As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to read “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis.
Back when bookstores still existed, I followed my dad into countless ones and occasionally saw the shrink-wrapped Australian paperback edition with the warning: RESTRICTED. I was dumbfounded.
I wasn’t some naïve kid. I’d already picked through most of Stephen King’s coke-fuelled 1980s output: the rampant scenes of child abuse, the graphic depictions of gore and domestic violence, infanticide and underage sex orgies. I’d borrowed these books from the municipal library. What could be worse? What warranted shrink-wrap and an age restriction? It’s just a book! Words on a page. All this secrecy only increased my fascination with the forbidden totem.
At age nine I already had an adult reading comprehension and was consuming mostly airport fiction from the likes of Arthur Hailey, Michael Crichton and Alan Dean Foster. If I wasn’t allowed to watch a movie that was rated R, I read the novelisation if it existed. But a book that itself was off-limits was new to me. And I wanted it bad.
Most consumerist rights of passage for kids who become legal adults involve purchasing alcohol or cigarettes. Me? The day I turned eighteen, I turned up to a chain bookstore with ID ready to purchase “American Psycho”. I was still in high school and dressed in full uniform. The (I assume) weirded-out clerk even asked for my proof-of-age, further adding to my rite of passage. I proudly displayed it and walked out. This grammar-schooled kid had just enacted his fully legalised act of rebellion. I’d never been drunk or smoked a cigarette, but I felt like a bad-ass.
Much like a silly kid smoking his first cigarette, when trying to read “American Psycho” for the first time, I did nearly puke. In fact, I only got about 90 pages in before I felt such disgust and self-recusal that I actually threw the paperback into the household council rubbish bin. I was not ready. I understood the rhetorical thrust: this was satire, born of a conflicted hatred of and attraction to the mores of a certain strata of society during a specific cultural moment that the writer was experiencing.
But I didn’t have the stomach for it. I’d never attempted any transgressive fiction until this point. And there was a certain specificity and intimate knowledge of the violence it was describing that I’d never encountered. Bret Easton Ellis says that he wrote most of the novel, sans the violent parts, in one duration. Then he researched the depths of depravity: the Marquis de Sade, artefacts from Nazi experimentation on human subjects, serial killer confessions, the kinds of material most would rather avoid. After that he wrote the repulsive parts. According to interviews, this was not an experience he enjoyed. “Sure, I was depressed, and I cried a lot, but who cares?” he mentions in one article. His drive to depict a brutal society through extreme and obscene metaphorical carnage was, to him, essential.
Bret Easton Ellis today is an openly gay writer. His facetious persona and its relationship to his oeuvre have become less slippery since the publication of his most recent book, “The Shards”. After he published “American Psycho” to a maelstrom of backlash for its undeniably misogynistic content and his disingenuous denial of any conscious effort to offend, his stance has softened. It’s been made into a movie, which arguably holds a larger piece of the cultural zeitgeist than its source material. There are Patrick Bateman memes and meta-ironic stances on what was, and still remains, a desperate cri de cœur from a problematic but important 20th-Century writer.