34. American Psycho: Murder, Trump, and New York City

Why was the book so heavily censored on publication? Is the novel gratuitously violent? And, what happened when Tabby met Bret Easton Ellis? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of American Psycho, and the world it was born of. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:10Speaker 00

  I decide to even up the score a little bit by showing everyone my new business card. I slap it on the table, waiting for reactions. New card? I try to act casual about it, but I'm smiling proudly. What do you think?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Very nice.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  He hands it to Van Patten.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Cool colouring.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  That's bone, I point out. And the lettering is something called Cillian Rail.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  It's very cool, Bateman.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  But that is nothing.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Look at this.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the colour and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Eggshell with Romalian type.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Nice, I croak.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Price says.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  This is really super. How did nitwit like you get so tasteful?

• 1:16Speaker 00

  I'm looking at Van Patten's card and then at mine and cannot believe that Price actually likes Van Patten's better. Dizzy, I sip my drink and then take a deep breath.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  But wait.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Price says.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  You ain't seen nothing yet.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  He pulls out of an inside coat pocket and slowly, dramatically turns it over for our inspection. Even I have to admit, it's magnificent. Suddenly, the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless hum compared to this card. And we all hear Price's words.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Grey's lettering, pale nimbus white.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Price pulls it out, and though he's acting nonchalant, I don't see how he can ignore its supple, off-white colouring, its tasteful thickness. I am unexpectedly depressed that I started this. So hello, everybody. That was from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. Dominic and I are putting on our very best yuppie impressions. And as you can tell from that opening reading, it is a darkly funny horror novel about a wealthy Wall Street banker in the 1980s who beneath the surface is actually brutally torturing and mutilating people while seemingly going about this very elite New York, Manhattan existence.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Tabby, as I was saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. And it's the same for you, isn't it?

• 2:52Speaker 00

  You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite book so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using Klarna to handle my real world money admin, and that gives me the headspace for the more important things like thinking about books.

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  Download the Klarna app so you can stay on top of your money and think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cash back points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply.

• 3:44Speaker 02

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• 5:09Speaker 00

  The book is notorious for its violence. It is censored in some countries and of course, it was made even more famous by the 2000 film starring Christian Bale, which I was actually modelling my performance on there. And there is so much to discuss in this episode, particularly with you, Dominic, because we're going to be diving into 1980s American capitalism and Wall Street. We're going to talk about Bret Easton Ellis himself, the dark comedy of the book, the superficial cult of consumerism, its parodying, and of course, its violent. But Dominic, before we started recording, we were talking to Nicole about our early experiences of this book. So what was yours? Because I don't think it casts you in a particularly positive light.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  So I first read this, I must have read it in about 1992. So I was at school, so it'd only been out for a year or so.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  I hadn't even been born.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Right, I know. Terrifying. And I can vividly remember the boys at my school, some of them saying, a couple of them had read it, saying, God, this book is absolutely brilliant because it's a book perfectly calibrated, I would argue, to please 17-year-old boys at a boarding school. And I can remember one of my friends actually saying to me, well, you should skip all the stuff about the consumerism and the dinners and Wall Street because that's quite boring. And the first sex scene starts on page 200.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Or something, which probably is not the spirit in which this book should be read. Well, it definitely is in the spirit. As a 17-year-old reader, I thought it was extremely clever in the way that it made you complicit in Patrick Bateman's violence. Because just to emphasise for listeners, this is of course a very violent book, so we'll be talking about some very grim things. And I thought at the time, I mean, what really impressed me as a reader, what impressed itself upon me was the way the transition, you have this extremely pornographic sex scene that moves almost seamlessly into a scene of hideous torture and violence. And this was the first time I'd read anything remotely like this. And it's stuck in my mind ever since.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  And we will discuss the way that juxtaposition works, what purpose it serves, if any at all. I actually didn't read it at school and it had never been that attractive to me as a concept. But then, the place where I used to work, Bret Easton Ellis was coming to do an event, to do a talk about his latest book. This was about five years ago, I think, four, five years ago. And so I hurriedly read American Psycho because I was going to be looking after him in the green room. And I thought, you know, it was important, we had something to discuss. Turns out, I need not have worried because he kind of shuffled in with this enormous suitcase that I think his assistant was carrying. And then he opened it and inside there was nothing but a full bottle of gin.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  So on brand.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  And his notes for the talk. And I was like, okay. And then he got onto stage and he was just brilliant. He was so articulate. He was so impressive. And then went upstairs, discovered that the whole bottle of gin was empty. So I was impressed in more ways than one. But my early reading of American Psycho didn't leave much of a mark. I think I kind of hurried through it. I remember thinking, God, it's very, very violent. I think I kind of ended up skipping some of the more gratuitous sections.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  And have thought about it hardly ever since. But I do love the movie. So let's see how this time my impression has changed.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  But there is someone who's a very, very big fan of this. And I think you can see the correlation between his work and Bret Easton Ellis's. And that's a guy called Irvine Welsh. And he's the writer.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Trainspotting.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Of Trainspotting, exactly. And he describes it as. As a book that holds a mirror up to a particular age, it says that it's petulant, unerring and uncompromising, because that is what the book is doing. It's parodying a particular moment in time, among other things. And now, Dominic, this is totally your hinterland. So tell us about the context of American Psycho, because this is 1980s America, capitalism, the Wall Street boom, think Wolf of Wall Street.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Or The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. So this is one of the, I suppose you would say this is actually one of the canonical texts of that era, of sort of 1980s New York. Of course, it's written slightly afterwards, but it's looking back at the kind of heyday of the sort of stock market-fuelled consumerism of the late Reagan and then Bush years in America. So to give people a bit of historical context, the 60s have been a period of great idealism, of course, civil rights movement, the movement against the Vietnam War and stuff. Then you had the 1970s stagnation, Nixon being brought down by Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the hostages in Iran and so on. So a lot of introspection and a lot of sort of gloom about the American capitalist model. You

• 9:47Speaker 01

  get to the 80s, you get to particularly the election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980, and it's as though there is a, you know, someone flicks a switch. I mean, we're talking about in Manhattan, in New York, which is a place of enormous contrast between, an enormous disparity between rich and poor in this period. So massive homelessness, massive crime, but also tremendous wealth.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  You see that in this book quite starkly.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  You do indeed. You absolutely do. This is a book about Reaganism in many ways. So Reagan, he's the former Hollywood movie star who becomes governor of California in the 1960s.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Terrifyingly white teeth?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Very white teeth. Yeah, looks good on a horse, though, Tabby.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Not as good as Putin, but yeah, man can dream.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  So Reagan comes in in January 1981, and he and his presidency, they become identified with this sort of revitalisation of the American dream, with an obsession with wealth and aspiration and ambition and so on. The Reagan presidency is all about luxury, it's all about big shoulder pads, big hair.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Bad fashion.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's bad, I mean, you say bad fashion, it's very glitzy fashion, it's very over-the-top fashion. There's a cult of materialism. You see this reflected in things like the film Wall Street, telling the, you know, set on Wall Street. And that's because the Reagan revolution, so-called, this is a period when manufacturing, traditional industries in America has, in so many places in the Western world, are in real trouble. But it is actually the financial sector that is driving a lot of the economic growth of the time. So you have a very lax kind of regulatory regime, which allows banks and stockbrokers and whatnot to invent new kinds of products. So money is kind of flooding into the stock market, people are making money in ways they'd never known before.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  And this has been reflected in the media, which is a self- undergoing a big change at the time because you have the rise of cable TV and so on. So what you have is a kind of general culture, particularly in New York, and particularly on the island of Manhattan, on kind of lower Manhattan, which is where Wall Street is, you have this culture of shiny suits, loads of money, unrepentant consumerism, the worship of wealth. In the film Wall Street, the character Gordon Gekko, who's played by Michael Douglas, gives this speech, you know, greed is good, greed works, this kind of worship of materialism that, to people particularly, I think, sort of people on the left, or people who are from

