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the complete review - fiction

American Psycho

by
Bret Easton Ellis

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : extreme, in both good and bad ways

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Deeply, completely divided; opinions tend towards the extremes

  From the Reviews:

• "Apart from what they wear, Ellis knows less than zero about what Wall Street bankers do all day. His characters think, talk, and act like GQ mannequins, and Ellis’ incantation of brand names allows him to traffic in just the stuff he pretends to abhor. (...) Compared with a truly frightening book about the dehumanized ’80s on Wall Street like Michael Lewis’ nonfiction Liar’s Poker, American Psycho’s social criticism is purely sophomoric -- horrifying only for its author’s utter lack of narrative skill. To say that Ellis creates two-dimensional characters would be to flatter his understanding of human nature. It’s when Bateman locates his prey, however, that American Psycho turns genuinely disturbing." - Gene Lyons, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Even if I believed, and I don't, that some books should be banned, I wouldn't pay this one the compliment. American Psycho is an entirely negligible piece of work, badly written and wholly lacking in insight or illumination. If it reveals anything, it is only a glimpse into the mind of an author who chose to sit in his apartment month after month imagining unoriginal ways of torturing women (not to mention dogs, gays and homeless people). It isn't really a novel at all but a commodity, a product of the consumerism it purports to despise, the latest accessory for people who are hooked on novelty. Ellis's sole contribution to letters in American Psycho is the inauguration of a new genre -- shopping-and-chopping." - Joan Smith, The Guardian
  
  
• "This man Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer. He gets us to a T. And we can't stand it. It's our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel which revolves about its own nasty bits. Brilliant. (...) American Psycho is a novel written out of the American tradition -- the novelist's function to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture: and he's done it brilliantly" - Fay Weldon, The Guardian
  
  
• "The chief technical problem facing Ellis was that of imagining a plausible interior life for his character: it’s a problem he tries to side-step by giving his character, Patrick Bateman, a 27-year-old Wall Street super-yuppie who goes around gruesomely murdering people in his spare time, no internal life at all. (...) There are literally pages and pages of this, and pages and pages of the sort of half-witty, half-bright dialogue and behaviour that goes with it: one repeatedly has the sense that inside this 399-page novel about a serial killer, a 120-page novella about spoilt rich kids in New York is wildly signalling to be let out. (...) The descriptions of the killings are as inert, and therefore as gratuitous, as one fears they will be." - John Lanchester, London Review of Books
  
  
• "What’s rarely said in all the furor over this novel is that it’s a satire, a hilarious, repulsive, boring, seductive, deadpan satire of what we now call -- as if it were something in the past -- the Age of Reagan. The miracle of Bret Easton Ellis is that without a plot, without much in the way of characters and with a throwaway nonstyle that renders the luxurious, the erotic and the grotesque in the same uninflected drone, a prose that is pure exchange value, he nevertheless makes it virtually impossible to stop reading. (...) Balanced against this seductiveness is the fact that Ellis is, first and last, a moralist. Under cover of his laconic voice, every word in his three novels to date springs from grieving outrage at our spiritual condition. (...) The novel subtly and relentlessly undercuts its own authority, and because Bateman, unlike, say, Nabokov’s unreliable narrators, does not hint at a “truth” beyond his own delusions, American Psycho becomes a wonderfully unstable account." - Henry Bean, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(W)e should note that simply to give American Psycho yet another bad review here would be to beat a dead horse -- or, more in the spirit, to gouge its eyes out, nail its legs to the floor and crack the bones, then compare its eviscerated guts to the kiwi souffle at Odeon. The book is as ridiculous in its excesses as the horror movies it purports to emulate. There's no question it's abysmally written; the real question, though, is why critics take this stock horror schlock so seriously. (...) In short, American Psycho is Less Than Zero reductio ad absurdum" - Pagan Kennedy, The Nation
  
