Australian Psycho 2012We decided to catch up for a barbecue lunch in the park, rather than the sort of dinner party we used to have.It was difficult getting everybody together, what with kids' sport and, for those whose kids had already grown up, there was some initial reluctance because the football season had started, whatever code you followed.I started to look at my wardrobe on Thursday, I still have everything I've ever bought that hasn't physically worn out, even jeans that I won't fit into until, perhaps, the advanced stages of cancer.I know it might sound bad, but I sort of look forward to that day (I hasten to add there's no history of cancer in the family), so that I can reminisce about what I did in those bellbottoms, purchased and worn before they were retro.I wondered if a T-shirt would be too un-ostentatious. F.M. Sushi suggested I wear something No Logo, though she stopped short of recommending a polo. I agreed with her. I thanked her for her advice and held her to me, full body length, every inch of contact an expression of our love and gratitude to each other.She is my beautiful wife, my rock, I can't imagine now what I saw in decades of promiscuity and seed-spilling before I met her. I love the way we hold each other. I will never tire of her opinions and the way she tentatively proffers advice, as if I might reject it, because I didn't think of it first.I might have done that once, but no longer. I listen before I speak, I seek first to understand an idea and then to improve it, if possible and only if necessary.It started to rain on Friday afternoon. I looked at F.M. Sushi and she reassured me that everything would be OK, in her usual "don't fret" way.For once she was wrong, not that a minor deluge is a catastrophe.Saturday morning, everyone started to phone, "Is it still on?"Josh and Mary decided that they'd stay at home, indoors, Mary had a bit of a sniffle, she didn't want anyone else to catch it. I replied that I was more concerned for her health than ours.Josh said they'd take a raincheck and I laughed. It was good to see his old sense of humour resurfacing. I assume he meant it as a joke. He would have once.When the rain intensified, I realised it had put an end to the plan that we all walk to the park.I decided to do another ring-around and suggested that we change the venue to our place. A few more pulled out. I was sort of grateful. The new place isn't really set up to host more than a dozen people at a time. Still, we should be grateful for small mercies.Peter and Sally arrived first, by cab. Their car hadn't started on account of the rain. Peter was carrying a wine carton from a New Zealand vineyard I hadn't heard of. When he placed it on the kitchen bench, I lifted the lid and discovered that he'd brought a dozen bottles of Perrier.I looked at him and thanked him both verbally and with the enthusiasm evident in my eyes.I hadn't been looking forward to alcohol, even a glass or two for the old times.Mark and Nina arrived with some home-made pastries for dessert. Unfortunately, they had to leave early, when their baby-sitter rang, panicking about the water level in the front yard. The girls made a nice salad and we broke bread, before they retreated to their rooms to do their homework. Mandy offered to give Peter and Sally a lift home, if it was still raining when they were ready to go.We laughed and chatted for an hour altogether on the deck. It started to pour even harder, so Peter suggested that we move indoors, he'd been looking at his watch furtively and I realised that he was keen to watch the football.It was the first Saturday game of the season. It was funny, the four of us sitting there, couples with arms around each other, the rain beating on the corrugated iron roof, while the players raced around, bashing each other, in total sunlight, all optimistic about what the new season held in store for them.Just as the game finished, there was a break in the clouds here, too.Peter and Mary declined the offer of a lift from Mandy and decided to walk home. It wasn't far. Thirty minutes max.I let an hour go by, before ringing them. They'd arrived home, safe and dry. I was grateful.There wasn't much to clean up. F.M. Sushi had done most of it while everybody was here.No cigarette butts, just a few Perrier bottles.Later when I looked in the fridge to see what I might whip up for dinner, I noticed that there were four bottles of Perrier left.I still like the way you can end up with a bit of a private stash when you host a party.American Misogynist 2011:http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...American Psycho 2011:Paul Bryant's ReviewThese comments are not a considered review of the novel itself, but contain some responses to Paul Bryant's excellent review of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries) by Julian Murphet (and the comments it stimulated):http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...I originally posted my thoughts as a comment on Paul's review, but am not sure whether that was fair to Paul.So I have moved them to this page, edited them slightly and deleted my original comments.Where Do Serial Killers Come From?Paul's