American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

If ever there is a book that captured the essence and excess of the late 1980s, it is American Psycho. It is a book that is set so comfortably in that era, that I don’t believe it would work in any other before or since. Yes, the subject could be carried over to the ‘90s or 2000s, or even the ‘50s or ‘70s, but to work on the level that this book did, it could only be set in the age of high technology, and the hustle and bustle of Manhattan and Wall Street. This is the same decade that gave us a litany of Wall Street-set films, and presented the need to develop wealth as almost altruistic: Wall Street, Risky Business, The Secret to My Success, Trading Places. 9 to 5. If you watched a lot of movies in the 1980s, you NEEDED to make money. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about used cars salesmen and the strangest things they’ve found in trunks.

Ellis wrote this book at the end of the decade, at the time we finally started to look hard at yuppie worship, and he produced a masterful story that put a fun-house mirror in front of society. The reflection glaring back at us, through blood-shot eyes surrounded by a blood-splattered face, was Patrick Bateman.

Pat Bateman, a Wall Street playboy who excels at murders and executions, er mergers and acquisitions, and who spends his evenings visiting the many clubs and restaurants in New York City with his friends(?), co-workers (?), and girlfriend (?). They are all adrift in a sea of rich, superficial professionals, whose only goals appear to be to bang the closest hardbody and eat at the most exclusive restaurants.

What sets Pat Bateman apart from the rest of the characters, is that he knows that’s what it’s all about. He knows they’re all self-obsessed. He sees the muddy banks they’re all trying to scramble up, that lead only to more muddy banks, and he’s laughing at them. He’s laughing at them and himself, because he knows that to reach the top of that bank is to only set his eyes on the next one. But he feels compelled to do it.

Bateman has a slew of idiosyncrasies: His obsession with music (there are three chapters dedicated to espousing the brilliance of Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis), his obsession with style, with renting and returning video tapes. He all but plans his day around morning and nighttime talk shows. I could go on, but the point I’m trying to make is, Pat Bateman is a psycho, but also the most human character in this book.

Watching Bateman decline through the book, slowly at first and then picking up speed, then slowing and jerking forward, is a treat. Bearing witness to his atrocities and his descriptions is sinfully delicious, and packed with enough humor to almost bring levity to the horrors he commits. He cries because he doesn’t know if he’s microwaving a head correctly.

Writing about Bateman is hard. “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman…”

So, I’m going to write about my experience with this book, because I experienced so many conflicts as I read through, and I think they were the exact responses Ellis was shooting for.

For the first 100 pages, I thought I was reading the most over-rated and boring novel with one-dimensional characters and no plot. It took me four days to get through them.

The second 100 pages developed enough momentum, and I started to see Bateman as he was: a three-dimensional character in a world filled with outlines of people. There was some sex and murder, but nothing I’d call world shattering. It took me two days to get through those pages.

The third 100 pages ripped me out of my fucking chair and took me into Bateman’s head like no other novel has ever been able to do. I began to see the other characters like he did. The world he lived in started to make sense to me, and, even more scary, I saw why it shouldn’t make sense at all. I don’t know how long it took me to read those 100 pages, because I devoured the balance of the book, 200 pages in all, in one day.

Some people won’t like this book. Half of it could be cut just by omitting the fashion advice and learning about who is wearing whom. But that’s one idiosyncrasy that holds up through the entire book, wavering only once that I saw, as if his need to know fashion is the only thing rooting him in the world of sanity. It’s gory. Possibly overly so. It’s the literary equal to the season 7 premier of that show about early morning mall walkers. The sex scenes are so graphic as to put the movie’s versions to shame.

In the end, the reader must ask themselves: did any of that really happen, or was it all (or most or some) in his head? There are clues that lend credibility to the latter. Paul Owen’s disappearance and what later happens in his apartment... his housekeeper never questioning the copious amounts of blood she has to clean up… finding a bone in his Dove bar… These are all things that make the reader take pause and ask that question. What do I think, you wonder?

I, uh, have to go rent—I mean—return some videos.

Psycho, by Robert Bloch

Well, that escalated quickly.

I’m still digesting the book, and the prudent thing to do is to wait a day or so before doing this, but I’ve never been a very prudent person (I’m pursuing an MFA in Popular Fiction forchrissakes!). So here goes…

Reading Psycho after knowing the big twist was actually fun from an analytical point of view. From the first few pages when we meet Mrs. Bates, I could identify some of the techniques Bloch used to present Norma Bates as a living person without hinting that she’s really dead. In that first scene, we see that Norman doesn’t look at or touch his mother. She’s there, in the peripherals, berating him over his choice of reading materials and terminal bachelorhood. She never comes around to talk to him face on, and he even mentions that he wants to ignore her as if she weren’t actually there. What’s fun, is that in those early pages we not only meet Norman Bates, but also see Norma Bates as if she’s a real, living person to us as much as she is to him.

There are other instances throughout the book that also work, such as when he sees her after waking from one of his fugue states. He sees her as a waking-dream, leading the reader into believing she’s actually present. It’s pretty brilliant. The first 50 pages was a blast to read and dissect, even if I knew what was coming.

And then things escalated. And not in a good way. By escalate I mean spiraled into a clunky narrative of one-dimensional characters, unbelievable plot points and haphazard mechanics . But, before I get into all of the bad, I want to point out something great about Bloch’s writing: It’s as easily digestible today as it was nearly 60 years ago when he wrote this book. For the most part, the language he used and the dialogue from the characters is rarely dated. Unlike Richard Matheson, Bloch didn’t use wide brush strokes, but rather pointed, acute writing that may very well be found in novels written this decade. Of course, it wasn’t without exception, but even those were rare moments that usually focused around the technology of the time.

Maybe it’s that time that led us to the biggest plot hole: why were the police never called? The thin reasoning that the company wanted to save embarrassment for both Mary Crane and the Lowery firm didn’t make sense to me. Maybe it was different back then, but I would still think that a $40,000 theft and a missing girl would garner some sort of police response. It’s that sort of slipshod reasoning that made me roll my eyes more than once. I can’t really nit-pick Lila Crane’s motives because this was written in the 50s, but her constant dependence on the men in the book made me squirm. There was never any chance she could save her sister, but the book would have only been a hundred pages long if she would have gone to the police when she wanted to.

And let’s face it, we wouldn’t have lost much if that happened. The first fifty pages were the strongest of the book, and the 150 that followed did little to advance Norman’s story-line. The eventual discovery of his multiple personalities was delivered in a clinical rundown from a character that probably should have died in the hotel office, but for some reason Bloch spared him. I could see this book ending with Lila making a visit to the State Hospital and talking to the psychiatrist herself (that would help her character arc as a near-helpless woman to somebody who takes control of the situation and her life. Instead she leaves it all in the hands of the man that made the whole ordeal stretch out a week or more longer than it needed to.

Anyway, I’d talk about the climax, but there wasn’t one. Because, once again, the guy who probably should have died shows up in the nick of time and has the easiest save of any hero I’ve ever seen or read.

Even with all the negative things I’ve written about, the pace and brevity of the book made it a decent read, one that can be done on a lazy morning while sipping coffee (and that’s just how I read it).