• 12:21Speaker 01

  the Rust Belt, or people who remember the idealism of the 1960s, feels very shocking. You know, it feels like America has kind of gone backwards to this Victorian worship of the free market and so on. And this is the age, you know, the people that they blame, the people that come the scapegoats for this in a way, are the yuppies. There is this phenomenon that you get in the 80s of people rebelling against the values of their parents. They're rebelling against the idealism of their parents. It might have been, you know, civil rights marchers, or they might have been students smoking dope and going on marches against the Vietnam War. But now their kids, you know, they've done quite well, their kids have gone to university, they go to law school, they end up on Wall Street in some, you know, swanky law firm or something. The old values of their parents, they are

• 13:05Speaker 01

  destined for the scrap heap, and they have absolutely no shame in kind of, you know, they're very proud of their gold American Express card or whatever, or their holidays in the Hamptons, or this sort of world. And actually, the man who epitomises this is not so much Ronald Reagan, it's Donald Trump.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because this is a time when people could make that unusual transition from being Wall Street executives to celebrities.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  I mean, Trump is identified with the revitalisation of New York, because he, you know, he's created Trump Tower, Trump has speculated and done all these developments, a lot of which actually don't make any money, but that's by the by. And he becomes this sort of cult figure. He's off on the front page of the New York papers, you know, day after day, his love affairs, his sort of lurid activities and whatnot. He's a figure of fun, really. He's a kind of slightly comical figure in the 80s. And in American Psycho, Trump is actually there throughout the book. Like Patrick Bateman is obsessed with Donald and Ivana Trump, and is always kind of looking over his shoulder to see if they've come into the restaurant, are they at D'Orsea or whatever. And Trump is a fantasy figure for Patrick Bateman, actually. I mean, you would say it's remarkably prescient.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And I suppose the one other thing that I haven't talked about, which is the context, is serial killers. This is kind of, it sounds a weird thing to say, but a kind of golden age of serial killers, this great fascination with killers. Crime is very high in 1980s New York. Horror, crime, murder, violence are very prevalent in the popular culture of the day. It's the heyday of somebody we're going to be talking about is actually on the show in a few weeks when we do The Shining, Stephen King.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  So Stephen King's books, which are all about kind of reflecting the buried anxieties of this world of haves and have-nots. Stephen King's books are at the top of the bestseller list, you have Anne Rice and her vampire novels, you have slasher films.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And I think it's really interesting that this is a period that's big on horror, because in books that we've done before in this show, so I don't know, Dracula, Frankenstein, horror's often expressed some latent fear in the society that those books are born of. So in Frankenstein, human innovation and scientific discovery, Dracula, foreign invasion and disease. Here, it made me wonder if the way that he's using horror is kind of, it's indicative of anxieties around excess, this long obsession, the decades-long obsession with consumerism, the out-of-control corporate greed. And it's almost like he's channing, like serial killers are just the next step, the logical conclusion of that greed. That's kind of the leap that Bret Easton Ellis is making in this.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  The idea that consumerism and capitalism, this model of capitalism, it's all about treating people as objects, using them up and then throwing them aside.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  I mean, this is obviously what serial killers do, they dehumanise their victims, then they cast them aside. And this is obviously what Patrick Bateman is doing.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Traditionally, the traditional view of serial killers is kind of, is isolated losers, full of self-loathing, and therefore it's from that position that you're able to dehumanise the rest of society. And Bret Easton Ellis himself said that American Psycho came out of a place of severe isolation and loneliness and self-loathing. I was pursuing a life, you could call it the gentleman's quarterly way of living, that I knew was bullshit. So what does he mean by this?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Well, that's just on gentleman's quarterly way of living. So GQ is one of those magazines that really captures the yuppie lifestyle in the late 80s.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it champions that kind of elitism, doesn't it? Handsome people, wearing the best clothes, wearing the right shoes. But speaking of Bret Easton Ellis, let's discuss my old friend, my best friend, Bret. He was born in LA in 1964, and LA is actually often the setting of many of his novels. His parents were divorced in 1982. And it's interesting, because during the publicity for American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis said that his father, that Patrick Bateman was based on his father, which is...

• 17:04Speaker 01

  God, what's he reading?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  That's an extreme claim, and it's definitely not complimentary.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Your son's written a book about you.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, imagine, yeah, you must be so proud. But then later, he retracted that statement, and he said, and he changed his mind. So that clearly is not true. Then he attended Buckley School in the San Fernando Valley. And then he attended a school that we have discussed before on this show, and this is Bennington College in Vermont.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Donna Tartt.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Donna Tartt. Because this, Bennington College is what the college from A Secret History is based on, and that is no coincidence. And it's also what Camden College, which features in several other of Bret Easton Ellis's books, is based on. And there, he studied music and he was in a band. More importantly, though, it was there that he met Donna Tartt, because they were both in this very artistic class of 1986. It's got a bit of a myth, a mythos of its own now.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  There's a podcast about it, right?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  There is a podcast about it, yeah, about all their crazy drug-filled shenanigans. And Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis became very good friends very quickly. And they actually met because they were set up on a blind date by their roommates, who said that they were the only people who would be uptight enough for each other. But they did, and obviously the date didn't work out, but they grew very, very close. So they were some of the earliest readers of each other's manuscripts, they edited each other's manuscripts. Tartt famously dedicated A Secret History to Bret Easton Ellis.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  I mean, they both have enormous success with an early book, don't they? So Bret Easton Ellis's book that really makes his name is The Rules of Attraction, Donna Tartt's Secret History. And The Rules of Attraction is very controversial, but it does really well, doesn't it?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does do very, very well. And both books feature thinly-veiled imitations of their classmates at Bennington, that campus, the things that they got up to. And they both became part of what has subsequently been known as the literary Brat Pack. So a group of intellectual, quite hedonistic young authors, kind of making waves in the literary circles of New York and LA, or whatever it may be.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Bret Easton Ellis himself was famously hedonistic, loved a party, loved a drink. And he actually published his first book at Bennington when he was only 21, so very young, like Donna Tartt. And this was Less Than Zero. And this is very debauched, but nothing on American Psycho.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So he's got Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, American Psycho.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  So American Psycho is his third book, and by far his most successful, but it took a while to take off.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So American Psycho, he gets the idea, doesn't he, at the height of the kind of Reagan boom?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Which is 1986. He's living in New York, he's having a very hedonistic lifestyle. And he said afterwards, didn't he, that he had wanted to write a book about what Wall Street was really like, this kind of world of Wall Street, the world of these young men in very shiny kind of Armani suits, who are obsessed with brands and with wealth and with credit and consumerism. A little bit like, actually, he himself, I think, has made the comparison with Oliver Stone's film, Wall Street.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  He said he'd wanted it to be like Wall Street initially. That's how he envisaged it.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  So he starts hanging around with these people. I mean, you know, these are all people who've gone to similar kinds of colleges, probably liberal, very expensive liberal arts colleges or kind of east coast colleges.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Quite preppy?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, preppy, exactly. Then they've done a law degree and then they've gone to work for a firm like Pierce and Pierce, which is what Patrick Bateman works for, the sort of fictional company. And he would hang around with them, have dinner with them, go to clubs and all of this kind of thing. Although, funny thing is that he says, I never went to their offices and I never actually saw them. I never saw them doing actually any work, which is true of Patrick Bateman. Patrick Bateman never does any work.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  No.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Why they're even paying him is unclear. Well, probably because we've discovered it's because of his family connections. But he said, you know, he would watch a parade of status, one-upmanship. Who had the best suit? Who has the best house in the Hamptons? Who has the hottest girlfriends? And then, bang, the light bulb goes off in his head. I thought Patrick Bateman is a serial killer and he's losing his mind and the novel's going to be hallucinatory. We're going to be in his head instead of writing a third-person novel about a sad, sad banker. So that's the genius element of it. Though we are in Patrick Bateman's head and right from the start, I think there's a slight uncertainty

