hugo's novel. It's not a chance as Bateman is, fundamentally, a miserable man. He sometimes seems to be conscious of his miserable condition, too. There's introspection, analysis, even melancholy, sometimes but there's not an evolution - and a "sanctification" would have been ridiculous.

I don't want to say there's a message in the novel but, perhaps, there's a question or more than one. Who are the respectable and ordinary people? Who are those you can trust? Who are those you must be scared of? I certainly can't give an answer nor B.E. Ellis does. He only seems to say: "Pay attention". Your neighbour could be a serial killer. Your best friend could be a serial killer. You could be a serial killer. And I c
ould be a serial killer, who knows?

Summary: