"I simply am not there."

AMERICAN PSYCHO by Bret Easton Ellis

Now's not really the time to reminisce about Wall Street in the 80's. It's when the economy was still steamlining along, maintained by a ruthless crew of greedy, vacuous young professionals, the same crew who crashed it into its current economic iceberg. Who was steering the ship, anyway? Bret Easton Ellis knew who, way back in 1991. The captain of the ship, his every hair gelled perfectly into place, was the impeccable lunatic Patrick Bateman, our American Psycho, sprung fully formed from the tide of American consumerism, materialism, and the worst recesses of Bret Easton Ellis's brain.

American Psycho is a horrifying book. Look at the premise: we're stuck in the 80's, rubbing shoulders with yuppies on the island of Manhattan, with only Patrick, himself a devil in someone else's hell, to guide us. Mr. Bateman's life orbits around yuppies and their drama: agonizing over restaurants, comparing business cards, reading aloud to each other from GQ, making blithe comments that objectify women. Apparantly it's all a ruse for Bateman: "I tip my head back and laugh even if what [my coworker's] saying isn't particularly funny, which is practically always. I've perfected my fake response to a degree where it's so natural sounding that no one notices." In a style both fascinating and sickening, Ellis essentially drags the reader through Patrick Bateman's miserable life by narrating in (wait for it) psychotic detail, a meticulousness so obsessive it feels almost meditative. Mantra-like, he describes everything he sees as superficially as he can, flooding the reader with brand names from pop culture and fashion design, going so far as to comment on the fashion of his victims even as he's tearing them apart. All the pop culture references almost pegs this novel as reactionary, but the release of sheer maniacal agony that must have driven Ellis to write this novel catapults it beyond your average dissertation on society.

To be frank, one of the more difficult aspects of the book is learning how to enjoy it. As a piece of literature, it is simply a disservice to the novel to regard American Psycho as anything other than a satire. Throughout Bateman's rampages, we get the complete reduction of 80's pop culture and television; there's sex, there's violence, and inbetween is advertisement. The gruesome content ensures even the gutsiest readers will recoil from certain scenes, but not to worry--Ellis's amazingly uniform delivery ensures a level of desensitization that allows the reader (especially if the reader was born in the last couple decades) to take the violence in stride, see past the beheadings, and realize this: it would be inaccurate, if not unfaithful and misleading, to satirize life in late 20th century America without including a serial killer and quite a few instances of gratuitous violence.

Beyond its place as a brilliant satire, the book probably wouldn't move much. Throughout the year and a half with Bateman, the routine of power lunches, nightclubs, and massacres doesn't really vary. The prose, while impressive and often hypnotic in its consistency, requires such strict attention to the endless stream of fashion and product references that it often seems poised to collapse into tedium. Characters have no intention of developing, thank you very much, save for sweet Joan, Patrick's not-quite-perceptive-enough secretary, cast with the thankless task of falling in love with him. As for the violence: it's very bad, there's a lot of it, and it comes even when you're not expecting it.

Ellis's ear for yuppie dialogue is priceless, and slightly reminiscent of that other angry boy in NYC, Holden Caulfield. While they share an equally disgusted attitude toward fakes and phonies, the clear difference here is that while Holden Caulfield and Patrick Bateman are both, to put it lightly, unnerved by society, Caulfield is too much of a weirdo to become a part of it. Bateman has succumbed. He's gotten through Harvard, his looks are everything, and he glides along in his superficiality until the final breakdown. Holden had a breakdown too, but it left him wistfully sighing over a merry-go-round, while Bateman, on the other hand, wanders the beach eating live sandcrabs and handfuls of sand. Welcome to the eighties.

In all honesty, he tells us, Bateman really wants to get caught. As sympathetic readers we want him to get caught too; we want the eighties to wake up and realize what's happening; it can't. In a post 9/11 world, Bateman probably wouldn't be getting away with his killing sprees, especially in NYC. The Internet, possibly the only medium able to match Patrick's endless pursuit of extreme ways to ward off ennui, hadn't yet made its debut. In the 80's, Bateman's still renting his porn from the local video store; he doesn't have the option of casting around online for chat groups to anonymously discuss his nihilistic tendencies, his love of Gucci, or his insatiable blood lust. No, in this world, "Everything failed to subdue me...everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money [my coworker] made....there wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust." Personally, to this young reader, it doesn't seem to be an entirely unjustifiable response to the eighties.

Dead today and Ever More: John Updike, facepainter

John Updike is dead, an author fully realized, a conscious and attractive player in my idea of living literature. Unarguably so. On a more personal level, he took a paintbrush, dipped it into the white of America, and then tried to jump at my face with it, snarling. Actually, not snarling. With perfect psychotic, almost loving precision he approached me, a big man with a dripping paintbrush at his side, and he pinned me down and sat on my chest and, even as I was squeaking and struggling, he took out his gloriously wide wet paintbrush, the kind for walls, and began humming and singing and reverently painting my face in heavy strokes. All over my face. In the middle of this he conjured up a white headband with two long, floppy ears, and jammed it to snap around the top of my head, and kept crooning and painting until I screamed, choking on the paint dripping into my mouth. Finally when I was able to roll away, I almost ran straight into a mirror, and stood panting at the rabbit reflected.

Oh yes and he was Somebody "around", the guy providing positive criticism on the back of books that want to sell, who contributes something sassy to the New Yorker every six months or so.
To be honest, the death invokes all these stringy pangs of regret. Should have read more before he died. Kurt Vonnegut's was different, a more remorseful pang; more like I was in a fight with him and was just about to come around with flowers and then heard the news.

Writing is a private connection in that the reader can choose to engage. The writer has to wait for the reader to come around. To hear anything, one have to use one's eyes. Bizarrely different from trying to read music, or anything more aurally based. I wrote about starting to read John Updike last year, though I stopped when his narrative became too overpowering for me. What does that even mean? When an author infiltrates your brain, takes down your whole inner monologue and dominates the story line of your reality. Brandishes a paintbrush in your face, and bunny ears. Like JD Salinger or someone equally easy to mimic. Dominant narrators are fun, but they are best enjoyed sparingly, for the reader's own emotional consistency. So we don't get to a point where we can't see past the arc of our narrative. Detachment, drama, aestheticism of reality; yes all fun, but damaging if kept off the page for too long.
I should give him another shot though, even though I feel like artists are the only everlasting ones who can still get at you from the grave.