review created a debate about the likely class or wealth of most serial killers.I felt that this issue was a bit of a sideshow to Paul's main arguments.But it did make me think about the real issue of how to categorise serial killers in the first place.To be honest, serial killers don't really interest me as a true crime genre or area of research or reading.However, even if someone did scientifically verify that fewer rich dudes are serial killers, I would want to pry into the statistics.It might just mean that fewer rich dudes got caught; or that the poor guys in some cases might have been the patsies of rich guys, etc.What is a Serial Killer?But a more important point of distinction is how we define a serial killer.Is a Mafia foot soldier who commits multiple murders for the benefit of the Family a serial killer?Are the rich guys at the top of the Mafia serial killers if they authorise or direct the murders?What's Wrong with Me, Doctor?And more recently there was a classic example of what we could easily define as a rich serial killer in my own state.This person wasn't found to have intentionally killed a series of people in separate incidents, but he was found to have recklessly or negligently killed them.He was a medical doctor whose treatment and surgery was found to be culpable.Wasn't there also a recent case of a doctor in the UK who "killed" a number of patients as well?So you don't have to be a shooter or a slasher to be a serial killer.If you were a doctor, you could dress up your serial killings as sloppy work.Disproportionate ViolenceIn Paul's review and the resulting comments, there was a lot of discussion about the amount of violence in the book..The amount or proportion has some interesting history and precedents in the law of obscenity.This area of the law interests me as a point of intersection between morality, political philosophy and the law.Merit DefencesWhen there was a defence that a work had literary or artistic merit that justified the alleged obscene or offensive material, it was sometimes counter-argued that there was so much of it that it might have overwhelmed the inoffensive or literary or artistic content.So lawyers and judges got themselves distracted by arguments about amount and size (we all know lawyers are preoccupied by these things anyway).You can see that, if someone says that there was only 10% violence, then that presumably means that there was 90% art or literature.Therefore, the 10% is OK.This whole argument relies on the legal distinction for its validity.But then I think you're entitled to argue that if the very subject matter of the book or work of art is violence or sex (or blasphemy), shouldn't it be permissible to have 100% of your work devoted to your subject matter?Isn't it how you write that determines whether it is literary or artistic?Conversely, the literary merit of the 90% might not necessarily justify the grossness of the 10% (which is sort of linked with the gratuitousness argument, as well as the old practice of sticking a few pages of pornography in between unrelated serious articles).How Do You Assess Size or Amount in a Film?Part of the reason I've yapped on monotonously about this is that these concepts started to become difficult to apply to film about violence or sex.You couldn't realistically make 90% of the film deal with some other subject matter in order to justify the 10% that was naughty.It would be interesting (academically) to calculate the proportion of violence in the film of AP, but I would venture to say that it would be higher than 10% (not that it really matters on my argument).Ultimately, this sort of problem with film helped contribute to the system of classification of literature and film and more recently games (G, PG, M, R, X, etc) that replaced the old law of obscenity (that was applied in the Oz trials).So the material is now permitted, but regulated and restricted in its circulation.Within this system of regulation, it doesn't matter whether someone finds content shocking or appalling.They don't have to buy it and read or view or review it.As long as they don't have it thrust down their throats publicly or on free to air TV or in newspapers.Does It Make Any Difference If It's Satire?Within this framework of classification, it doesn't really matter to me (at least) whether AP was satirical.It is enough that BEE made an artistic choice to write about violence.Illegal or Immoral?The legal arena has moved on from amount and size (to some extent), so I think people should forget about turning their sense of offence into some sort of legal attack every time they hear about something they don't like personally (see the Bill Henson dispute discussed in David Marr's book).http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70...People might still have a moral objection to the material, but I think they should express their objection in the moral arena, not the legal arena.They should just express their disgust if they feel so bad about it and let other people decide whether they want to read or watch it.Then if they want to change the law, they can make it an election issue at election time, which they always do anyway.