• 21:28Speaker 01

  about whether or not we believe what Patrick Bateman is telling us. Anyway, let's park that idea for a second, the idea about the reliability or not of the narrator. He's a great noticer, actually, or a fabulist. So he's constantly telling you what people are eating, what clothes they're wearing. He lists all the labels that they have on. You know, he notices what kind of wallet they have, their car, all of these kinds of things. We are in his head the whole time as he observes this world around him.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And Bret Easton Ellis is living this at this time, you know, ostensibly for research. And he describes it as slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and made me feel good about myself, but just made me feel worse and worse and worse and worse about myself. And this insecurity comes through in his portrayal of Patrick Bateman. But Bret Easton Ellis struggled to write the book. He said that during the process of writing it, he felt depressed, he felt isolated. He tried to channel this and the insecurity that he was feeling into Patrick Bateman. And I think he does do that successfully. And he'd also been warned that in writing the book, as he intended to, it could end his career. So he was afraid of that.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  But the experience of reading some of these scenes stays with you forever. They are unforgettable, horrible scenes.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  That's what I was thinking. I kept thinking, how could you not feel a bit depressed writing some of the things that he was writing? Anyway, he finally finished it in December 1989, so it took him three years to write. And then Simon and Schuster were signed on to publish it, but they withdrew. They drew out of the deal at the last minute. They cited artistic differences, but really, I think it's because they were uncomfortable with the violence and perhaps the sexism. And our old friend, Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame, is appalled by this in his essay that he wrote about American Psycho. He described it as an act of appalling, of terrible cowardice. Anyway, instead, the book was acquired and

• 23:31Speaker 00

  published by Vintage Books in the US. But how was it received? You know, he's obviously been afraid that it's going to end his literary career, quite promising literary career. A few months before the book was published, some of the pages from the manuscript were leaked to the media and these pages happened to be instances of the most appalling violence from the book. So it's when Patrick Bateman murders people or imagines murdering people. And critics assumed from this that this was representative of the whole book. And it fuelled an outrageous response from a lot of reviewers, a lot of feminist critics, as we will see. And temporarily Bret Easton Ellis truly did become a social pariah. There

• 24:11Speaker 00

  were accusations of misogyny, gratuitous violence, moral irresponsibility. Again, we'll delve more into this later. But he also quite chillingly receives death threats, many of which saw people drawing pictures of or describing doing to him what he describes Patrick Bateman doing to people in the book.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, turning it back on himself.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Exactly. You know, how do you feel about that?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  This furore did quieten down once the book was published. Nevertheless, as I said in the opening, it was censored or banned in several countries. It was deemed harmful to minors in Germany and sales were restricted between 1995 and 2000. And in Australia, this is mental, the book is still sold wrapped in cling film and you have to prove that you're 18 in order to get a copy. I mean, Bret Easton Ellis was unmoved by this criticism. And he said in response, I think it's adorable. I think it's cute. I love it.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Criticism. Well, of course, writers, deep down, any publicity is good publicity. So the New York Times critic, Roger Rosenblatt, absolutely slammed this book and said it was actually fine to shut it down because it was so terrible. He said of American Psycho, it's the journal Dorian Gray, another book we've done on the show, that Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore, but that's unfair to sophomores. And actually, there is something quite Dorian Gray about Patrick Bateman, isn't there? Because Patrick Bateman, you know, rather like Dorian Gray, or of course, our old friend, Braden Peters, to be clavicular. He's very...

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  He's obsessed with his looks, isn't he? I mean, I was actually reading this for skincare tips.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Were you?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Because he's spent so long. Yeah, the revelation that you shouldn't put after cologne onto your face because it dries, after moisturizer because it dries it out, I thought was interesting.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Why would you put cologne on your face anyway? Spray it directly into your eyes. This is where you've been going wrong all these years. This is why you like glasses.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  What? Because I've been dousing my eyeballs.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I have to say, though, if we all live like Patrick Bateman, I mean, we'd all look as good as Braden Peters.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  We would, although, would you, if you were eating out, like, multiple times a day?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, there's that iconic, there's that, well, I don't know, is it terrible? There's that iconic scene in the movie when he's like, I see that they failed to bring out the pork loin jello. And the food in the book does get madder and madder. Anyway, it was also a big hit with a certain group of people, wasn't it?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Because some people said, you know, this is exactly what I've been waiting for, a novel that properly satirizes the excesses of the corporate capitalism of the 1980s. And I think there are, there have always been critics, they love it as a transgressive book, they like it as a book that challenges the reader. It's taught in university literary courses, though, these days, I think with the trigger warning. And of course, there was the film, the film that actually made Christian Bale's name as an adult actor.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Quite rightly, I think.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So let's just give people a very, very quick reminder of what actually happens and what makes it so controversial. So we have Patrick Bateman. He works for Pierce and Pierce. From the very beginning, he narrates his life, his Wall Street friends, their culture of one-upmanship, the goading, teasing repartee that they have, which we captured in that reading about the business cards.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And they're all kind of beautiful, wealthy, successful, waspish. They're all yuppies.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Their obsession with their expensive suits, their expensive gyms, their expensive restaurants, their scorn and contempt for the poor or the homeless. They spend all their evenings going to clubs and taking cocaine and eyeing up the waitresses and whatnot. Patrick is engaged, isn't he, to Evelyn, we will talk about a little bit Evelyn, as I should say. Through the book, through the first 100, 150 pages, Bret Easton Ellis or Patrick Bateman drops clues that there is, you know, he talks about how he's carrying a knife.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Well, he's always reading about serial killers. Or there's a point where he says, very, very casually, very nonchalantly, I took my shirt to my usual dry cleaners to get the blood out. And you're like, what?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or he says, I don't know, such and such reminded him or whatever of a waitress that he assaulted in Aspen last year, or this kind of thing. Or he says to people, I'm an evil psychopath. But they either don't, they don't hear him or they think he's joking or whatever.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  But the main thing to say, though, is that vast swathes of the book are just Patrick Bateman going about his day-to-day life, going to restaurants, meeting up with friends, going to the gym, his ridiculously complex facial regime, you know, whatever it may be. And then it's increasingly interspersed with these episodes of intense violence.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if the book is, I don't know, what is it, 400?

