A Nameless Dread

This week I finished Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. It features a rich wall street executive losing his mind and killing numerous people in vicious and sexual manners. It is not for those with weak stomachs to say the least. Some passages seriously made me feel disturbed like some sort of sympathy pain, except sympathy psychosis.

I am a bit lost after reading it. I get that it is a bit of satire about the superficial lives of the rich, with quotes like, "There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust." But on some level I still feel that Ellis has some pity for the main character, Patrick Bateman. You can't write 300 pages about the inner monologue of a character without identifying with that character on some level, which makes the satirical elements a bit problematic. There are also long passages where Bateman describes what everybody is wearing, focusing primarily on designer names, which, while incredibly tedious to read, serves to highlight how these characters only care about the surface. But, to write these passages, Ellis had to know a great deal about designer clothing, and this means he has to operate in that circle to some degree.

Another issue with the book is that there is a lot of homophobia and misogyny. This is further puzzling since Ellis himself is bisexual, and leans mostly towards homosexuality from what I've read about him. And one might argue that this is a continuation of the satire, mocking the hypermasculinity of these wall street types. But at some point you cannot hide behind satire anymore. At some point, you're producing so much homophobia and misogyny, that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that you don't harbor some of those sentiments yourself.