jason, an old high school buddy, knew i was in manhattan for a few nights and asked to meet up for dinner. fuck it, i'm a sentimental guy, and it's nice to catch up -- even with a wall street douchebag. jason told me that lisa, another old friend, would be joining. here's the conversational breakdown at dinner: 20 minutes: comparing features on their new blackberries.40 minutes: the new zagat guide and the city's best restaurants. 20 minutes: glib commentary on people we grew up with. lisa leaves and jason asks me to walk a few blocks and check out his new apartment "fucking sick pad, bro, sick" -- unable to deal with any more of this shit without backup, i text the address to bryan and john; they meet up and we sit in jason's super large, super minimalist, picture-window-overlooking-the-city apartment shooting the shit and drinking johnnie walker blue label. jason is quickly bored and calls over two hookers. he hits the bedroom with the cuter of the two; me john and bryan sit at the living room table and drink blue label with the other one. five minutes passes and we hear this from jason's bedroom:jason (screams): 'get off! get the fuck off!'we're all wondering what it is, exactly, she is on that he wants her off of. and if we should go in there and see if everything's ok. and then again: jason: 'get the fuck off!' hooker: 'shut up!'the door busts open and the hooker storms out with a very angry jason behind her ranting that she took a phone call while giving him head and carried on a conversation while licking his balls. so it's a moment of hilarious revelation when we realize that what jason wanted her to get off of, of course, was her phone. phone girl looks to blue label girl: 'you ready to go?'blue label girl: 'you get paid?'phone girl nods. jason (angry): 'you're not going anywhere! i fucking paid for two girls! all we got was a half!' the girls pause and give us the once over, i imagine, to gauge if we're the kinda guys to get violent or to let 'em just walk out with jason's money. they're professionals and know their shit. they walk out. jason lamely chides us for not getting his back. me bryan and john go down to von for a beer. i recently re-read american psycho only a few weeks after returning from jason's (second) wedding in a vineyard in napa. they wouldn't allow any alcohol other than their own wine to be drunk, so everyone compensated with dimebags and eightballs. and i spent hours talking to all these coked-out shitbags (and, yeah, i guess i was a coked-out shitbag, but in an entirely different non-patrick-batemanesque way) -- here's the wedding conversational breakdown: - new gadgets (iphones, stereos, flatscreens, cars)- we are at the top of the system because we are the smartest and most shrewd and if obama is going to regulate us and put more money in the hands of the poor, we will be forced to prey on the poor… good job obama, you just fucked the poor in a way bush never could have.- is jay-z the 'new sinatra'?- vacation spots. (st. barts, maui, etc)- can we get more coke?- you know how much money greg has? fucking sick, bro. you know he took a fucking private helicopter here, right?- jason's stepsister is kinda hot. you think i can fuck her?easton ellis's book isn't really much of an exaggeration. what it is: controlled, hilarious, horrible, tragic, honest. and he employs some great little warholian tricks (whereas andy lined up pictures of mao, marilyn, & minestrone, easton ellis clobbers us with a quick repetition of interwoven, passive-voiced, flattened-out sentences about daytime television, anal rape, and fashion tips) to accent his truly mad book. but the big question: is american psycho a book that hates women? i guess. I mean, it's about and for a culture that hates women, no? now, i don't really wanna defend the book against these charges; more fun to wonder what those who view american psycho as woman-hating or anti-feminist make of the dozens (hundreds?) of panty-sniffing television shows, movies, graphic novels, books, and video games that blanket pop culture? consider, as a mild example, Law & Order: SVU.here we have a show in which every episode is about an underage girl raped. or a coma victim raped. or an old woman raped. written, shot, and ingested as titillating panty-sniffing nonsense. less offensive because it takes itself so seriously? because one of the cops is a woman? or because it's able to take a preposterous and unrealistic moral standpoint in 'punishing' the crime/criminal by having them jailed or killed? or, in those rare occasions when the rapist isn't caught, we're given a profound & poignant & important commentary on violence and crime and the justiceblahfuckingblah.or do CSI, SVU, COLD CASE, etc. get a