• 28:57Speaker 00

  It's quite long.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  So the book is like, sorry, 400 pages long. So the violence really only kicks in after about 200 pages or so. And the episodes become, there are sort of, let's say, five or six episodes of violence and they become ever more lurid and they reach an absolute pitch of savagery and horror about three quarters of the way into the book.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  And they're more frequent as well. As though the more fevered he gets, the more his killing sprees escalate.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like he's trying to feed an addiction.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And then we get to this point in the plot where we think it's kind of the climax or maybe the breaking point. And this is after killing a coworker of his called Paul Owen. And he's using his flat to house the bodies of his victims. And he starts slipping into necrophilia and cannibalism and just awful stuff.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  And actually, we've talked about Patrick Bateman. But his friends, the girls he meets, the people he works with, they are cut from quite similar cloth, aren't they? They're quite superficial, they are hollow. So Evelyn, his fiancee, in his version of her, because of course, we only ever see her through his eyes. She is a very uninteresting and uninterested person. She spends most of her time thinking about Waldorf salad.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a whole scene where she panics because she thinks her guests aren't enjoying the Waldorf salad. She's like a walking mannequin, a clothed horse. She's beautiful and she looks right.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  And their relationship.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  I find it deeply depressing. Anyway, there's quite a funny moment where he says, for the first time since I've known her, she's started straining to say something interesting. And then she says, is that a Vanna Trump? And that is the peak of her intellectual curiosity. And that epitomizes the plastic emptiness of this world. And I find their relationship very depressing because it epitomizes the lack of heart of the novel, the lack of moral heart. Because this should be the most meaningful relationship in his life. His fiancee, I don't know, his friend, his confidant, whatever it may be. But there's nothing there. They use each other for their physical appearance, really.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  And they just sit and watch the shopping channels, don't they?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  She's dead inside, she's numb, and partly because she takes so many sleeping pills or antidepressants. So at one point, he says, Evelyn is addicted to Parnate, an antidepressant. I lie there beside her, watching The Home Shopping Club, at glass dolls, that's telling. Embroidered throw pillows, lamps shaped like footballs, with the sound turned off. That's all the companionship they can expect from each other, watching the shopping channel in silence.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And then he's got all his male friends and they're, they're sort of copies of him, aren't they? And actually, we'll get into the confusion of identities and the interchangeability of some of these people after the break. They don't seem to do any work either.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  They high five each other all the time, which is just.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Or they compare their business cards.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  So lame.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Which as we will say, as we will see, I think there is something very suggestive about their constant obsession with ever bigger and better business cards.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  But they judge each other entirely on the way that they look. Something that this book is quite famous for is these long lists, these long descriptions of what people are wearing, of skincare regimes. So for instance, this comes across in the movie. I think that one of the most iconic scenes is Patrick Bateman getting ready in the morning. It goes like this. I take the ice mask off and use a deep pore cleanser lotion, then a herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I check my toenails. Then I use the Pro Bright tooth polisher and next the Interplac tooth polisher. This in addition to the toothbrush, which has a speed of 4,200 RPM and reversal erection 46 times per second.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  And it goes on and on and on and on with these seemingly banal descriptions of just a series of actions. And there's very rarely any commas. It's a, you get a sense of this flat monotone voice.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  We will come in a couple of weeks to a book with a hero who, you know, where it's not meant ironically. And a hero who is a male fantasy figure who does this at great length, and that's James Bond.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  James Bond.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  So Ian Fleming, one of the innovations of Ian Fleming's James Bond books, is he does use brand names a lot. He will tell you what kind of, he tells you what kind of jam James Bond always has for breakfast. And this is an important part of the, of the Bond books' appeal, though. They're kind of consumerist how to guides for people reading in the 1960s. And Patrick Bateman is actually just carrying that to an extreme. This identification of kind of virility and handsomeness and attractiveness with particular brand names. And the idea that, you know, the first thing in the morning, you use all the right brands and then you go out. I mean, this is the, you know, you mentioned, we were talking about GQ earlier. This is the fantasy that magazines like GQ were selling in the 1980s.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's aspirational, isn't it?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  So while you get these very intricate descriptions of tassled loafers, pinstriped suits, Armani shirts. You learn absolutely nothing about people's eye colors or what their smiles are like, or what makes them laugh. You know, friendship is defined by insatiable material competition. And Nicole made a very good point, for instance, that Bateman is constantly trying to win the affirmation or the praise or the respect of his male friends.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  This is such an interesting point, that actually, all that Patrick Bateman does, his dress, his suits, his, you know, the skincare. It is done to impress the, what's his name, Paul Allen or like these other McDermott or these people, not Evelyn and women. He doesn't really think about what women will think of him because women are just objects. It's actually all about impressing his peer group.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  But Bateman wants to be the best. His blind murderous rages are often triggered by someone having something better than him, about a tanning salon. And it's interesting now because you talk about Bond, one of the most glamorous characters in the world. But Patrick Bateman, by glamorizing him, you know, handsome and alpha male, high status. What Bret Easton Ellis does, remember what we said about this being the golden age of serial killers? Is he's distorting the idea of the serial killer as some kind of an inadequate, sullen loser. Instead here, he's turning a stereotypical model of American success, the guy living out the American dream, if you will.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Into a homicidal psychopath. He's totally functional. He is able to breeze through his own society with, you know, no one really noticing. And that actually is, this is, this is one of the first books to do that. And it became a bit of a trend, the rise of these anti-heroes, where the psychopath is recast as reactionary and cynical. The difference here, though, is that Patrick Bateman wholeheartedly buys into society. He's not reacting against it.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Although, Tabby, isn't there an argument, though, that you describe him as very successful and alpha male, a kind of wishful fulfillment figure, all this? But we only think that because he tells us that he is. Like, we never have an external observer. And in fact, everything that other characters say about Patrick Bateman suggests something very different.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  A lot of people describe him as being very good looking, though.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  But they describe him as a loser, though, don't they?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  They describe him as a coward at one point. Yeah, but we'll dig, we'll dig more into this. But basically, I think what Bret Easton Ellis is doing is making the whole book reactionary by turning a monster into someone that functions well in his society. It's, I suppose you could say, holding a mirror up to the society rather than the monster.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Patrick Bateman is not, he's not an outsider tilting against the values of society. He's actually somebody upholding them. He's the distillation of conservative values, you could argue.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  But then again, he's obviously not that functional because he does.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Kill a lot of people.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Viscerally kill and mutilate people. And as you said, we have these blasé signposts, you know, intercut with dinner party scenes. Someone saying, you should stop reading all those Ted Bundy books. Or the Chinese dry cleaner, as I usually said, my bloody clothes to you delivered back to me yesterday, a soprani jacket. And then it gets more and more explicit. So I have a serrated knife in my pocket, cut his face off. The urge to kill McDermott passes. And it's building, building, building. So you start to think, is he actually going to kill someone? And it builds quite an unnerving tension.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  And, and of course, he does kill somebody and we'll find out who after the break.