  
• "Every bad thing you've read about it is an understatement. It's ineptly written. It's sophomoric. It is, in the truest sense of the word, obscene. And the main charge of the feminists is right on the mark: Ellis describes the bestial acts committed by his cardboard hero in a way that is positively lascivious. One would hate to be his next date. It would take more space than the task deserves to catalogue all of Ellis's myriad ineptnesses, but I'm especially struck by the utter incredibility of the events he describes. (...) Bret Easton Ellis would presumably argue that American Psycho, being a satire on the Reagan era, need not be overly literal. But having chosen to write his book in an ultra-naturalistic style, Ellis is stuck with the conventions of naturalism, which include a certain amount of surface plausibility, of which American Psycho has none whatsoever. (...) (T)here is no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination. It is as if he knows nothing of good and evil." - Terry Teachout, National Review
  
  
• "Though American Psycho also seems to address the violence of contemporary society, in fact it is too mindless to be revealing. The novel is more graphically repulsive than any paraphrase can suggest. (...) American Psycho is both inept and pretentious, an exploitation book dressed up with an epigraph from Dostoyevsky and a title allusion to Hitchcock." - Caryn James, The New York Times
  
  
• "What Mr. Ellis is evidently trying to say is that Patrick Bateman lives in a morally flat world in which clothes have more value than skin, objects are worth more than bones, and the human soul is something to be sought with knives and hatchets and drills. (...) The trouble with American Psycho is, of course, that you can't create a meaningless world out of meaninglessness. Surface, surface, surface can not serve to define substance. For meaninglessness to cohere, it needs a context of meaning. American Psycho is built out of meaninglessness except for a couple of outrageously comic-satirical scenes (.....) Mr. Ellis's true offense is to imply that the human mind has grown so corrupt that it can no longer distinguish between form and content. He has proved himself mistaken in that assumption by writing a book whose very confusion of form and content has caused it to fail, and for that offense and no other does one have cause to excoriate American Psycho." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
  
  
• "Of course, you will be stunned to learn that the book goes nowhere. Characters do not exist, therefore do not develop. Bateman has no motivation for his madness -- though there is one telling reference to his displeasure with a Waldorf salad. (My guess would be the urine.) No plot intrudes upon the pages. Bateman is never brought to justice, suggesting that even justice was bored. Nor is Mr. Ellis. The novel may not be much as fiction or as social criticism, but its publishing history shows what a glorious nut box people can get in when they lose sight of what writing is supposed to be. Mr. Ellis got the process going with his lame and unhealthy imagination. The product of that imagination was then urged forward by his editors, who either did not read the book -- a sin not unknown in a publishing era when it is more important to acquire a book than to edit it -- or worse, did read the book and felt that it had something. It does. What American Psycho has is the most comprehensive lists of baffling luxury items to be found outside airplane gift catalogues" - Roger Rosenblatt, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "There's a certain poetic justice that such a fate should befall a novel,whose main stylistic thrust is not the knife but the label. Almost every page features a rain of brand names (.....) The effect of this litany of names is curiously mesmeric. Bret Easton Ellis uses the consumerist surface, the thinginess, of modern American life to satirise its greed, ignorance, complacency and moral bankruptcy. (...) I have never read such shocking depictions of savagery as Ellis's. But I believe them to be a justifiable part of a serious, clever and shatteringly effective piece of writing. (...) American Psycho is not a novel to recommend lightly. It calls into question the depths to which the literary imagination should sink. But for its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards." - John Walsh, Sunday Times
  
  
• "What he has come up with are two sorts of description roughly latched together by various taxi rides and social rambling around New York. There are, firstly, long descriptions of people's clothes giving every detail, down to the last designer label on everyone's handkerchief. Sometimes this is prolonged by listing their furniture or favourite music or the food they are eating, all uniformly uninteresting. Then there are the descriptions of various atrocities. (...) Murder and rape is depicted in detail and by the end of the novel the dismemberment of corpses has become almost as commonplace as cooking. (...) It is a ridiculous book cynically promoted as shocking." - Anne Barnes, The Times
  
  
• "Is American Psycho with or without art ? One has to keep reading to find out. The novel is not written so well that the art becomes pal­pable, declares itself against all odds, but then, it is not written so badly that one can reject it with clear conscience. (...) What a deranging work ! It is too much of a void, humanly speaking, to be termed evil, but it does raise the ante so high that one can no longer measure the size of the bet. Blind gambling is a hollow activity and this novel spins into the center of that empty space." - Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair
  
