Best 1991 Adventures (3)

By: Joshua Glenn
May 23, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1991 adventure novels.

Bret Easton Ellis’s sardonic thriller American Psycho (1991).

Not one of my favorite books, but an underrated one — and an important cultural touchstone. David Foster Wallace said of novels by Ellis (“and certain others”) the following: “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.” This is a fair description of American Psycho. Patrick Bateman, a Manhattan investment banker who worships Donald Trump, drones on about fashion, grooming, luxury goods, sex and violence, and the work of 1980s pop music artists. The present-tense stream-of-consciousness narrative quickly induces the sensation that one has been cornered, at a party, by a coked-out yuppie douche. He is also a psychopath (the shallow, vicious product, the author would have us understand, of a shallow, vicious capitalist society) and a serial killer (the violent, misogynistic product of etc.), though it’s not impossible that his murderous spree is a delusion. In an elite, privileged world where everything is commoditized and fungible, then why not kill and eat prostitutes and club girls? (At one point, he confesses his “murders and executions” to a colleague, who mishears the phrase as “mergers and acquisition.”) The novel’s violence is truly grisly and disturbing. Ellis’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, who’d acquired the book before he wrote those scenes, withdrew from the project because of “aesthetic differences”; and most reviewers expressed disgust for both the book and its author. A frightening, graceless, ingenious yarn about a frightening, etc.

Fun facts: “Look man,” DFW’s quote continues, “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?” Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation, starring Christian Bale at his creepiest, is terrific — better than the book.

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Best 1991 Adventures (3)

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