American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis | This satirical look at the world is well beyond disturbing...

American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis | not everyone can stomache it

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American Psycho

	American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis Vintage, 1991 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 1081 reviews view larger image
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This satirical look at the world is well beyond disturbing...

What would the experience be like, if one could crawl into the mind of a madman. Meet Perfect Patrick Bateman ... perfect hair, perfect body, perfect job, and perfect fiancée. What more could a shiny shoed Wall Street up-and-comer ask for in the over-indulgent 80's. For success in the 80's was all about perfection -- who had it and who didn't. Patrick Bateman is certainly not lacking in perfection. Even the gruesome, cruel, beyond rational thought acts of violence he commits are perfectly orchestrated down the very last detail, much like his attire.

But what is a young man to do when everyone around him can distinguish the infinite subtle details of a business card, yet they cannot remember his name. When is being trendy simply not trendy enough? What does a man have to do to get noticed ... kill people? Of course, set yourself apart, get your anger out, be creative -- nail guns, chainsaws, axes, and hangers ... puppies, kittens, and rats. Now that is what Patrick is talking about ... if your life has become a chocolate covered urinal cake, make your girlfriend eat it and then go play around in someone else's blood, but be sure to nail them to the floor first, you want their undivided attention, don't you?

I won't kid you, this satirical look at the world is well beyond disturbing ... but what can you expect from a psychopathic lunatic. Patrick takes us through a day in the life -- his life, as grotesque and evil as it is. Yet, one minute, you will be falling over yourself with laughter at the trendy bar banter, and his upscale 1980's musical commentary, and the next minute, you will be walking away, hoping only to attempt to vomit what you just read out of your head, swearing you won't pick it back up again. And yet, for some reason you can't seem to help yourself, you need to keep turning those pages as Patrick takes you deeper and deeper into his nightmarish world ... and lithium will not save you.

An extraordinary work of genius. Although I have no comprehension how Mr. Ellis slept at night with Bateman at his side. And for those who spent their twenty-somethings in the 1980's, you will understand without a doubt the profound social commentary, which might even be more disturbing than Bateman himself.

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not everyone can stomache it

i really love this book. this is a very discriptive and detailed book, and not for weak stomaches. its grotesquely detailed. but wonderfully written. i highly suggest it if you can stomache it. some desctiptions are along the lines of being x-rated

Yuppie Rage

After months of hesitantation, I decided that I was going to read this book many claim could not get pass 30 or so pages. I had finsihed reading a small novella by Michael Chabon before picking up Ellis' 'American Psycho'. It was already late but I wanted to break into it as much as I could. After the 30th page, I wanted so bad to continue reading. I though it great so far: intriguing, well-written (easy to follow), funny, and very, very detailed (perhaps this is what others disliked about it). I closed the book. I had to sleep to get up for work the next morning where I found myself taking it to work and reading a bit there getting more and more involved. After work I read some more at home passing the 100 page mark just like that! After two more nights, I was finished with the book, and I'm very surprised to say that I liked it a lot.

The story is about Patrick Bateman, a wall street yuppie, who may or may not be a serial murderer -that's one of the things I liked about it: it's ambiguity about if he really did kill people or not (besides Paul Owen, I think he did). The book's chapters all involve Patrick as it's told By Patrick himself at the restraunts, bars, dance clubs, the office, his apartment, etc. The reader is literally logged into his brain and eyes as we witness everything he does and thinks.

At time it can be very facinating and funny. While at other times, it can be very disturbing especially when he describes his killings -very very detailed stuff here that could make anyone cringe. However, there are a few light moments in the book that may seem tedious to some. Patrick discusses everything in detail from stereo units to the music that comes out of them. Ellis devotes 3 chapters to music artists and their records: Genises, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News. It's all interesting, and I didn't find it distracting or uneccessary, but some might. It's all about developing the character of Patrick, who, is one of the best characters I've read about in a long time. It's also funny but while I was reading this, I couldn't help but think that in 20 years or so, this book could be considered a classic.

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Examines the dark side of the mind

A main feature of American Psycho, is how Bret Easton Ellis is capable of including the reader as a part of the story. By his several pages descriptions of his morning dressing, exercice and make up, the dishes they get served in fancy New York Restaurants and the songs on the albums he listens to Eliis succeeds to make the reader as bored as Bateman is. Because for the first several hundred pages of the book, bored, rich and not too empathic toward people worse off than himself is what Patrick Bateman - and probably many of the readers is.

When Patrick Bateman finally puts imagination into practice and starts elimintating what he regards as the trash of society - prostitutes, beggars, black people and colleges standing in the way for him making more money, Bret Easton Ellis manages to make the observant reader to realize that the descusting monster Patrick Bateman might has more in common with the dark side of their own personality than they care about. One of the most magnificant ways that Ellis illustrates this point is by the many comments he acomplishes to make people complain about their stomach - as if they got a unsatisfactory meal in a restaurant - rather than identifying how relevant his objections really is. This projective way of writing makes Ellis a part of the inherritage of James Joyce, who in Ulysses introduced this litterary tradition of combating rather than amusing and entertain the reader, while the reader's reaction to what he reads works as an integrated part of the story the writer wants to tell.

On this basis of this same tradition of I regard many of the objections about American Psycho - as boring, a challenge for the stomach etc as rather irrelevant. They can simply not have understood that this feelings that Ellis novel provoces in the reader, is the Writers aim. Alternatively they can not recognize that the dark side of the mind has a place in litterature. If you agree on this view, American Psycho is not a book for you. If you belive that the dark side of the mind indeed has a place in litterature, even that the dark side of the mind indeed can be the subject of some of the greatest litterature, if you are ready to spend some time on puzzeling with understanding what the writer is aiming at and may be even is ready to identify and take in that you, yourself might be a part of the problem that the book identifies, this is definately a book for you.

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