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• 39:19Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the Book Club, everyone. Now, before we dive back into American Psycho, a reminder to join our own community of psychopathic capitalist killers and sign up to Book Club Notes. And this is our beloved weekly newsletter, which has talking points, book recommendations, people can give whichever book we've discussed that week their own score, give their feedback. It's a bevy of insights from you, our Book Club community, delivered into your inbox every Saturday morning, and it's totally free. So you won't become a consumer stooge by signing up. So do sign up at thebookclubhq.com. Now, back to the show. Dominic, how do we find out that Patrick Bateman is in fact, or at least seems to be, a violent serial killer?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  So he's made references, hasn't he, as you mentioned, but his first killing is actually a homeless person. So this book is famous for violence towards women, but it's a man who's the first obvious victim.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  And actually, just to say, we're not going to be giving away the true depths of the violence in American Psycho. We're going to be giving you a kind of skim surface view.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  The murder takes place, he kills this homeless person, then he goes back to his normal lifestyle, doesn't he? He goes back to his normal routine of the restaurants. His obsession with getting reservations at the top New York restaurants.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  The first thing he does afterwards is go and get a milkshake.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  He will kill somebody and then he'll go and get a pedicure.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  The classic juxtaposition is, I put on a new suit, gave myself a pedicure and tortured to death a small dog I had bought earlier this week. It just slipped in there.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  It's devoid of emotion, but it's very physical. It's merely a list of kind of actions with no sense of how this made him feel or whether he reflected on it or anything like that. And obviously, what Bret Easton Ellis is trying to do, as a point we made in the first half, he's arguing, I think effectively, that this is the logical extreme of the dehumanised, alienated consumerism. And this theme, the dehumanising effects, the soullessness, the lack of meaning of modern capitalism, it's a very popular subject in the 1990s for writers. So you made the comparison to New Tabby with Fight Club.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I found that very interesting because Bret Easton Ellis says this himself. He acknowledges that what Chuck Paulanick is doing in Fight Club is very similar. The book was published a few years after American Psycho. Because what they're doing is, is they're both satirising the deadening effects of capitalism. And it's also transgressive fiction. So these are books that deal with characters that are disaffected with, suffocated by, alienated from some form of society. And so they seek to break free of its confines, usually in some kind of illicit way. In this case, both these books are using violence. Violence is the psychological outlet that serves as the substitute for human connection because everything has been so deadened. The difference, though, is that in Fight Club, Tyler Durden, he's lower class, he's without

• 42:08Speaker 00

  money or opportunity, whereas in this, as we alluded to earlier, Patrick Bateman is an elite. He exists in a world of extreme wealth and privilege. So in his world, and in the world of American Psycho, those with very limited or very low economic value, all lacking in beauty, are totally worthless. They're as good as cadavers in his eyes.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  They're expendable. And this is why, to bring it back to Donald Trump, this is why he idealises Donald Trump, because he is, in Patrick Bateman's view, Patrick Bateman, who, as we've said, you literally is so bought into this world that he can't get enough of it. He has to channel his hunger, you know, his hunger for consumption into human bodies. So in his perspective, Donald Trump is wealthy, successful, the archetype of the soulless capitalist tycoon, and therefore, you know, this serial killer's hero. So it's a sort of twisted distortion of the American dream because it's where the pursuit of success becomes a hollow nightmare, full of narcissism and consumerism, and of course,

• 43:15Speaker 00

  the loss of identity. And it's why, to go back to his first killing, it's also why he kills homeless people, and it's why he kills so many prostitutes, because they are the lowest of the low in Patrick Bateman's hierarchy of wealth.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  But your point about hollowness is absolutely right, though, isn't it? Because it's not just born out of the 1980s and the wider culture.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  It's Bret Easton Ellis's own sense of, you know, he was adrift in the late 80s. There are points where Patrick Bateman actually talks about, where he is reflective about himself. So Bateman says, "Everything failed to subsume me. Soon everything seemed dull. Another sunrise, the lives of heroes, fading love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. There wasn't a clear identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and possibly total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being, flesh, blood, skin, hair, but my depersonalisation was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure." And he goes on to say that he was basically just the rough resemblance of a human being with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, I think, a very good description of somebody who's basically clinically depressed.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. But he also is clearly, in a way, wanting to be acknowledged. In some way or another, he wants something to get his blood pumping, something to get his adrenaline rising, because there are moments in the book where he quite literally tells people.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  That he's a serial killer. So at one point, he's chatting to some banal model in a club, and she says, "So what do you do?" And he says, "Murders and executions." And the model he's talking to doesn't even notice. She just assumes that he means mergers and acquisitions. Now, yeah, well, you could read that as the implication is that perhaps they're one and the same, or it could be that this society has grown so mindless, so numb, that it doesn't even matter. You know, a monster, a killer can hide in plain sight and no one even notices.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  And the hollowness and the sense of depression explains the flatness of the tone.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no variation between the facial regime and the murders.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  No, exactly. As time goes on, I mean, this could be an explanation, of course, of why the crime, everything becomes more extreme. He is feeding this sort of desperate, gnawing need for meaning and for sensation. He wants to feel something, but this is if Patrick Bateman exists, and of course, if what he's telling you is true, he's trying to do something, he's going to ever more extreme lengths in order to have some kind of emotional or intellectual or whatever reaction to what he's doing. And he can't do it because he's dead inside.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  He literally starts eating people, you know?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  That's as far as it goes. We mentioned earlier, there's a funny joke that runs throughout about how, in a sense, he and his yuppie compadres, they're all just as meaningless as, I don't know, the prostitute or the homeless person that he kills, because they're totally interchangeable. They're constantly mistaken for each other.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  So he's mistaken, there's a very funny scene where, and surely we've all been there to some degree or another, where he's mistaken for a guy called Marcus Halberstrom, by Paul Owen, the guy he subsequently murders, and he just goes along with it.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  So this happens again and again, doesn't it? The slippage of names. Now, this, we'll probably talk a little bit more later about the similarities or differences with Alita. Because in Alita, Vladimir Avikov's book, also very controversial, of course, there is a slippage of names, and Humbert Humbert's name keeps, people get it wrong, and Alita's name changes and so on and so forth. I think in this book, it's a little bit less sophisticated as a point. It's simply that people keep getting Patrick Bateman mixed up with other people, perhaps because either they're all the same, or because actually, he's very forgettable.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  It could be that they're all just corporate stooges without soul, without any distinguishable flicker of creativity or curiosity. Or, as you say, it could be because actually Patrick Bateman is a bit of a nobody, and therefore, sort of invisible. But the writing, it continues at this flat, level pace. There's no up or down, there's no heightened emotion. There's no climax, aside from the fact that the killings become more frequent and more ghoulish. We're still waiting the whole time for the main event, which never really comes, particularly when the private investigator comes, because that's when I thought, reading it, I thought to myself, well, now, now we're getting to the main event.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  And I thought, okay, well, is this going to be a cat and mouse chase in reverse? Is it going to see some kind of moral growth? But it actually goes nowhere.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  This would be my criticism of the book, actually, Tabby. I was reading this, as you know, a few weeks ago on holiday. I enjoyed it initially. I was actually, you know, I was in this kind of hotel, this high-rise hotel in North America, and it seemed like the perfect setting to be reading this book. You know, about 200 pages in, I thought, God, there's another 200 pages of this, because I feel like the point's been made. I feel like the equation, you know, it becomes slightly boring to just keep saying, well, this is consumerism on steroids, this is a satire of corporate capitalism.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  It keeps being a satire, because it's a satire of corporate capitalism. It's a satire of the traditional detective novel. In some ways, it's a satire of a classic romance, because you kind of think at one point, oh, is he going to fall in love with his secretary, the plain girl, the unnoticed girl, the forgotten girl? And is that going to be his moral redemption?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  But that goes nowhere. Now, the one thing I will say in its favour, however, is that it is often very funny.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  So some of my favourite bits. So we mentioned the food. The food becomes ever more bonkers, possibly as Patrick Bateman loses his grip on reality.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  And starts possibly just inventing mad stuff. So two of my favourite things, which I would love to recreate.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  At one point, he has a lamb sausage salad with lobster and white beans sprayed with lime and fragrant vinegar.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Fantastic.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Which just sounds insane. And also this one, eagle carpaccio, mesquite grilled mahi-mahi, endive with cheddar and chocolate-covered almonds, and this weird kind of gazpacho with raw chicken in it.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  I have to say, I agree, though, it works very well as a black comedy, and I found it much more palatable if I read it in that way, and if I read his bizarre grooming routines and his lists of people's personal appearances.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  And there are a couple of bits which are really inspired. So there's a bit where he goes to his apartment block and he bumps into Tom Cruise, and he says, "I loved you in that film, Bartender." And Tom Cruise looks at him and says, "Was that actually Cocktail?"

