It's almost pointless, blogging on American Psycho. Most people made up their minds about Patrick Bateman and his murderous progress through the New York yuppie scene long ago. It might be best to write, simply: "Discuss." I'm not going to change your position, am I?
Having said that, it is interesting to note how much more favourable modern opinion is towards the book than it was back in 1991. I'm guessing your comments will be much more appreciative of Bret Easton Ellis's efforts than they would have been 20 years ago. Now that American Psycho, which is the subject of this month's Guardian book club, has become an established feature of the literary landscape and is generally acknowledged as a modern classic, it's fascinating to go back through the archives and discover how much critics hated the book when it first came out.
The Guardian's digital archive, for instance, features a review by Joan Smith, who described the book as "nasty, brutish and long". She noted, with inadvertent hilarity, that it was "unconvincing" in its depictions of murder and concluded that it was "an entirely negligible piece of work, badly written and wholly lacking in insight or illumination". Andrew Motion in the Observer meanwhile lamented that the book was "throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety."
To describe such reviewers as suffering from a sense of humour failure is almost as much of an understatement as the following delightful assessment I came across on Wikipedia: "Bateman's mental state appears increasingly questionable."
But the reviewers were minor players when it came to hating the book. Its troubled emergence into the world is well known. Simon and Schuster refused to publish at the last minute and let Ellis walk off with his alleged $300,000 advance. They claimed editorial objections; Ellis claimed that they feared commercial reprisals. Spy magazine had just written an excoriating article about the way Bateman likes to rip the skin off women, and the LA chapter of the National Organisation of Women had started sharpening their knives (branding the work: "a how to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women") and threatening a boycott of whoever dared publish it.
Luckily, Sonny Mehta, the president and editor-in-chief of Knopf (a division of Random House), purchased the book for Vintage, defending his decision on the grounds that Ellis's novel was "serious". The boycott did indeed take place, the critics savaged the book, and only a few lone voices spoke out against them (like Fay Weldon – also in the Guardian, redeemingly – who described it as a "beautifully controlled, important novel").
As they nearly always do, the boycott-and-ignore lobby brought the book fantastic publicity, it sold in the hundreds of thousands and has remained essential reading ever since. Ellis's evisceration of the creatures that roam around Wall Street seems more relevant than ever in the face of the recent world recession. The motif of the serial killer working in plain view because none of his contemporaries was prepared or able to look beyond his haircut, his clothes and his pay cheque seems horribly prescient in the light of Enron and the great sub-prime Ponzi scheme. Sonny Mehta was right. It is a "serious" work: seriously funny, seriously sharp, seriously sick, and, to borrow Andrew Motion's construction, seriously serious.
It's also a significant work of literature. The collision of absurd reality and deranged fantasy still works a treat. Bateman's voice – obsessive, and only a very small fraction of a degree madder than the average style magazine – is a superb achievement: equally unsettling when he describes a suit, the "emotional honesty" of Phil Collins, or doing unspeakable things to prostitutes. There's also the disturbing uncertainty of the whole thing. Should we believe anything Bateman says? Does he actually look good? Does he attract hardbodies as easily as he makes out? Is he really a killer? Do cash machines really demand that he feeds them cats? It's impossible to tell. But there's no doubt that it works as an indictment of a culture.
Yet to talk of such weighty matters hardly does justice to the most significant aspect of the American Psycho reading experience: the fact that it's hilarious. As well as being a repulsive nightmare, Patrick Bateman is a comic creation of the highest order. His snobbery, his bad taste, his obsession with Les Mis and ability to take Huey Lewis and the News seriously, his terror when someone has a better business card than him, his constant worry that he has "to return some videos" all add up to one of the funniest comic creations since Bertie Wooster. True, he isn't quite such pleasant company as Bertie, but what did you expect? He's a psycho.
Discuss.
Comments will be most appreciated, as they'll help inform John Mullan's final book club column this month.
