For four months, book circles have been rocked by an unusual scandal-the suppression of a novel for obscenity by its own publisher on the eve of publication. Nothing like this has happened at a major house since Theodore Dreiser`s ”Sister Carrie” was accepted, then rejected, then disemboweled by Doubleday, Page & Co. at the turn of the century.
But in the case of ”American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage Contemporaries, 399 pages, $11), the victims of disembowelment, and many worse fates, are not the book and its author. They`re a number of women victims of the book`s protagonist, a deranged young New York investment banker named Patrick Bateman whose skills and ingenuity as a torturer are so graphically described that in November Richard E. Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer of Simon & Schuster, let Ellis keep his $300,000 advance and rejected the book. Soon afterward, it was snapped up by Vintage Contemporaries, which last week distributed copies to publications for review.
In all the free publicity that attended these events, which invariably described stomach-turning scenes from the novel, no one bothered to mention the most startling fact about ”American Psycho,” which is that it is a stupefying bore. Without Ellis` name attached to it-he had already published in 1985 the best-selling ”Less Than Zero”-the manuscript probably wouldn`t have made it past the slush pile of a sado-porn house, much less to a mainstream publisher`s first reader.
It can`t be easy writing a dull book about a serial killer, and Ellis spares his readers none of the difficulty. That he has been able to make this a dull book is really a prodigious feat, akin to circling the Earth without once blundering into the light.
As near as I can figure, Ellis wrote ”American Psycho” for the same reason John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan-to make a name for himself-and it may not be possible at this point to decide which act was the more grievous and inept. Although Ellis` aim is no better than Hinckley`s, it`s entirely conceivable that his designer dissection kit will prove to be at least as dangerous to women as Hinckley was to society at large.
That is, it will if a significant number of readers make it past Page 30 or so, which I sincerely hope they won`t. Interesting narratives about obsessed people are notoriously hard to write without inflicting the full weight of their obsessions on the reader, and there are real writers of genius who have had trouble bringing it off-Vladimir Nabokov in ”The Defense,” for example, though he managed it perfectly in ”The Eye,” ”Lolita” and ”Pale Fire.” So did Dostoyevsky in ”Crime and Punishment.”
Bateman is a man so obsessed with superficial appearances that he tells us about, and consists of, very little else. He and his circle are shown early on as little more than an assemblage of walking, fornicating brand names and hip tastes. Here ”the most interesting person I know,” Tim Price (get it?), is complaining to Bateman in a cab about being underpaid (at $190,000 per) at his job in New York, which he doesn`t like: ” `I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs. Maybe the ODM III or ORC II dynamic tuning systems?` . . . He continues talking as he opens his new Tumi calfskin attache case he bought at D.F. Sander`s. He places the Walkman in the case alongside a Panasonic wallet-size cordless portable folding Easa- phone (he used to own the NEC 9000 Porta portable). …”
And that`s easily the most interesting person in the book. If you think this is just a quick establishing shot to indicate the superficiality of these people, you`re wrong. Everybody, and every object on or about him or her, particularly clothes, gets the full brand-name treatment instantly on introduction-and the brand names stay on even on second or third reference.
If, upon rising in the morning, Bateman changes out of Ralph Lauren silk pajamas into ”Ralph Lauren monogrammed boxer shorts,” then, by God, they`re still ”Ralph Lauren boxers” when he puts them back on after stepping out of the shower. And these people change clothes-and accouterments, lovers, sexual preferences and everything else-a lot, virtually no noun or name lacking its designer label every time we see it.
Excruciating detail
”But that`s my point,” I can hear Ellis whining from the direction of New York. Right, Bret. But you`re already slipping into unintentional self-parody by Page 19, during the scene in which this merry crew verbally eviscerates a departed dinner guest who just didn`t make the grade
sartorially: ”`Vanden is a cross between … The Limited and … used Benetton,` Price says. … `No,` I smile. `Used Fiorucci.”`
And by the end of Chapter 2, which describes Bateman`s morning ritual in excruciating detail (”I stand in front of a chrome and acrylic Washmobile bathroom sink … which I bought at Hastings Tile to use while the marble sinks I ordered from Finland are being sanded. . . .”), the narrative has completed its transformation into an eerie kind of inadvertent camp, and we are happy when Bateman turns on ”The Patty Winters Show” and we get to listen to the guest with multiple personalities. By now we`re desperate to encounter a character with even one.
In sum, Ellis and his publisher have made cultural news in at least two landmark ways. By sheer marketing efficiency they`ve brought the fear and hatred toward women of some American men into the open; and they`ve brought into mainstream publishing the kind of printed matter the police find by the boxful in the homes of sex criminals.
The distinguished house of Knopf, which owns Vintage and once gave us the work of Thomas Mann, has provided the first over-the-counter slasher novel and the first consumerist epic, packed with product tie-in possibilities for the inevitable movie. So much for brand names.
Although he overdoes it to the point of turning some of his big emotional scenes into comic opera, there`s nothing at all funny or even unrealistic about the several points Ellis is belaboring.
There is no doubt that such people exist in significant numbers among the elite crowd who run things and make the most money in this country, and that they are incredibly shallow, ignorant and sometimes dangerous despite the expensive colleges from which they come and whose names they use as status credit cards.
Ellis gives us a deer park full of people so absorbed in status that they are what they own, and this ”minimal self,” as the social critic Christopher Lasch called it, is continually threatened by not having exactly the right things at the right time-as well as by people who have nothing.
It`s significant that the first person we see Bateman killing is a homeless man, and that Bateman and his friends apparently see the whole social problem of poverty and homelessness as a matter of urban decor aggravated by a subconscious sense of guilt they don`t have the resources to confront.
Their usual way of dealing with such matters is to wave dollar bills in the faces of the derelicts at the entrances to their chic pubs and then give the tips to the doormen. They even have discussions on the best way to taunt and torment such people.
Devalued values
In the scene in which the derelict is killed, Ellis effectively shows us how all Bateman`s values-despite a Harvard education-have effectively hardened into a sense of taste: Ethics are all aesthetics for him, and he is enraged when they are violated.
After first questioning him sympathetically about being laid off, hungry and cold, Bateman goes into a tirade about the man`s appearance, which he blames on his ”negative attitude. … My rage builds, subsides … then I sigh: `Al … I`m sorry. It`s just that . . . I don`t know. I don`t have anything in common with you.”`
Bateman has to kill him-and does, slowly and painfully-merely to reaffirm his own sense of who he is. This dehumanizing attitude can be found in people with much less money than Bateman and his friends-people who have merely been drenched with a generation`s worth of consumerist brainwashing on television. And some of us have lived long enough to remember when college-educated people considered it very uncool to look down on such people and no big deal both to attend a good college and to serve a couple of years in the enlisted ranks of the Army, to fulfill what was accepted-grudgingly, maybe, but accepted-as their obligation to society.
Few Americans under 40 or so will understand this, but to be democratic was hip. The Reagan years made this attitude incomprehensible by mandating a greed ethic and abolishing any sense of personal responsibility toward society.
This is a whole revolution in consciousness whose effects will be very hard, if not impossible, to reverse. I only wish that Ellis had written a better book to illustrate it.
