/5I'm not a fan of the film adaptation of American Psycho, but I am a huge fan of stories about fictional serial killers and privy to the fact that novels are often nothing like the films that they spawn, so I decided to give Bret Easton Ellis' novel a read. Having finished it late last night/early this morning, I can definitely say that reading the novel is a wholly different experience than watching the movie... but I don't think I can honestly say that I'm overall more impressed with the novel. I enjoy the premise of the story, I appreciate that Ellis was willing to write a piece so shocking and explicit that it leaves most writers and readers out of their element, but, quite frankly, I am not very impressed with this novel at all.
American Psycho (the novel) is a collection of "notes" recounting events in the life of Patrick Bateman, an extremely wealthy businessman on the surface, and a psychopathic murderer behind closed doors. Over the course of the novel, Patrick murders coworkers, prostitutes, and small dogs, consumes human flesh, starts a shootout on the street; he does a lot of crazy things... but one of the problems with the story is that he does a lot of totally boring things too. Ellis constantly goes into an extreme amount of detail about what brands, fabrics, and colours characters are wearing, and not in an interesting, detailed way, but as if he is ticking items off some drab, internal list. I understand that this is meant to be a social commentary, but it gets extremely old after the first four or five times and I found myself skimming through these sections rather than reading them. There are pages upon pages about Bateman and his friends making dinner reservations, reviewing 1980's albums, eatting at restaurants, basically talking about nothing... there is such a huge contrast between Bateman's normal, everyday life and his escapades as a serial killer. I understand that this can probably be noted as one of the charming aspects of this novel, but I dislike it. It makes the whole thing seem very disjointed, and the calm sections of the novel just drag on and on in a boring drone. Adding to this, the novel doesn't really have a plot. This is a story begging for a conclusion or a summative event that makes the whole piece worthwhile, but there isn't one: the novel just continues, continues, continues, and then ends. I still feel as if I should be reading it, but I'm not: I'm done. As it was, however, the novel doesn't seem to be.