  
• "(A) contemptible piece of pornography, the literary equivalent of a snuff flick. Its concluding 150 pages can only be described as repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation; American Psycho is a loathsome book. It is also, and in the end this matters most, a bad book. (...) There is within it not a single redeeming quality. Ellis is capable of putting together a competent sentence and his ear for conversation is not entirely insensitive, but his prose here is flat and his dialogue is self-indulgently pointless, not to mention interminable." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The 'American psycho' of the title is the narrator of the novel, Patrick Bateman, twenty-six years old when the story begins. It's the late 1980s, with the Wall Street boom in full swing, and Exeter and Harvard (and Harvard Business School) graduate Bateman is a silver-spooned, well-heeled yuppie, working at a Wall Street firm, Pierce & Pierce -- P & P -- and living the high life, indulging in a great deal of excess in its various forms.
       Bateman reveals practically nothing about what his job might actually entail; it seems almost incidental (and, indeed, girlfriend Evelyn complains when at one point he claims he's too busy to have dinner with her: "What work ? What work do you do ? I don't understand"); he's family-rich enough that, as an old Harvard girlfriend points out: "If you're so uptight about work, why don't you just quit ? You don't have to work". What does matter to Bateman, and what he goes on endlessly about, are appearances. Obsessive about his own, he has extensive skin- and other care-routines, and works out obsessively. He dresses with great care and, regarding the sartorial -- and everything else -- is ultra brand-conscious, noting (often with a critical eye) what practically everyone he interacts with is wearing. He is a capitalist-ideal consumer, defining himself and practically everyone he deals with by the markers of capitalist consumption: their various accessories -- whereby clothes are the most significant -- and what else they spend money on (notably also food, especially at all the latest hot restaurants).
       Early on, Evelyn insists Bateman is: "the boy next door", but when she repeats the claim we already get the first strong hint that there's something more menacing lurking beneath:

"Patrick is not a cynic, Timothy. He's the boy next door, aren't you honey ?"
     "No I'm not," I whisper to myself. "I'm a fucking evil psychopath."

     "But you always bring them up," McDermott complains. "And always in this casual, educational sort of way. I mean, I don't want to know anything about Son of Sam or the fucking Hillside Strangler or Ted Bundy or Featherhead, for god sake."

I wink at her. But she's still talking; she doesn't hear a word; nothing registers. She does not fully grasp a word I'm saying. My essence is eluding her. She stops her onslaught and breathes in and looks at me in a way that can only be described as dewy-eyed.

     She inhales on the cigarette, then blows out. "So what do you do ?"
     "What do you think I do ?" And frisky too.
     "A model ?" She shrugs. "An actor ?"
     "No," I say. "Flattering, but no."
     "Well ?"
     "I'm into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It depends." I shrug.
     "Do you like it ?" she asks, unfazed.
     "Um ... It depends. Why ?" I take a bite of sorbet.
     "Well, most guys I know who work in mergers and acquisitions don't really like it," she says.
     "That's not what I said", I say, adding a forced smile, finishing my J & B. "Oh, forget it."

I went as a mass murderer, complete with a sign painted on my back that read MASS MURDERER (which was decidedly lighter than the sandwich board I had constructed earlier that day that read DRILLER KILLER), and beneath those two words I had written in blood Yep, that's me and the suit was also covered with blood, some of it fake, most of it real. In one fist I clenched a hank of Victoria Bell's hair, and pinned next to my boutonniere (a small white rose) was a finger bone I'd boiled the flesh off of.

I'm playing with the baby while Nancy holds her, offering Glenn my platinum American Express card, and she grabs at it excitedly, and I'm shaking my head, talking in a high-pitched baby voice, squeezing her chin, waving the card in front of her face, cooing, "Yes I'm a total psychopathic murderer, oh yes I am, I like to kill people, oh yes I do, honey, little sweetie pie, yes I do ..."

I sprinted over to Sixth Avenue, decided to be late for the office and took a cab back to my apartment where I put on a new suit (by Cerruti 1881), gave myself a pedicure and tortured to death a small dog I had bought earlier this week in a pet store on Lexington.

