American Psycho and Actual Psychopaths

Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho was published 25 years ago, and the book’s publication process was fraught with scandal, the kind of scandal that fires up the NYC chattering classes. Spy went to town, having its cake and eating it savagely. Because of the violence, sexual and otherwise, depicted in the book, Simon & Schuster decided to pull the plug. Many executives and editors hadn’t read it, but they didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Vintage snapped up the orphaned manuscript and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ellis was hugely prescient, and casual psychopathy is part of the fabric of American life. From the events and actors leading to the Great Recession, to the business practices of hypergrowth CEOs, to the frictionless sociopathy of anonymous internet trolls, luxury goods made under questionable conditions and flaunted on Instagram (full disclosure: tapping this out on a Macbook) American Psycho laid out a roadmap of where we were headed. And hit the nail on the head. Repeatedly and hard.

Are the events in the book written in a flat affect, with no authorial judgement laid upon Harvard’s finest financier, Patrick Bateman? Does the relentless listing of kir royales, Armani ties, nail guns, and cannibalism make the book a tough read? Yes and yes.

This book will live on in the American muckraking canon — there’s even a musical coming to Broadway soon with songs by the great Duncan Sheik.

In closing, a still from the movie: