American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis, 1991)

My second choice of holiday read was also turned into a Hollywood movie, although a slightly different one. American Psycho is a film that I'm sure I watched on the plane to Florida back in 2000 and there are only a few moments in it that stick in the mind. The same could be true of the book. Written from the perspective of Patrick Bateman, Ellis' novel follows him and his friends through the 80's as they live the Yuppy lifestyle - everytime a new scene is featured Patrick lists the brand of each character's clothes, none of the objects in his life come without brand name qualifiers to show you how expensive and image conscious everyone is. The first 100 pages or so consist of Patrick and his awful friends going out to various hip clubs and restaurants and discussing the right way to wear a particularly type of tie. 

And then just when this gets rather boring, Ellis begins to make things more interesting. And sick. Bateman casual drops lines into his narration about violence, and occasionally says these thoughts out loud among company, who never bat an eyelid. Later he begins killing people - or continues, it's noted later on that he's being doing this for some time - and in very graphic manners. Ellis details the explicit sex Bateman has with up to 2 women at a time, and then the graphic way he tortures and eventually kills them, slicing parts off, using a rat imaginatively and doing vile things with acid. It's a fairly horrific set of chapters, but following one of these episodes Bateman's behaving normally, or there's a lengthy chapter on the works of Whitney Houston or Huey Lewis and the News.

As the book goes on Bateman's psychosis appears to get worse, he takes more risks, but he rarely comes close to being caught. While reading about these nasties, it's hard to find Ellis' point, although I figure it's about the crass commercialisation and numbing of society that the greed of the 1980's personified. With the bodies piling up (or rotting away under quicklime) it is odd that Bateman can continue to kill at whim. Towards the end doubt is cast on whether or not the explicit events are all in the narrator's sick and twisted mind, and actually he hasn't been acting out his fantasies at all, hence why he hasn't been sought out. I find that hard to believe though, and I think that Bateman did carry out these episodes, but that the world around him is so wrapped up in themselves to give a damn. Either way, American Psycho is gripping, filled with vivid, disturbing imagery and a confident style that doesn't spoon feed answers or make itself easy to read.