Book 66(6): American Psycho

“I’ve perfected my fake response to a degree where it’s so natural-sounding that no one notices.” Pg. 150

I am writing this while listening to the 10th anniversary concert recording of Les Misérables I mentioned yesterday.

When American Psycho was first published, I was working in a bookshop. It was my first full-time job. I was 23. There was a special staff meeting called by the manager to discuss what “we” should do about the book. It was already famously offensive. Should it be displayed prominently on a front table, where anyone could pick it up, leaf through it, and enjoy the blood-spattered descriptions of rapes, murders, mutilations etc.? Should it be up on a top shelf, with the erotica, where only adults could get at it? Or should it be kept behind the counter, available on request, like Little Black Sambo (a horrifically racist and very popular children’s book)? There may even have been some discussion of whether or not we should stock it, but I can’t believe the manager would seriously countenance not selling a novel which had already received so much free publicity – so if we did talk about this option, it must have been as a sop to the middle-aged Christian bookseller on the team. Anyway, I was 23 and a recent Eng Lit graduate, and so I no doubt held forth on the importance of free speech, artistic expression, all that. The upshot of our discussion: the book was prominently displayed on the new fiction table, along with 1991’s other Important Novels, whatever they were. No customers ever complained.

I half-remembered all this while working my way through some of the more disgusting passages of American Psycho. The 23 year-old me would, I suspect, have decided to tell people he found this stuff clever and hilarious; Bast, 39, on the other hand, read much of it through half-closed fingers/eyes. If we had that staff meeting again, I think I would vote for the top shelf.

There are two reasons for this. One: I am probably more squeamish now than I was then, and I have a child – violence seems rather less amusing. Two: I am not convinced that the artistic merits of American Psycho justify either the novel’s length or the explicitness of its horrors. The combined result seems rather less than the sum of its parts. It’s a fact that, over the last fifteen years, the book has proved perennially popular with those readers who are simply looking for some really good murders and many of whom skip all the “boring” stuff about Ralph Lauren, Huey Lewis etc. Having said that, much of the book is very funny, and it worms its way into the psyche. The repetition of certain phrases, the lists of brand names, the interchangeability of key characters, women, bums etc. – the satirical power of the book is intact and has not dated much (sadly – yuppie-ism now being a general and widespread state of mind rather than being restricted to one societal group.) Yet, although the length and relentlessness of the book has a kind of mesmerising effect, broken by the eruptions of the old ultraviolence*, once that card has been played it’s difficult to see any deeper purpose to these outbreaks of hacking, slashing and imaginative cruelty than to allow the author to display his (if you will) chops – the satire is almost entirely contained elsewhere. The book is framed in its first and last lines (“Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” and “This Is Not An Exit” respectively) as a sealed chamber of horrors or an Inferno, but it sometimes feels static as a result. Or perhaps that’s the point. Either way, I often felt as weary and drained as Patrick Bateman, however energizing the latest dismemberment or killing spree.

* A Clockwork Orange, by contrast, did not provoke this reaction in me. The violent scenes and the over-all intent of the film seemed to be in proportion.

Third cult book in a row, and third portrait of rampant self-interest – not a coincidence. I am wearing black Levis 501s, black M&S socks, the same black M&S cardigan as yesterday, and a blue Mogwai t-shirt which reads: COME ON DIE YOUNG.

Last word to Patrick Bateman: ‘“I think his work … it has a kind of … wonderfully proportioned, purposefully mock-superficial quality.”’ pg. 95