American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

It's about time, don't you think?

Abandon all hope ye who enter here is the first line of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho. It is taken from Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy where it is inscribed on the gates of hell. Here it is scrawled in red spray paint on a wall in an extension of hell itself - 1980s New York City.

It's protagonist and narrator is Patrick Bateman. Bateman is a Wall Street yuppie of the most cartoonish proportions (sickeningly rich and good-looking in equal measure), yet Ellis doesn't so much throw a spanner in the works as a rusty, bloody chainsaw - Bateman is a psychopath with a thirst for gruesome, vicious murder.

Despite sounding like a distinctly disturbing novel, Ellis is able to put down some truly comic observations of New York City's rich and vacuous. It is that rare thing which authors often find so difficult to achieve; it is both a grotesque yet funny novel, although many female activists didn't, and still don't, see it that way. When it was released the misogynistic content ruffled feminist feathers, to say the least.

The cast of vapid, over-privileged twenty-somethings concern themselves with being seen in the right clubs, the right restaurants and all the while in the right clothes. Any description of another character by Bateman will see him meticulously pick apart the other person's outfit whether it be Gianni Versace, Jean-Paul Gaultier or Louis Vuitton. Appearance is everything, right down to the finest, nauseating and most irrelevant detail. The novel casts a satirical eye over American attitudes in the 1980s, namely mindless consumerism, and picks apart the ultimately pointless, directionless existence of those who like to spend spend spend.

Throughout his body of work Ellis' influences are for all to see. The minimalist modes of Hemingway and Faulkner are rampant in the majority of his novels yet American Psycho throws away the proud simplicity of these literary cornerstones and sees Bateman survey New York with the meticulous eye of a pre-Raphaelite artist. This can often be funny (Bateman describing his latest hi-fi system; laying down his robotic morning routine) but also highly disturbing (the death and sex scenes mercilessly leave nothing to the imagination). In the novel's more stealthier moments, between the blood and the sex, Ellis writes with a sensitivity which is delicate and subtle in its presence. When Bateman and his fiancee leave the social cannibalism of New York and retreat to a friend's beach house for a holiday, Bateman leaves small affectionate notes in her handbag, revealing something resembling a humanity which is otherwise NOT THERE. However, such moments of tenderness are not without the macabre lurking in it's shadow. On the same holiday Bateman finds himself stood over his sleeping wife, ice-pick in hand, gripped by his madness.

Those of you who know me will be all too aware of my feelings towards this book. I often find it amusing myself how highly I rate this novel. At its best it penetrates with an execution one can only marvel at, slack-jawed; at its worse it is one of the sharpest American novels of its time. I have actually judged people solely on their opinion of this novel and have surely lost potential friends for it but those I know who value it don't just like it. You can't just like it. You can't just like Christmas, you can't just like your birthday, you can't just like it when Chelsea lose. The novel gives you something.

To many people it is a punchline to a literary joke. To me it is one of the greatest books I have ever read.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to return some videotapes.