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I also love the genuine existential crises that he has. The only times he ever questions himself are when his personal appearance is in any way called into question. So at one point, Evelyn says to him, "Why don't you get your hair styled that way?", you know, pointing at some other guy. And then his internal monologue goes, "Before this comment, I was an automaton, only vaguely paying attention to Evelyn, but now I'm panicked and I ask, 'What's wrong with my hair?'" In a matter of seconds, my rage quadruples. "What the hell is wrong with my hair?" I touch it lightly.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  And then, and actually, this is a part of Christian Bale's characterisation that I love.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  He's very funny.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  He's very funny. He really brings out Bateman's kind of sick zaniness. You know, his love, for instance, of 80s pop artists, totally misconstrued love of 80s pop artists.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Which he completely misunderstands all the time. So when he says that Genesis by far the most exciting band to come out of Britain in the 1980s, that's just an insane thing to say, not least because he's like 10 years behind the times. Or when he says, I hope Hugh Lewis and the News don't become one of these radical, subversive bands, like The Clash or Billy Joel or Blondie.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  And at one point, he thinks that the lead drummer or guitarist or something of U2, they're kind of having a telepathic communication between them, really deep, powerful and soulful.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  And then obviously there's Dorsia, which is a hilarious motif that runs throughout. This is longing to get into Dorsia in this embarrassing scene where he gets kicked out. But I think one of the funniest moments of all is when he decides that he's going to strangle this guy called Lewis Carruthers, who is his mistress's boyfriend. So he walks into the bathroom to strangle Lewis and he puts his gloves on and starts tightening his hands around his neck, only to discover that Lewis thinks that Patrick is hitting on him.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  I start to squeeze tightly my grip. Lewis stares, I'm doing it in Batman's voice.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not Batman.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Lewis stares at me and I tense the muscles in my arms, preparing myself for a struggle. Instead, he looks down at my wrists and for a moment wavers as if he's undecided about something. And then he lowers his head and kisses my left wrist. And then he looks back up at me shyly. Yeah, it's really good. It goes on like this. Now, I have a theory about this, Tabby, which is that he's actually is cracking on to Lewis Carruthers and that what he's telling us is not correct. I don't know, maybe Bret Easton Ellis would say Dominic's talking nonsense, insofar as, I mean, if Bret Easton Ellis ever listened to this podcast at all. I think it's possible that Patrick Bateman is gay. And the violence towards women, it's partly the fact that he's so conflicted about it. Yeah, exactly all of this, and that actually he really is cracking on to Lewis Carruthers.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And the stuff about wanting to kill him is a blind.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  But you mentioned the violence against women. And obviously, we've been having a fun time with the dark comedy of the novel. But it is ultimately an extremely violent horror novel. And despite the dark humour and the cynicism and how comical the whole world is, Bateman's acts of violence do become increasingly repulsive. His cruelty to homeless people and animals, the things he does to his female victims, you know, it starts to make one feel quite uncomfortable and actually for me, quite disturbing when it surfaced. It gets aggressively torrid, you know, fleshy corpses, physical writing, limbs, blood, torture, all described in this clinical, deadpan way.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  And it becomes also terrifyingly random. Like at one point, he just stabs a boy in a zoo and kind of sort of cocks his head, almost intrigued when he hears this mother wailing. And this is the thing that many feminists were opposed to with American Psycho. They saw the violence as anti-women and misogynistic, and many still do. So for instance, the feminist Gloria Steinem, who actually bizarrely is Christian Bale's stepmother.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Anyway, so she was a journalist and activist. She was a leader of second wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s. She was very, very against the book's portrayal of violence against women. And Bret Easton Ellis's response to all of this was, I wasn't a misogynist when I wrote the book, but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Now, I think he's perhaps, I mean, I'm not just gonna say he's being disingenuous.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  He's probably just being intentionally glib.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  He's being intentionally glib. There was a point when I was reading it this time where I did think this is actually very hard to read. And has this crossed the line now into being gratuitous? So there are a couple of scenes later on, in the last, let's say, 100 to 150 pages. There's a scene with two women called Tori and Tiffany that is so gory. You know, it's indescribable, the stuff with nail guns and drills and whatnot.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  You know, I stopped reading it before going to sleep at night. It was just getting too much.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Or the girl with, there's a stuff, I mean, we had 1984 with the rats and 1991. The stuff with the rat in this book, which is absolutely, you know, mind boggling. It's so horrific. Again, you know, what place does that come from in the author? I mean, do you need that to make the same point? I guess that's the, you know, is this just for shock value? Or does it, does it make the point more effectively precisely because it is so violent?

• 54:54Speaker 00

  In many ways, I actually do think that in its, in its kind of model of male perfection or whatever it is, in a certain strain of its misogyny, it's actually quite ahead of its time.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  I think you're right.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  You could argue that instead of glorifying Patrick Bateman's treatment and objectification of women, it's actually radically shining a light on the realities of a culture where patriarchal capitalism has gone this far. So it's a time when men generally have much more power in the workplace anyway. It's wealthy executives belittling their secretaries, you know, it's Hollywood's culture of sexism and sexual harassment or whatever. And even though it was published in 1991, so years before online culture, in Patrick Bateman's obsession with his physical appearance, the way that his values are all about attractiveness and success and muscles and tan, his obsession with being the best and having the best. It screams manosphere to me, or what we would call toxic masculinity.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with you completely.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  And actually, there's a scene in the movie, which I think, God, that could literally have been in Louis Theroux's documentary. And it's when Christian Bale is having sex and he's looking at himself in the mirror and he's looking at his abs. Such manosphere behaviour. He's a man, Bateman is a man that would really thrive on knowing that his YouTube video got more views than anyone else's and outperforming other men and dehumanising women. And it's all about the successful performance of an impressive masculine persona.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  I completely agree with you. And reading this book again, I thought to myself, gosh, we are, you know, this is Andrew, this is kind of Andrew Tate level stuff. The way that Patrick Bateman and his friends think about women, the way they talk about them, the way they use them, all of that kind of thing. And in that respect, didn't Irvine Welsh say, if a woman had written this book, it would be seen as a great visionary feminist work? I don't actually think he's wrong about that. I think if a woman had written this book, people would perceive it completely differently. And they would say, well, she is actually exposing the truth about how men behave and how they think about women. But because it was a sort of wise, cracking, very colourful, dissolute man who wrote the book, people perceived it differently.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  But I do think if you want to know where the kind of that world of incels and the manosphere and looks maxing, what the logical culmination of that is, this book actually is the answer to that.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  The trouble with these things is, you can say I've written it as a satire, but some people will take it frankly as a how to guide. And that, I mean, that's maybe being a bit simplistic, but there's a bloke who carried out a massacre in Sydney in 1991, Wade Frankham. American Psycho was one of his favourite books. He loved American Psycho, Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo. So he had a very controversial wife and accomplice called Carla. She was also a big American Psycho fan.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think the question people asked at the time was, is it morally irresponsible? Is it setting in writing the very detailed, very graphic, violent and sexual scenes? Yes, while you are using them to make a point, you are also maybe providing a handbook.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Having brought that up, I'm now going to disagree with myself. I don't think that you can put any of that on Bret Easton Ellis.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  No, neither do I. I absolutely don't.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  To go back to the person in Sydney, American Psycho was one of his favourite books, but so too was Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishments. And it would seem insane to blame Dostoevsky for a massacre carried out in Sydney in 1991.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  But you also, you can't run a society on the basis of the sickest people in that society, you know?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Completely agree. But to go back to the issue that we raised, actually.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Do you read it differently as a man and a woman?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Because I already described it. When I first read it, I was reading it as a 17 year old boy surrounded by other 17 year old boys. And none of them, as far as I know, I can't remember anybody saying, this book is horrible, those poor women. Oh, in fact, I remember quite the opposite, that the boys were almost gleeful about it. And I think surely it must be a very different experience reading it as a young woman.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  I think it's not like, I think the women can still read those sex scenes and think those sex scenes are sexy or whatever. But I do think it is a different experience reading it as a man of a woman. I think as a woman, it's slightly more unsettling. And I sometimes find myself thinking, okay, enough now, you know? I get what you're trying to say, enough. And I think particularly the stuff involving prostitutes, that was quite disturbing and how easily overpowered they are by Bateman.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  You know, when they're trying to run out of the room or whatever. And I know, you know, for instance, Irvine Welsh, he makes the point that, you know, sometimes you just get sensitive readers and sensitive readers just aren't going to like this kind of content. And I know I am quite a sensitive reader, you know, I don't like slashes, I don't like horror movies. So I was a bit sick to death of all the violence after a bit. And I was quite unsettled, but I think you're meant to be right by the fact that the sex scenes literally flowed directly into the violence. But I think that that's the point. I think that's probably quite an important point because they're very pornographic, aren't they, the sex scenes? So maybe Bret Easton Ellis is saying, well, you know, you think you're just having a bit of fun and watching porn, but then actually this is where it ends up.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  It's published in 1991. It's published at a point before you might call the pornografication of mass culture. Before the rise of the internet, basically. So pornography is still off in its own little silo, really. And Bret Easton Ellis writes that the sex scenes are very obviously drawn from pornography. They're very lurid, they're wildly over the top, they are pure kind of male fantasy. So, you know, blokes with like multiple girls, all kinds of stuff is happening in a very sort of exaggerated way. But then, as you say, the very first example of this, actually, I was just having a look at it before we started recording. So it's about four or five pages long. The transition from the sex to the violence happens just like that.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  The one paragraph ends, which is pure sex. And then the next paragraph begins and he says something like, Elizabeth is running, she's covered in blood and I'm following her.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  And it's like in a dream, it's like the transition in a dream where you don't really know how you got somewhere, where an intervening bit has been lost. And it happened, and that, you see, that leads me to think that these things didn't happen. That this is all a dreamlike fantasy. But anyway, I think the effect of it, because of course, I think for a male reader, now I think maybe this is different reading as a woman. I think for a male reader, particularly if you are a young man. You're reading those scenes and you probably find them quite titillate, you probably find them very titillating, actually. So you are complicit in it. And then you turn the page and suddenly, having been very titillated, you are, oh my god.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  You're repulsed by yourself, though, as well, in a way that-

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  You're repulsed by yourself because, of course, you are invited to picture yourself as Patrick Bateman, if you're a male reader. No? I mean, that's what I think.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  And I actually think as well, you know, we spoke about, you know, what is that, we spoke about this in Elita as well. What is it in Bret Easton Ellis that means that he's able to write these deplorable scenes? I always think that's slightly kind of the wrong question to ask.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Portraying something is not the same as approving of it, is it?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  First of all, a writer should be free to use their imagination however they like. But also, I think it's slightly disingenuous and dishonest of a reader to say, gosh, what sort of a person must Vladimir Nabokov or Bret Easton Ellis be to have an imagination as dark as this? Because, well, maybe I'm betraying myself here, but if we're honest about ourselves, do we not all have quite dark imaginations and dark corners of our minds that we wouldn't want to share with the world?

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  There's a reason that people are fascinated by serial killers and true crime, and that that's one of the biggest genres on Netflix, and that, you know, the minute that news or TV was serialized, commercialized, you know, people wanted to watch about serial killers. And I think stuff like, you do just have to separate the author from the art a lot of the time, I think.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  In the book, Patrick Bateman is grotesquely homophobic. Bret Easton Ellis himself is a bisexual, I think, now more openly gay man. So that's obviously not a reflection of what he himself thinks.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  But there is one other question that hangs over this, Tabi.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  The biggest question, I think.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Is whether or not this actually happened at all. So we've, we've compared it with Elita a few times.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  And Fight Club.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Right. And so there is a sort of genre novel in which you have an unreliable narrator who tells you an extreme story. And the more it goes on, the more you start to doubt whether it's, whether it really happened at all. And don't we, we know from the very beginning that Patrick Bateman is a very, very strange narrator. He calls himself a psychopath. You know, he's basically on drugs half the time. He has hallucinations. He doesn't seem to do any work. His life appears to bear no relation to anyone's real life. Everything we know comes from Patrick Bateman's head. We know he is somebody obsessed with serial killers. His friends joke about how Bateman reads these biographies all the time, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, all of this kind of thing. So he's basically spending his evenings

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  reading stories about serial killers. Is it therefore possible that he has constructed his own fantasy world? There are moments in the book which seem clear fantasies. You mentioned the car chase.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Yes, so this cinematic showdown, exactly, where it's, you know, helicopters, Bateman's causing explosions, left, right and centre, all of the police are on to him. And it seems so fantastic, and also the perspective shift, suddenly you move into the third person. And, and it seems so fantastical that it's almost, it's more like something that you'd watch in the cinema than, than, you know, that is in keeping with the rest of the book, that it causes you to question whether any of it is actually happening. And then there's the whole bit at the end when he leaves out a voicemail to his lawyer confessing everything. Paul Owen's murder, the murder of all the women, it's in the movie as well. And the lawyer just laughs and he says, well, obviously you didn't kill Paul Owen. You know, I was

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  having dinner with Paul Owen that night. And he mistakes Patrick Bateman for someone else, again, the mistaken identities. And he says, Patrick Bateman couldn't commit those murders. He's a coward. He could never do that.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  I know you've had, done some reading up on what Bret Easton Ellis himself thinks of this idea. So what does Bret Easton Ellis say about it?

