American Untitled Review. um. (American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis)

Member Name: awalsh

Product:	American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Date:	29/05/02 (50 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny in places, hey, murder is sorta interesting in a morbid kinda way

Disadvantages: you want to read 2 pages of clothes descriptions whenever two characters meet?, leads nowhere

American Psycho, one of the most contraversial books of recent times... one of the most popular, too, as it is consistently voted high in surveys on people's favourite books. So I guess I'm going to have a lot of people disagreeing with me when I say that personally, I think its also one of the most overrated...
For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it is a black satire chronicling the (mis)adventures of Patrick Bateman, a young American who works on Wall Street. Rich, good-looking and intelligent, he also happens to be a serial murderer.
The author, Brett Easton Ellis, has described the murders and mutilations in such detail as to earn him equal praise and notoriety, and the book has been accused of being pornographic and obscene. Personally, however, I feel it is a sell-out. Murders are shocking, and I feel that this fact is being exploited for the purpose of sales, rather than being used to make any actual point or opinion.
The murders in the book start with that of a homeless man and his dog, and though sickening, it is actually quite tame by the standards of the rest of the book, as the tortures and murders get more violent as the book proceeds. The author has claimed that this reflects the degeneration of American society, but building things up is a standard part of virtually any plot in any book. It feels as thought the author wrote the book first, and only then thought about coming up with a reason for it. The fact that the book ultimately leads nowhere except to say that the protagonist acts in this way because he wants to and because he can, is a lazy ending. There are a lot of loose endings in the story, such as where Bateman is under investigation, or where he is robbed and blackmailed by a taxi-driver, and I kinda wondered what the point in them was... sure, the events are diverting and add an element of "will he or won't he get caught?", but in the end they are unsatisfying simply because they
lead nowhere.
And that is a fault which applies to the book as a whole. It leads nowhere. It has no views or insights into the mind of a serial murderer, and doesn't even work as a character study, as the character and events are so exaggerated as to be unbelievable. Easton Ellis's previous book, Less than Zero was much more effective and disturbing for being understated, and this has been lost in the over-the-top gore and detail in American Psycho.
I would say give the book a go for its novelty value (and hey, its funny in places), but don't expect too much of it. Its throwaway fiction, and for me, didn't live up to the hype.

Summary: