The laundry room in my building has a little library. Some thoughtful soul tacked up a couple of shelves by the door, and residents leave books and magazines they no longer want so that others can have something to read while they wait for the fabric-softener light to come on. I’ve snagged many an entertaining tome from those shelves, and in return I’ve left a few orphans of my own; even my absurd book-hoarding has its limits. The unauthorized biography of Martha Stewart that I finished reading in one day and couldn’t justify keeping went straight to the laundry room. So did several dozen back issues of literary quarterlies with names like Plinth and Obscurity Review, filled with inscrutably horrible poetry that made my eyes bleed, and that wretched Seymour Hersh book on the Kennedys, and my extra copy of The Hite Report (don’t ask). A couple of weeks ago, as I stuffed the last pillowcase into a top-loading machine, I checked the shelves for new arrivals, and what to my bleach-addled eye should appear but Bret Easton Ellis’s much maligned sophomore effort, American Psycho. I couldn’t resist – I had to see if it sucked as much as everyone said it did when it first got published, and I’d heard that someone had decided to make it into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio or one of his plus-ones, so I stuffed the book into my backpack and took it upstairs with me.

Well, I just finished reading it last night, and I don’t quite see why so many people got their knickers in such a tight twist over so little. When the book came out in 1991, Ellis took beatings for months in the press, and the mob came at him from all sides – the literati dismissed him as a cynical lightweight with inadequate formal training; the feminists denounced him as a vengeful misogynist who posed a danger to women and to the culture in general; the pop-cult mavens muttered about trends and taboos, and wrote dour op-ed columns with titles like “Has Bret Easton Ellis Gone Too Far?” After all the sniping, I expected either a poorly-written attempt at satire, or a catalog of gratuitous gross-outs – perhaps both. But I got neither. Sort of.

I wouldn’t call the book a literary masterwork by any means – I wouldn’t even call it “good,” in fact – and I could have done without a few of the sterner scenes of torture and humiliation. But while I wouldn’t deem the book worthless either, I just don’t think it bears getting upset over. For those who haven’t read it, American Psycho follows the career of a murderous psychopath in the guise of an affluent and attractive investment banker named Patrick Bateman. The psychopath also serves as the protagonist, narrating the action and directing the reader’s sympathies – or lack of same. Bateman as drawn probably doesn’t strike a sympathetic chord with many people: he lists the components of every other character’s designer outfit in minute, pointless, boring detail; he becomes enraged when his estranged brother gets a coveted reservation at the newest “in” restaurant; he recounts the ridiculously expensive and over- choreographed nouvelle-whatever meals he and his friends spend most of the novel eating; he drinks a lot of scotch, takes a lot of drugs, does a lot of exercising and cheating on his so-called girlfriend, expends a lot of energy avoiding productive work, and fornicates with the severed heads of his call-girl victims. Golly, how shocking. Well, except for the “shocking” part.

I imagine that Ellis envisioned this novel as a mirror held up to the go-go eighties, a shocking reflection of the essential emptiness of material wealth and so on, and to a limited degree, he succeeds. I did get a reasonably depressing picture of the lives of twentysomethings who, having made more money than God just for showing up, find themselves completely enervated, at a loss for anything to do and thereby reduced to debating the merits of various brands of sparkling water. As a satire, however, it fails. Ellis lavishes too many particulars on the fifty-dollar appetizers to sell me on a send-up; he wants the reader to think he holds these people in contempt, but I can’t escape the sense that he admires them in certain ways, that he respects the completeness of their dissipation. Furthermore, he sprinkles the story with irritating and unsubtle devices meant to help the reader along, but at least for this reader, they had the opposite of the intended effect. For example, throughout the book, as Bateman wends his way through the complexities of his social life, his peers mistake him for someone else; minor characters continually address him by the wrong name, and by a different name each time. Ohhhh, now I get it. Nobody knows the real Patrick Bateman. Nobody sees the true self behind the carefully manicured and attired exterior. They think he is what he IS not. Gee, Mr. Ellis, what a clever literary leitmotif you used there – kind of like an iron skillet to the head, eh what? Bateman’s dissociative rambles about popular music, apparently aimed at illustrating the depth of his depravity by intimating that he cares more about the trajectory of Whitney Houston’s career than about human life, merely bored me rather than driving home a point. It seems to me that, once your narrator has picked up a woman in a bar, brought her home, pinned her to his headboard with a nail gun, and cut off her nipples just prior to killing her, you can probably dispense with the fugue states. The point has, so to speak, already arrived. He’s a sociopath. We. Get. It.

So the novel doesn’t really do what it sets out to, at least not on the level of ironic commentary, but it entertained me somewhat. Ellis does have formidable, if not terribly subtle, powers of description, and as I said before, he succeeds in conjuring up the bleak but well-appointed void in which his characters live. Alas, the reader can’t bring herself to care about the characters much. I wondered whom Bateman would cannibalize next, and whether he would get caught, but I didn’t much care one way or the other. Yes, Bateman defiles and degrades the women he kills, and yes, he does so in the most painful and torturous manner imaginable – but these scenes of rape and grisly murder don’t seem genuine, either to the narrator or to Ellis. They feel insincere, like showing off, and while I hardly relished the image of Bateman introducing a hungry sewer rat into a woman’s vagina, I can’t say that it chilled my heart either. I shuddered reflexively, of course, but at the same time it went so far over the top that I almost couldn’t take it seriously. As for Ellis’s alleged misogyny, I don’t see it. Bateman kills almost as many men as he does women, and in just as gory and random a fashion – homeless guys, cops, gay men walking their dogs. I suspect that Ellis wanted to make Bateman and his crimes as inhuman as possible, and he viewed adding torture and rape (and racism and homophobia) as the quickest way to up the ante. Ellis might very well hate women, but I don’t think you can deduce that from American Psycho – only that he has a less-than-firm grasp of narrative finesse. Why put Bateman’s mother in a psychiatric ward? Why make constant references to a fictional talk show which Bateman watches every day without fail? Why not give the characters organic motivations instead?

Less Than Zero, which I didn’t mind either, suffered from the same overbearing effort to Get The Point Across And Make A Statement. Peopled by the same wealthy, jaded, vaguely detestable youngsters and peppered with the same exhaustive pop culture references, Less Than Zero apparently wanted the reader to think twice about kids who appear to have everything. But Ellis’s writing, not strong enough on its own to make us care about the characters, relied heavily on references to MTV and accounts of wild parties and soulless sexual encounters. These devices have their uses, of course, but you can’t send up what you don’t have down, and the author’s repeated protests that he intends his work as a parody of society don’t convince me that he knows what the words “parody” and “satire” actually mean. From what I’ve read about Glamorama, his latest release, Ellis employs that by-now-familiar name-dropping as a shorthand for telling his story, and as usual he has had to explain to dozens of interviewers that he meant the book as an indictment – this time, of the cult of celebrity. In short, while I find his work reasonably engaging, he doesn’t write very well. He doesn’t write well enough to make his satirical intent apparent, he doesn’t write well enough to make us care about his characters as people, and he certainly doesn’t write well enough to merit a months-long brouhaha over a piece of work that got way more mileage out of the “negative” press than it deserved on its own merits. In order to shock people with writing, to rattle them, to make them think about your words long after they’ve put them aside, you have to show them something they recognize. Ellis doesn’t do that with American Psycho – unless you count a writer trying too hard as something recognizable, and believe me when I tell you that nobody wants to read about that.

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