384 pages, Picador Fiction
Review by Marc Nash
I'd avoided reading this when it came out,
but in a moment of weakness some 22 years later I picked up the free copy I'd
scored at a reading I did last year. I was broke and waiting for my Amazon
vouchers to arrive before buyring some new titles, so there was nothing left
for it but this. I don't think time is the issue here, even though the Yuppie
culture of the 90s that the book satirises lies in tatters as financial sectors
in economies all over the world collapses around our ears. No, I think the book
comes down to taste. Do you buy into the humour and satire and overlook the
graphic excesses of torture and violence, or can you simply not get past that?
Patrick Bateman is a Yuppie, living off an
unspecified inheritance so that he wants for nothing and seems to do no work
whatsoever in his Wall Street firm of Pearce & Pearce where he works in
Hostile Takeovers (get it?). Instead we get a litany of his Yuppie clothes,
detailing every brand label; his workouts at the gym; his love of gadgets and
accessories; his dining out in exclusive or new restaurants; his chasing after
cocaine in fashionable clubs; taunting the homeless by flaunting his own wealth
and of course his penchant for ultra-violence. First of all, it's worth saying
that we have 127 pages of all the above except the violence and this is turgid
heavy going. Bateman may well have forensic powers of recall and recognition of
brand labels, including for women's clothes, which is bemusing (since when he
is shown killing women, he's too febrile to pause to examine their clothes
labels), yet neither he nor his yuppie cronies can ever recall the names of
other yuppie acquaintances. They can't seem to remember who they're dating
either, as in their power games they make sure to screw their confreres' girlfriends
behind their backs, and Bateman is often leaving his dates waiting at wrong
destinations. But 127 pages of this is as I say highly tedious. If you want a
critique of capitalism, then you're better off reading Nicholson Baker's early
books, "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature". I will give
Ellis some credit here, in that his critique is less generalised about
capitalism and specific to the Wall Street yuppie culture of the 1990s. But he
makes the point quickly about both their inter-changeability for one another,
as well as the emptiness of their consumer culture and we don't need it
relentlessly rammed in our faces for quite so many pages.
So once the torture and murder kick in,
then it becomes a different sort of novel. The graphic detail of the unpicking
of his victims matches the forensic detail of listing people's clothes or a
shopping spree in an accessories store. And I get that this is the point, the
emptiness and vacuity is the same for all sorts of activity. Bateman literally
dissects his victims as if trying to get beneath the surface of their material
reality, only to find that there too lies nothing. No depth, no profundity, no
meaning. While personally not particularly offended by the gross depictions of
violence, I do feel there is a dissonance in tone here. While the satire on
clothes and clubs and restaurants is clearly comic, such gratuitous detail of
torture cannot carry the same comic touch. Hence the novel to me is schizoid
and ultimately doesn't work. In the same way that Bolano's chapter in
"2666" ultimately just alienates and keeps the reader outside the
text.
I did feel that Ellis' descriptions of
Bateman's swings between orderliness and disordered mental states to be
unbelievable. I just couldn't credit that he could be quite so ordered to hold
down a high-flying job, (even if he does no work, again probably the satirical
point), when compared with the raging insanity he displays elsewhere. Part of
the satire seemed to be how all the clues he left to his bloody activities were
ignored by those around him as if they simply couldn't see it. The scene in a
dry cleaner’s, when he is arguing about their ability to remove bloodstains
from his clothing is amusing. But again I couldn't really buy this whole
premise. Dead bodies always betray their existence through smell. Like Jeffrey
Dahmer, Bateman likes to keep body parts around long after the event.
For me there remained an unresolved but
important question emerging from all of this and one hinted at even within
those first 127 pages when he occasionally says what he'd like to do to the
person sat opposite him who was irritating him beyond belief; do these murders
really take place, or do they only exist inside his head, in which case the
book becomes something else and something frankly less problematic, because who
among us hasn't imagined a grizzly end for some irritant or other in our minds?
When he confronts a fellow yuppie on whose answer phone he had confessed to his
vile deeds, the other man says Bateman couldn't have long ago killed a mutual
colleague since he had dined with him in London only a week before. Is this
again a case of the colleague dining with another interchangeable yuppie
believing it to be the man Bateman claimed to have killed? Or had Bateman
dreamed the whole thing up? At the apartment in which this grizzly murder and
then a further double murder were supposed to have occurred, now is being shown
around to prospective buyers by an estate agent with no mention of the blood
soaked carpets and walls supposedly left by Bateman. Maybe no one ever dropped
Bateman's name into the Police, because these crimes never happened beyond
Bateman's fantasies? This just made the book even more unsatisfying for me.
I will say that when Ellis describes
Bateman losing the plot, the modulations within his state of mind to include
anxiety, impassivity, febrile rage, disorientation and a general unravelling,
were handled extremely well. I was really invited inside the rollercoaster of
Bateman's thought processes during these sections. But again this authentic
writing only served to highlight the rather limp satire of the opposite states
of mind of the yuppie at a restaurant or getting dressed. So there were enough
bits of good writing to say that the book is not wholly without merit, but these
I suspect will be dwarfed by that original dichotomy of whether the reader is
likely to find the torture porn a turn off, or that it would not hinder them
advancing through the relentless pages of the book. For me it wasn't a
hindrance, but the unsatisfactory dissonances in tone, the dull expounding on
brands and trendy behaviours, certain incredulity at sections of the plot and
finally the ambiguity as to whether the murders were even happening, all
conspired to leave me feeling this book doesn't work. But at no point did it
make me want to pick up an icepick and drive it into the author's brainpan.
No comments:
Post a Comment