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  So Bret Easton Ellis, he said that the ending isn't meant to reveal that the murders were all in Patrick's imagination, i.e. he's saying, you weren't meant to come away from it thinking it was all made up. And that he was surprised by how many people read it that way. He actually said, I always thought it was clear that Patrick Bateman was not imagining the murders. Instead, he intended the novel to kind of remain ambiguous. The point is rather the collapse of certainty. There's no twist ending. But then, he's quite inconsistent on this, because in the afterwards of the book, he talks about those leaked passages, those passages leaked to the media, in which Patrick Bateman kills women or fantasizes about killing women. And then he said in an interview with Larry King, when Larry King asked him, is this all a dream? And he says, when I was working on it, I didn't know, I

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  had no idea. I went back and forth, I went back and forth, I went back and forth. And it wasn't interesting to me to answer that, i.e. it's not the point.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  I think that's fair. I think it's not the point and he wants it to be ambiguous. I'll tell you now, you know, I have a theory of my own.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  You as a reader or a detective reader, you like to call into question your narrator.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Me personally.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  You like to call, yeah, you personally, you like to call into question the whole plot.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm not saying this is the truth, I'm just saying this is my take and this is what I like to think. I think there are clues throughout the book that Patrick Bateman, that the reality is very different. So I think there is a tension right from the beginning between what Patrick Bateman says about himself and what other people say about him. So as early as page 19, Evelyn says, Patrick's not a cynic. He's the boy next door, aren't you, honey? And Patrick whispers to himself, no, I'm not. I'm an effing evil psychopath. Now, the thing is, at that point in the book, we are led to believe Patrick is telling us the truth and Evelyn has completely misread him. But I think it's the other way around. I think she is telling us the truth. He is a goody

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  goody. He is the boy next door. And he's pretending to be something he's not to himself by saying, I'm an evil psychopath. I think he's an incel. I think he is, there's a, I think he's embarrassed about all sorts of things and he's messed up. When his ex-girlfriend Bethany comes to have lunch with him and he, she asks about his family and his father, he shuts it down straight away. He's anxious and embarrassed because he doesn't want to be reminded about his parents. Later on, when she goes to his flat and she says to him, you've hung this contemporary art thing upside down, it's very embarrassing for him because she's exposed his gauche-ness.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Then that goes straight into a scene of great violence. I think that scene of great violence is all in his head and it's a fantasy and it's a way of him compensating for his embarrassment. He goes for dinner with his secretary Jean. She's got a crush on him. I think this is the one point in the novel where he could realistically, in real life, have a sexual encounter because she invites him back to her apartment. But he says, no, I don't want to go, because I have to return some videotapes. I think he's too nervous. And then finally, the end of the book, you said, the thing about the lawyer who says, oh, Patrick Bateman couldn't carry out these murders because he's, quote, a brown-nosing goody-goody. And the lawyer says, Evelyn dumped him, which is not what

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Patrick Bateman has told us. And the lawyer says, he could barely pick up an escort girl. I think that's the truth about him. And I think everything else, the stuff with the escorts, the murders, the extravagant, decadent, violent lifestyle is in his head and it's a massive act of compensation.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  See, I think you're half right and I think that he's half right. I think he massively-

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  He carried out half the murders.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  And I think that there is a real, like, sick creepiness in him. That means that he does commit some of the murders, some of the less lurid ones, but not the later ones. But I think the point is kind of more that this is so, this is, this society is so deadened that even the woman who shares a bed with him, Evelyn, doesn't know that she's sharing a bed with a serial killer because she doesn't really care, as long as she's got kind of her American Express and her legs are perfectly shaped and her hair's looking great. You know, that it's about this kind of, the existential numbness of this world, ultimately.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Well, the fact that it ends with nothing changing.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. It ends where it began.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  In a restaurant and they're chatting about hard bodies. That's what they call waitresses.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the sign, this is, this is not an exit. And which, by the way, I think that's a brilliant ending, to end with the this is not an exit sign, which is basically there's no escape from the cycle of kind of capitalist consumerism.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  His hollow world will just continue.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  So after we've been just, or certainly I have been very pretentious and pontificating about it, Bret Easton Ellis had the most brilliant way of summing this all up. He said, people finally read the book. They found out it wasn't 400 pages of torture and mutilation advocating the death of women. It's just some boring novel.

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Anyway, so is it a boring novel?

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  I think we should rate it out of peanut butter soup with smoked duck dishes.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Out of 10.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Will I go first?

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  You go first.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I'm always going first. I think I'm going to give it six. The, the argument, it's a satire of corporate capitalism in 1980s America. Fair enough, but a satire should really make you think and challenge you, make you think more deeply about something, I would say. And I felt like this didn't really do that. It was a bit like looking at, it reminds, it reminds me of an 18th century cartoon. You know, which are often very scatological, very shocking. But a cartoon, you look at it for five minutes, max, and you're like, well, the point's been made and then you move on. That's sort of how I felt with this. I don't think it's anything like as sophisticated as a book like Elita.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  It's not a very literary novel, though, is it?

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  No. Is it a book that I would recommend to people? Where I'd say, oh, you've got to read this. It's a brilliant book. It is not. And so I'm marking it down for that reason.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  For fairly similar reasons, I'm also going to give it a six. I did find it very funny. And genuinely quite original, you know, it's not like I've read anything else like that. But I, like you, did not find it an enormously pleasurable reading experience. Certainly from kind of the halfway mark, I thought the point has been made. You know, call me sappy, but I actually do like to root for something in my books. I like to have someone to get behind and, and there's no one in this to relate to or to cheer for or to be moved by. It's just so incredibly cynical.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  And coming from you, that is, that is harsh.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  I know, I know. For me, that's, that's extraordinary. Do you like the movie, by the way?

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  It can be quite funny and I think Christian Bale is very funny.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  It is funny.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  But I don't find it as immersive. And of course, because the film cannot show the, I mean, this actually goes, maybe answers my rhetorical question about do we need extremes of violence? Because the film doesn't show the violence in such gory detail, because obviously it can't, it's perhaps not as effective. It's not as powerful. It doesn't linger in my head to the same degree.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  That was actually Bret Easton Ellis's problem with it, actually. He said, lacking that interiority meant that you sapped the movie of its power. And he also said that it made readers decide, it made, it made viewers decide, does it happen, does it not happen? Yeah. But then he did actually meet Christian Bale during filming, when Christian Bale was, was in Bateman mode. And he said he got quite freaked out by-

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, how uncanny, uncannily similar they were.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  But on that note, don't forget to, to join our own community of psychotic consumerist serial killers and sign up to Book Club Notes.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, bookclubhq.com.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  And Tabi, we will be trailing, won't we, in Book Club Notes, all the things that we've got coming up. But just a quick taste for people, what are the books that are coming in the next few weeks?

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, so that's Bond, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, White Nights by Feodor Dostoevsky, and The Shining by Stephen King. So two people that we mentioned in this episode coming up.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exciting. Loads of fun things. Bye, everybody.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  Bye.

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