American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
Summary
Patrick Bateman, a Harvard educated Wall Street trader in his mid twenties, narrates his life among nearly identical yuppie friends who constantly mistake each other for someone else, a running joke Bateman himself is sometimes unable to correct, interspersed with murders that escalate in number and cruelty as the book goes on. He kills a colleague, Paul Owen, with an axe over a superior business card, then kills homeless men, prostitutes, an ex girlfriend, and, in one notorious chapter, a stray dog, describing each act in the same brand obsessed deadpan he uses for suits and restaurants. Near the end Bateman leaves a rambling murder confession on his lawyer's answering machine and flees, but when he finally confronts the lawyer, the man dismisses the message as an obvious joke and claims to have had dinner with the supposedly murdered Owen in London days earlier; Bateman later finds Owen's apartment for sale, cleaned and empty, the real estate agent denying any knowledge of a crime. The novel ends without resolving whether any of it happened outside Bateman's own head, or whether it happened and was simply absorbed by a world too self absorbed to notice, closing on Bateman back at a bar beneath a sign reading This Is Not An Exit.
Reading it means sitting through relentless brand name cataloguing, stereo equipment, skincare routines, restaurant menus, that becomes numbing before it becomes horrifying, since the prose never changes register between a review of a pop album and a graphic murder. Several passages remain among the most extreme violence in mainstream American fiction, and the book asks a reader to stay inside a narrator whose two obsessions, appearance and cruelty, are presented as functionally the same thing.
Historical Context & Significance
Simon and Schuster paid Ellis a three hundred thousand dollar advance and scheduled the novel for March 1991 before cancelling the contract late in 1990, citing aesthetic differences; Vintage picked the book up within days and published it largely as written in March 1991. No literary prize considered it; its documented early record is protest rather than recognition. The National Organization for Women called for a boycott, and Roger Rosenblatt in the New York Times compared it to a journal Dorian Gray might have kept as a high school sophomore, approving of the original cancellation. It ranked as the American Library Association's fifty third most banned or challenged book of the 1990s, and Germany classified it as harmful to minors from 1995 to 2000.
Its reputation has since shifted considerably. Mary Harron's 2000 film, starring Christian Bale, reframed the material as satire the press could embrace, with the New York Times calling it a mean and lean horror comedy classic, and the book has gone on to a Broadway musical in 2016 and a graphic novel adaptation in 2023, each a later recognition a book once pulled from its own publishing schedule went on to receive.