pass because they're low art, light entertainment, 'not taken seriously'...? the shit's backwards, yo.to be totally honest, i have a hard time seeing how one views (as so many do) american psycho as 'woman hating' or 'anti-woman' or 'anti-feminist' -- i suspect that easton ellis is so good at what he does, his depiction of violence so visceral, excessive, and demented that it literally pushes people to a point in which they must either reduce the book to a 'commentary on society and consumerism and capitalism' (ugh) or to the point at which the excess drowns out any point easton ellis imagines he's making.and then there's a complaint best made by David Foster Wallace:"I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that."while i find his stance admirable and elegantly stated, there's so so so much i disagree with here -- i guess it all comes down to an ear-drum shattering 'NO!' i do not believe that 'in dark times the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements.' i believe that could be a definition of 'good art', but not the definition. norman mailer (who tried, and failed, to create an american psycho type book with his an american dream) complains that easton ellis offers no alternative to the 'flat, insipid' life of patrick bateman... DFW and mailer seem to suggest that we need two things from art:1. we need to follow a traditional model of literature which presents the good contrasted against the bad (i.e. tolstoy, dickens, etc); an art which offers an alternative morality, a way out, a 'CPR', something better... this is, of course, reactionary nonsense. what's good for leo, charlie, dave, or norm ain't necessarily good for the gander.2. we need a representation of the 'good' in our art to show the reader an alternative or a means to break free. bullshit: while orwell needed a winston smith in order to achieve the intended effect of 1984, i cannot conceive of an american psycho with a moral voice. the moral voice comes not from the narrator or characters within the novel, but from the reader herself. and look -- most of the shit i dig tries to do just this: "illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it" -- finding a means to live with integrity in a world of shit is an underlying theme in most of the shit i respond to and/or create. but, again, this does not mean that it is the author's job (or the creator of 'good art') to proceed along those lines. in fact, what i most appreciate about easton ellis is his refusal to trace over pre-defined lines.as helpful, at times, as it might be to read litcrit and reviews which approach the novel as a kind of book-shaped container meant to convey certain ideas, standpoints, or commentaries... as a reader (for me, at least), it's a killer. deadly. american psycho is a great book in that, yes, there's lots of serious shit going on in there that lends itself to term papers, academic essays, and the like; and, yes, it succeeds wonderfully in defining a particular point in american history... but also because it transcends all that. it creates (here goes my generalization), as does all 'good art', the ineffable feeling only able to be expressed through that particular work. no other contemporary writer (except, perhaps, delillo at his best) is able to infuse a work with such dread. the dread that easton ellis creates in this book goes far beyond DFW's simple assertion that american psycho 'does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is.'transcendence through dread, baby.
What do You think about American Psycho (1991)?
May 4, 2013: I couldn't finish this I'm afraid. Too much racism, sexism, homophobia, materialism, narcissism etc etc. It just wasn't for me.May 26, 2013: I really dislike leaving a book unfinished so after some consideration and some gentle nudging from a GR friend, I decided to finish reading the book. After reading the remaining chapters, my rating hasn't changed; I still dislike the book. Yes, the title does clearly suggests psychotic events will be found in the book but I wasn't ready for the extreme graphic descriptions of brutality depicted. They are honestly the most brutal I have ever read, and as I am a very squeamish person, there was no way I was ever going to enjoy this book. I also got bored by the repetitive descriptions of food and fashion. I understand why the author felt compelled to put them in but it got annoying after a while.What I did like were the few chapters that discussed 1980s music icons. Whitney Houston and Genesis in particular. I love 80s music and so I enjoyed those chapters a lot. Well, I am proud of myself for placing myself outside of my reading comfort-zone! I don't think I will ever read another book similar to this one.
