Disintegration – I’m taking it in stride.

I’m having a sort of hard time paying attention because my automated teller has started speaking to me, sometimes actually leaving weird messages on the screen, in green lettering, like “Cause a Terrible Scene at Sotheby’s” or “Kill the President” or “Feed Me a Stray Cat,” and I was freaked out by the park bench that followed me for six blocks last Monday evening and it too spoke to me. By this point, Bateman, whose grip on reality was tenuous at best to begin with, has spiralled completely out of control. The title of the chapter in question – “End of the 1980s” – is significant.

This memorable monologue – portions of which feature in the closing moments of feminist filmmaker Mary Harron’s subsequent adaptation of the novel – is delivered in a chapter near the end of American Psycho. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. In fact, things are only going to get worse: Psychopaths versus sociopaths: what is the difference?Īs Bateman himself acknowledges about two-thirds of the way through, his “rages at Harvard were less violent than the ones now and it’s useless to hope that my disgust will vanish – there is just no way.” It soon becomes apparent that Bateman simply cannot help himself. Again, we know because Bateman tells us – in graphic and nauseating detail. So, too, are unspeakable acts of torture, sexual assault and homicidal violence. The Art of the Deal, Huey Lewis and the News, the original British cast recording of Les Misérables: these are a few of Patrick Bateman’s favourite things.

We know because he tells us this repeatedly – in excruciatingly detailed, tonally flat prose. Patrick Bateman is obsessed with 1980s Donald Trump.

American psycho first edition