#306

Books

This week I read:

• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

  I thought I knew what this was about, as I’ve seen the film¹: a wall-street banker with an obsessive personality and a habit of murdering prostitutes. And that’s certainly partially true.

  He is obsessive: almost every chapter (which are short, typically only a few pages) has a detailed description of what everyone around him is wearing; he has strong opinions on brands of bottled water; and he can’t help but correct someone if they mistake the brands he’s wearing, or don’t appreciate the decor of his luxurious apartment. More strangely, he rents the same videos over and over and over again, renting them, returning them when the time is up, and then renting exactly the same videos again.

  He is successful: he flaunts his wealth, frequently dropping hundreds of dollars on dinner and drinks without a thought, and spending thousands of dollars importing furniture from Europe. But he never seems contented with what he has. If someone else shows success, he wants to outdo them.

  And he is a murderer: he describes brutally killing many women, and disposing of the bodies. Or… is he?

  More than anything, Patrick Bateman is an unreliable narrator. I don’t think he actually killed anybody. There are glaring discrepancies between what he says happened and how other people act. He describes killing people in the street while on the way to some other event, and the people at that event never make comments like “hey Patrick, your perfect hair is a bit dishevelled” or “what are those red spots on your suit?” He describes dumping bodies in the stairwell of his apartment building, as if they would just be taken away with the trash rather than the police summoned. He describes the maid calmly wiping blood off the walls of his apartment while a dismembered body lies on the floor in the very same room. At one point he confesses that he murdered one of his colleages months ago, only to be told that it’s a good joke, but the victim can’t be dead because the person he’s telling this story to had lunch with them just the other day. In fact, he frequently “confesses” his crimes, but nobody ever takes him seriously—or even appears to hear him, most of the time, as if he’s not actually saying anything, only imagining that he is.

  At one point he has a really bizarre conversation about a holiday a coworker went on. The coworker talks exactly as if they’re reading an advert aloud. Was Bateman actually talking to the TV and just hallucinating that the presenter of some tourism show was his friend in the room with him? I’m leaning towards “yes”.

  The discrepancies get more and more extreme as the book goes on, as he descends further into his madness. Sometimes we get a hint that other characters realise not all is right with him, as they’ll look at him strangely, or try to comfort him, and we realise that what he described as a normal conversation was more likely a bizarre outburst. The book is just really well done.

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