the last book I read

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Patrick Bateman has it pretty good, all things considered - lucrative job doing something mysterious in finance in New York, spiffy business cards, a nice apartment, a whole wardrobe full of designer suits and ties, a highly eligible girlfriend, at least one other woman on the side, regular dinner reservations at exclusive eateries with his group of acquaintances, all of whom do pretty much the same job as him. So he's pretty happening. He's also - and it's hard to characterise this in an acceptable way in these days of acceptance and understanding of mental health issues - properly and utterly bananas.

Let's join Patrick for a typical day, shall we? Up at dawn for a visit to the gym, then home to apply an extensive range of moisturising products and primp his fabulous hairdo, pick out one of his expensive Valentino suits, then off to the office for a day of seemingly not doing very much while getting his secretary Jean to screen his calls and cancel all his appointments. Maybe there'll be time to fit in a game of squash with a colleague, and then after work a few drinks with other colleagues, all identically clad in sharp suits, braces and glasses, then on to the latest achingly hip restaurant (via a bit of competition to see who can do the impossible job of getting a reservation) for some of the latest creations in Burmese-Ecuadorian fusion or something, and so to bed, probably with some tight little thing from the gym or a nightclub, or the waitress from the restaurant. And then, refreshed, exactly the same thing, perhaps with minor variations in restaurant choice, the following day.

There are a few clouds on the horizon of this otherwise sunny existence: everyone, including Patrick, is constantly being mistaken for someone else; in Patrick's case this is usually Marcus Halberstam, who he perceives to be beneath him by virtue of having a slightly inferior hairstyle. Conversely Patrick perceives Paul Owen to be slightly above him in the hierarchy for similar reasons (slightly better haircut, a slightly more fashionable shade of off-white on his business cards, the ability to get restaurant reservations at prohibitively trendy Dorsia) and hatches a bold and unusual plan to get back at him for this perceived slight: murder him frenziedly with an axe and then dispose of the corpse. I mean, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

Having done this, and emboldened by no-one seemingly giving the most tepid of fucks as to Owen's whereabouts, Patrick embarks on a spree of further murders (mostly using Owen's apartment as a venue), pretty much all of these involving women and increasingly brutal and sexual in nature. Those are the ones Patrick really takes some trouble over; others are quicker and more impulsive: stabbing a child at the zoo, shooting a homeless guy in the street, that sort of thing. That last murder attracts the attention of the police and is the catalyst for a pursuit across Manhattan (and a few more killings) which ends with Patrick taking refuge in his office building and leaving a breathless confession on his lawyer's answering machine.

The plot thickens at this point, though: not only does the lawyer not take Patrick's confession seriously (indeed he has trouble recognising who Patrick is), he says that Owen can't be dead because he had dinner with him only a few nights ago. Moreover, when Patrick re-visits Owen's apartment, expecting to find it festooned with entrails and with severed heads in the fridge, he instead finds it clean and with a real estate agent showing prospective tenants around.

So what's going on? Clearly Patrick is a massively unreliable narrator, but are we to assume that the murders never happened? Has the whole thing been a fantasy? Well, those reading the book will have to make up their own minds as it's left slightly ambiguous, but you do have to wonder about the noise and the smell, not to mention the logistics of disposing of several corpses without being rumbled. Then again it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing had gone apparently unnoticed by the neighbours.

Whatever the reader might conclude about the likelihood of the murders described having actually happened, they will almost certainly have some idea of what point the book is trying to make. Clearly there's some black satire on consumerism, 1980s greed, the emptiness of Patrick and his cronies' day-to-day activities, the implicit sexism and racism involved in it. There are lots of very funny sections - the early chapters where Patrick describes in excruciating detail the designer clothes he and his dinner companions are wearing, the braying banality of Harvard and Yale types hailing each other by their surnames across a crowded restaurant, Patrick's gradual mental disintegration throughout the course of the book - but there's no getting away from the brutality and graphicness of the descriptions of the murders of the several women that Patrick dispatches. It was this stuff that got the book into trouble when it was originally published in 1991 and it remains (slightly bizarrely) banned in the Australian state of Queensland. 

To be honest, as open as I am to experimental and transgressive fiction, I did find the extensive descriptions of torture and murder of women a bit hard to stomach. I suppose this is part of the point of the book, though: some of whose themes are (or seem to me to be) to do with what JG Ballard called "the death of affect", i.e. the flattening out of emotion in response to an increasingly overwhelming rush of stimuli, and a corresponding need for more and more extreme input in order to provoke feeling.

I can't say I absolutely loved American Psycho, but it works pretty effectively as an extreme blackly comic satire of its targets. I was already familiar with its 2000 movie adaptation (though I don't think I've ever seen the whole thing), which is mainly notable for a remarkable and career-reviving central performance from Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. Obviously the film does tone down some of the old ultraviolence a bit, though it's still pretty graphic, and is more explicitly comic than the book. It also features Jared Leto playing much the same part as he does in Fight Club, i.e. a pretty rival and target of resentment whose main plot role is to be ritually brutalised (to death, in this case) by the protagonist. American Psycho is the third novel on this list to be adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, the other two being Empire Of The Sun and Metroland.