There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being -- flesh, blood, skin, hair -- but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't put my finger on it.

She's barely gained consciousness and when she sees me, standing over her, naked, I can imagine that my virtual absence of humanity fills her with mind-bending horror.

One hundred and sixty-one days have passed since I spent the night in it with the two escort girls. There has been no word of bodies discovered in any of the city's four newspapers or on the local news; no hints of even a rumor floating around. I've gone so far as to ask people -- dates, business acquaintances -- over dinners, in the halls of Pierce & Pierce, if anyone has heard about two mutilated prostitutes found in Paul Owen's apartment. But like in some movie, no one has heard anything, has any idea of what I'm talking about.

     In the morning, for some reason, Christie's battered hands are swollen to the size of footballs, the fingers are indistinguishable from the rest of her hand and the smell coming from her burnt corpse is jolting and I have to open the venetian blinds, which are spattered with burnt fat from when Christie's breasts burst apart, electrocuting her, and then the windows, to air out the room. Her eyes are wide open and glazed over and her mouth is lipless and black and there's also a black pit where her vagina should be (though I don't remember doing anything to it) and her lungs are visible beneath the charred ribs. What is left of Elizabeth's body lies crumpled in the corner of the living room. She's missing her right arm and chunks of her right leg. Her left hand, chopped off at the wrist, lies clenched on top of the island in the kitchen, in its own small pool of blood. Her head sits on the kitchen table and its blood-soaked face -- even with both eyes scooped out and a pair of Alain Mikli sunglasses over the holes -- looks like it's frowning.

     There's no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine. I laugh spontaneously at nothing. Sometimes I sleep under my futon.

I sidle up to a couple of hardbody rich girls, both of them wearing skanky Betsey Johnson-type dresses, and I'm wired beyond belief and I start off with a line like "Cool music -- haven't I seen you at Salomon Brothers ?" and one of them, one of these girls, sneers and says, "Go back to Wall Street," and the one with the nose ring says, "Fucking yuppie."
     And they say this even though my suit looks black in the darkness of the club and my tie -- paisley, Armani, silk -- is loosened.
     "Hey," I say, grinding my teeth. "You may think I'm a really disgusting yuppie but I'm not, really," I tell them, swallowing rapidly, wired out of my head.

     To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is endless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign, the sound flickering away over new images: blood pouring from automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it ?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigures itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification.

- M.A.Orthofer, 6 July 2025

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Picador publicity page
• Robert Laffont publicity page
• Kiepenheuer & Witsch publicity page
• Einaudi publicity page
• ‘American Psycho’ at 25: Bret Easton Ellis on Patrick Bateman’s Legacy at Rolling Stone

• Adequate Squatch Presents
• Amanja Reads Too Much
• anushareflects
• The Australian Legend
• Beware The Shadows
• Biblioklept
• Damyanti Biswas
• The Bobsphere
• Books Baking and Blogging
• Books, yo
• DaneCobain.com
• Dead End Follies
• Entertainment Weekly
• Errant Dreams
• forthenovellovers
• Frappes and Fiction
• The Guardian (1)
• The Guardian (2)
• HTML Giant
• It Came from Author
• italkyoubored
• Kyle Reviews Everything
• litbeetle
• Longbox of Darkness
• Luna Negra
• Frances Mac
• M/C Journal
• megsbookrack
• Mike Battista's Blog
• Molly Elizabeth Marcelle Books
• Mumblings of Joe Loftus
• Muse with Me
• Novel Niche
• Opinions of a Wolf
• Page Chewing
• Pajiba
• a paper arrow
• The Punk Theory
• The Quietus
• Duncan Ralston
• Rambles
• Read, Watch & Drink Coffee
• The Reader's Room
• Seattle PI
• Der Spiegel (German)
• Talula
• These Novel Thoughts
• Touchingly Naive Books
• The UMass Lowell Connector

• IMDB page

• Official site

• The Shards

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       American author Bret Easton Ellis was born in 1964.

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© 2025 the complete review

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