—Rowena
I don't usually bother giving negative reviews here, but I feel it's time to nail my colours to the mast and identify a few problematic titles. Problem #1: American Psycho.It's funny how many people qualify their glowing reviews of this book with the words 'I didn't enjoy it but...,' as if it contained some bitter but necessary medicine. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I would have thought even a disturbing book, movie, song or painting should at least be enjoyable on some level if it's to gain its audience's love, and if it can't gain that love then it's certainly not worthy of glowing reviews. To me, American Psycho is damn near loveless, its murder scenes especially, and I don't buy the line that there's anything medicinal in those scenes either. What we have here is 2 books, or better, a book and a bunch of uninspired self-consciously provocative crap tacked onto it for the sake of controversy. Ellis said it himself: for the most part, American Psycho was just him writing out his frustration at his life, which corresponded closely, for the most part, to Patrick Bateman's; the murder scenes were added later. This is a telling admission. While there's something mildly enjoyable about Ellis ripping apart (in prose) the yuppies he obviously knows so well, the tone changes entirely every time a character is ripped apart for real. Satire? Yeah, parts of American Psycho are satirical, but not the violent parts - they are flat, vacant, bland. And it's a sad thing, that this young, lost, numbed writer felt the need to dress up his comedy of manners in wolf's clothing. You can imagine why he did it. Not for money necessarily, but from the same misguided notion that leads his fans to believe there is something medicinal in torturing themselves by reading this shit: the poor sap thought he was writing something 'important'! Well I'm sorry, but the only important thing about American Psycho is that it illustrates - by its existence, by its success - something deeply wrong with the society that gave birth to it. Any dickhead with a halfway decent grasp of prose could have written this splatter-porn; on the level of artistry it's dull as dull can be. But it illustrates something: the banality of evil. Brett Easton Ellis is no more a psycho than you or me, nor does he demonstrate any deep knowledge of what a psycho might be. But by parading his numbness, his naivety, his insensitivity, he demonstrates how a human might unwittingly do evil. And to my mind, there is something evil in what he's done, by seeking to legitimise this shit. In the end, there's only one question that's important here: does the world need more violence-for-violence's sake? I say absolutely not. And this is coming not from a wowser or an anti-violence lobbyist, but from a diehard fan of Clockwork Orange and Reservoir Dogs. One reviewer points out that the uproar over American Psycho is ridiculous given the number of malevolent, misogynistic slasher films on constant display in our culture, and to an extent I agree. But what I find reprehensible in American Psycho is the pose - that this is somehow above those slasher films - when Ellis himself has admitted that all the conceptual justifications only occurred to him after he was demonised, as a way to talk himself out of trouble. Is Brett Easton Ellis a mysoginist? To me he's more like a parrot, repeating the refrain of a sick culture. Well if you need a parrot to remind you what's wrong with clinical descriptions of excessive violence towards women then this is the book for you. For my part, I'll take Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me any day if I feel like a glimpse inside psychosis. And - wrong as this may sound to some of you - I'll enjoy it. Because art is meant to be enjoyed. Yes, it can change you, hurt you, get under your skin, but only if you love it. Personally, I wonder how anyone could love American Psycho. An absolute piece of shit and probably the worst book I have ever bothered finishing.
—Ben Winch
I am not convinced that endless descriptions of murder and torture are a good metaphor for unrestrained eighties capitalism. Consequently, while I have read many books that made me uncomfortable or nauseous, I have not read any that did so for such weak returns.The prose style is never better than competent. Generally it alternates between repellant and just very dull. I don't think it's hard to make readers feel sick and disgusted. If I tell you I have a puppy in one hand, and a blunt pencil in the other, even though you know they don't really exist you probably don't want me to decribe what happens when the two are made to interact. Exercises in this sort of writing have to work hard not to feel juvenile and this one doesn't work at all.There is a lively ongoing debate over whether it's misogynistic or not, (just have a look at the comments to Paul Bryant's excellent review). To me it seems self-evident that the book is misogynistic – but then there are a lot of excellent novels that are also misogynistic, so I'm not sure how far that gets you. More pertinent for me was just the fact that I loathed every moment I spent reading it.I think I threw it away halfway through. Maybe it turns into Tolstoy after page 200, but I have no inclination whatever to find out.
—Warwick
