SPOILERS!!!
First and foremost: it’s not by any means a fun read - and not just because of the graphic description of murder and torture. Aside from the torture scenes, everything happens so slow in this book, it’s simply ridiculous. The majority of the book takes place during some dining in a bar or a restaurant, where the main character, Patrick Bateman spends his time with his “friends”, eating and drinking. The author describes everyone’s clothing, so I mainly fast-forwarded those paragraphs, because it was just as boring as a fashion catalog. I wanna read a novel, a story, goddamnit!
As I said it’s not a fun read, but it’s not a bad book. In the book, we are in the head of Patrick, and we can hear what he’s thinking about. All the time. So if he’s thinking about what other people are wearing around him, we read that. If he’s thinking about food, drinks or porn movies, we read those thoughts. Simple as that. From this POV, I can safely say that the fashion catalog is just a gimmick, which proves to us that Patrick’s life is shallow. He doesn’t find excitement anywhere. And later, in the book, this thought escalates to a ridiculous level: even during the scenes in which Patrick is brutally and horrifyingly maiming his victims left and right, he stays calm and just describes what he’s doing at the moment. And he doesn’t really get any excitement out of say cutting a woman in half with a chainsaw…
My main problem with this book is that it carries a statement about the society, but not about its main character. And this is a crucial issue, because we are in Patrick’s head, and we’d like to see the layers and depths of his personality. OK, maybe Ellis is trying to say that Patrick doesn’t have depths and layers. But this - from a psychological point of view - is ridiculous. It doesn’t add up, however you’re trying to interpret it. It’s just disturbing, how he can just return to his “normal” life after he’s done something horrible.
The trick of this book is that any flaw I find, I can explain. For example, we doesn’t get a personality in Patrick, because Ellis uses Patrick as a tool to show us, what yuppie life really was at the beginning of the 90s. It was insanely boring (as the book itself at parts…), it was shallow, it didn’t have any depth at all. And if you consider that none of the yuppies were yuppies all the time, they had to have some personal life, you get why they didn’t do things like Patrick. Patrick has a life too, but he’s not in any way touched by it…
And this is where this book misses a great opportunity to dive into the REAL madness Patrick has in his mind. I want to know more! However, I think Ellis captured the manneurisms of madness really well in those incoherent inner monologues, which are really fun to read. But they are so few and far between, and half of the scenes in which you can find them are so BRUTAL, that overall the book - as I said before - is not a fun read.
I definitely recommend it, because you have to read it, if you want to understand and feel how alienating and boring consumerist society really is. It depicts the hopelesness brilliantly. It made me feel hate even the word “restaurant”, LOL… And it made me feel somewhat thankful that I’m not a millionaire. Really :-)
On a final note about the torture scenes: yes, they are bad. And I mean BAD, and not really the torture methods themselves are what make them really frightening (although I’ve gotta admire Ellis’ creativity - I’m convinced that this man is SICK), but the way Ellis writes them: so casually. The atmosphere of these scenes comes from the fact that there is NO atmosphere at all. The torture just happens to happen. And this blandness and casualness makes it an unique experience. I must warn you: if you have a weak stomach or a weak set of nerves, you’ve gotta
stay away from this book, because if you skip these scenes, you’ll miss the impact of the book.
Pros and cons section:
PROS:
- It has an unique atmosphere
- At times it’s fun to read, and extremely entertaining
- It raises many questions about human nature, society, etc.
CONS:
- It doesn’t have a coherent story
- The world it depicts at times isn’t plausible (a large number of murders go unnoticed by the police, and other inconsistencies in the storyline), and at times it tries so hard to be a satire of our real world, that it becomes ridiculous.
- The chapters are repetitive - dining scene, wardrobe scene, horrible mutilation/murder/rape/all of the above scene, repeat ad infinitum, and to the point where you can literally guess what kind of chapter is coming next.
- Almost zero character development.
Questions raised by the book:
1. Does Ellis try to make a point with the repetitiveness and boredom of the book?
2. Why doesn’t Patrick’s character show any kind of progression? Is it intentional?
3. What’s more important in this story: Patrick or the society he is in?
4. What’s the point of the implausible things in the book? The police must be the stupidest police ever if they can’t make any connection between the horrible murders and Patrick…
5. Why is that, that only Patrick goes mad? Is yuppie life maddening for the human soul in general, or is Patrick insane by nature? Will his other friends go mad and murder people left and right in this world?
6. What’s the point of the line in which Patrick says that he just wants to feel loved? Is he completely deprived of human connections? Oh, but he isn’t, it’s the world around him, what’s so naive and shallow. Is this a flaw in the book, or does Ellis do this intentionally?
7. Why is Ellis reluctant to give us a real story, which takes place in the real world? Is he unable to write on a different level or is this intentional?
All in all I would rate this book a 6/10, it was nothing special, and you definitely don’t have to read it more than once. I sure as hell never will read it again! :-) I recommend it, because after you read it, you can think about the questions and come to your own conclusions!
