A-
Title: American Psycho
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publication Info: Vintage March 6, 1991
ISBN: 0679735771
Genre: Top 100 Banned Books
Patrick Bateman is a man of high fashion, high society, and high stakes. He wears expensive suits, eats at the finest restaurants, and makes crazy business deals. He has strong opinions on many aspects of culture, especially music – he's a big fan of Huey Lewis and the News and Genesis. He is possibly the ideal man of the late '80s New York upper-class business culture, except for one thing – he kills people. Graphically. In many awful ways. And he gets away with it. Or does he?
Patrick is a wonderful narrator; he sounds so wonderfully sane for the first two-thirds of the book. He's an excellent guide to and navigator of the wealthy elite social scene of his time. If you want to know anything about fashion, especially men's, from the eighties, then he's your man. There are a couple of chapters that are delightful essays on the careers, prior to 1990, of several musical artists including the ones mentioned above. Behind his urbane exterior, though, his thoughts are sometimes so extreme and off the wall that one simply must laugh:
But she's not listening; she keeps blabbering something in the same spastic, foreign tongue. I have never firebombed anything and I start wondering how one goes about it – what materials are involved, gasoline, matches . . . or would it be lighter fluid?
Despite his affability, Patrick has many obvious flaws. He isn't a reliable narrator at all. Although he's polite to everyone, he's horribly racist (the woman in the above quote is a Chinese laundry-owner) and he sees women as objects for both his sexual and murderous lust. He doesn't have any patience for anyone who gets in his way and, oh yeah, he tortures and kills people. Other than that, of course, he's a fine, worthy citizen.
The reason the book was banned is fairly obvious: graphic sex and torture scenes, often a combination of the two. This book probably isn't 'appropriate' for anyone over OR under eighteen. Sex, torture, or stream-of-consciousness writing aren't to everyone's tastes; combine the three and you have a trifecta of ban-ability. I happen to have enjoyed the book quite a bit and if you can see past the shocking language and events, it's both funny and a delightful commentary on appearances. That someone could be a serial killer and still be an upstanding member of society based on his Brooks Brothers suits is sad but, in Ellis's Manhattan, accurate.
While I'm not sure I would actually recommend this to anyone, I'd still assign it an A-.
I had no idea that someone tried to ban American Psycho. Just curious (and Google lazy), was it banned before or after the NC-17/R controversy of the movie?
I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while. Thanks for the review!
I have no idea if it was before or after the movie controversy, but the movie came out in something like 2000 and I think the book was on the “Most Challenged from 1990-2000” list, so I’m guessing before.
I remember that with the movie they were more pissy about the LOOK on his face while he was doing some awful stuff, rather than some of the STUFF.
(Incidentally, I wrote that review.)
I couldn’t get through it. I read a few pages several years ago and actually felt my stomach lurch and had to go lie down. That’s never happened with a book before or since, so thanks, BEE.
Although I rather like the movie. It’s anyone’s guess as to why.
I read this book at 16 and at one point pressed a flower between the pages. It was really just an accident – saw a pretty flower, it was the only book I had with me. Freaked the HELL outta my parents when they found it though.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you there. Ellis makes his point in about the first five pages (He’s the epitome of the 80s man! Yet he’s a depraved killer! Oh my!) and the rest of the it is just Ellis patting himself on the back for being so gosh-darn morbidly clever. I don’t mind graphic violence if it has a point, but this seemed like the height of gratuitousness to me. It’s one of the very few books I finished and wished I’d stopped much, much sooner.
But I have some friends who think it’s fantastic, so there you have it. I wouldn’t recommend it be stocked in a high school library, but ban it in general? Absolutely not.
Brett Easton Ellis is a self-absorbed, self-indulgent hack.
JMMFOAFYIYDLI.
Ban him? No. Ban nothing. Avoid shit passed off as literature? What do you think?
I tried reading it, but couldn’t finish it because is was so boring.
It was just a rehash of the same thing over and over again.
I suppose the point was to show how you can become desensitized to the violence, but it was more that I was bored by his words, not his actions.
I refuse to read this book or to see the movie. And I’m a liberal. I have never understood why violence, especially against women, is considered to be entertainment. I’ll pass.
I read it when it came out in paperback and thought it was funny and fairly observant about the state of society at the time, but I was about 23 and really enjoyed the pop culture references from my own generation. I also love unreliable narrators, and I never saw the twist at the end coming (most of the people I talked to about it back then opposed it without having read it, so they didn’t know about the surprise ending).
As far as the graphic sex and violence go, recent books in the mystery and thriller genres are at least as graphic. I have a feeling that even back then, if it had been shelved with the thrillers instead of the contemporary literature (and if it had been written by a genre writer instead of a member of the literary brat pack) it would have gotten a few mediocre reviews and faded into obscurity, and nobody would care enough about it to try to get it banned.
Honestly, I never finished this book. I found it alternately disgusting and obnoxious.
And I thought the movie was dull and…well, it was pretty obnoxious, too.