Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "edge"
American Psycho
I wanted to say this book was about violence, but that's a little too easy. Going into what makes me uncomfortable about this novel (and there are things that definitely make me uncomfortable), I hit on the point of "centering." Patrick Bateman is looking for a core, for a self, and it is this spectrum he slides along on his gruesome, delusional journey for titillation, which is really just a craving for connection/acknowledgement.
People in Psycho can't understand each other; they misinterpret the other's words, or flat-out ignore people. This allows for some funny bits, but also illustrates how these characters totally "miss" each other's authentic selves. Whether or not they have authentic selves is another question, which isn't important because every fucking human has one, even genetic psychopaths.
I'm going to be honest: I loved this book. It was the first thing I read (by age 22) that I could definitively call "art." Now, of course that's a stupid thought, because I'd read McCarthy and Faulkner by this time, but as a jaded millennial, this book far exceeded any violent fantasies I could possibly have cooked up, and it was this unimaginable extremism that hit me in the guts and literally made me nauseous (at one point I had to turn the book face-down and take a breather). But the reward of this admittedly repetitive and occasionally outright boring book is, strangely, a re-centering process.
If I read it again now, I don't know what I would think. It might be "too much," but at the time, it was the kind of novel I needed to make me really think about limits, and, by association, people's centers.
It's fashionable to trash Bret Easton Ellis as an asshole, and from the little I know of his interviews, I'm sure he is, sometimes, like all of us. I don't really care. His book, essentially, is a long list of brand names interspersed with silly dialogue, drug taking, discourses on popular bands, and vicious, unremorseful murder.
This sounds terrible to a lot of people, and it would to me: but for some reason, once I got 50 or so pages in, I was invested in seeing it through to the end. Ellis walks a tough dance in presenting mostly soulless New Yorkers and expecting us to care about what happens to them (he might not expect this). He also might hope to just straight dazzle us with the vivaciousness of his prose, which works sometimes, but is untenable as a way of doing things long-term (name an Ellis novel from the last 10 years that people care about; even Pynchon wised up enough to start being people-focused).
American Psycho lives on the edge of sanity. That's the point; but by this very design, it is obsessed with souls, with what is meaningful, even as it portrays the gross lack thereof. Outside/inside: nothing new, but presented in such a way that it's literally wrapped in plastic in Australia to make sure young people don't accidentally read it. (No ten-year-old should have their eyes on this, sure. It'd fuck them up crazy.)
Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
People in Psycho can't understand each other; they misinterpret the other's words, or flat-out ignore people. This allows for some funny bits, but also illustrates how these characters totally "miss" each other's authentic selves. Whether or not they have authentic selves is another question, which isn't important because every fucking human has one, even genetic psychopaths.
I'm going to be honest: I loved this book. It was the first thing I read (by age 22) that I could definitively call "art." Now, of course that's a stupid thought, because I'd read McCarthy and Faulkner by this time, but as a jaded millennial, this book far exceeded any violent fantasies I could possibly have cooked up, and it was this unimaginable extremism that hit me in the guts and literally made me nauseous (at one point I had to turn the book face-down and take a breather). But the reward of this admittedly repetitive and occasionally outright boring book is, strangely, a re-centering process.
If I read it again now, I don't know what I would think. It might be "too much," but at the time, it was the kind of novel I needed to make me really think about limits, and, by association, people's centers.
It's fashionable to trash Bret Easton Ellis as an asshole, and from the little I know of his interviews, I'm sure he is, sometimes, like all of us. I don't really care. His book, essentially, is a long list of brand names interspersed with silly dialogue, drug taking, discourses on popular bands, and vicious, unremorseful murder.
This sounds terrible to a lot of people, and it would to me: but for some reason, once I got 50 or so pages in, I was invested in seeing it through to the end. Ellis walks a tough dance in presenting mostly soulless New Yorkers and expecting us to care about what happens to them (he might not expect this). He also might hope to just straight dazzle us with the vivaciousness of his prose, which works sometimes, but is untenable as a way of doing things long-term (name an Ellis novel from the last 10 years that people care about; even Pynchon wised up enough to start being people-focused).
American Psycho lives on the edge of sanity. That's the point; but by this very design, it is obsessed with souls, with what is meaningful, even as it portrays the gross lack thereof. Outside/inside: nothing new, but presented in such a way that it's literally wrapped in plastic in Australia to make sure young people don't accidentally read it. (No ten-year-old should have their eyes on this, sure. It'd fuck them up crazy.)
Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
American Psycho
Eating crack for lunch
Will never center your mind
Just makes you nauseous.
Will never center your mind
Just makes you nauseous.
