American Psycho

American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 third novel, the canonical contemporary American satirical literary novel that defined the late-1980s-into-1990s American literary discourse on contemporary corporate-and-consumer-culture critique. The structural premise is Patrick Bateman, a twenty-seven-year-old Wall Street investment banker at Pierce & Pierce in late-1980s Manhattan, narrating his life across cocaine binges, designer-suit consumption (the Genesis-and-Huey-Lewis-and-Whitney-Houston music-criticism chapters that interrupt the narrative across the broader arc), restaurant reservations at the broader late-1980s New York restaurant scene (Dorsia, Espace, the broader fictional New York high-end-restaurant ensemble), and a parallel pattern of escalating sexual-and-murderous violence. The structural ambiguity that runs across the entire novel (whether the murders are actually happening or whether they are operational hallucinations or fantasies of Bateman's broader corporate-and-consumer-collapsed consciousness) is the structural-interpretive question that has driven critical reception of the novel for thirty-plus years.

Ellis's structural method is the patient close-first-person Bateman narration across the entire novel, with the broader Manhattan-corporate-and-consumer-culture material providing the structural setting that the late-1980s American literary fiction on contemporary corporate-and-consumer-culture critique had been working toward. The novel reads in the patient Ellis stripped-down register that distinguishes his project from the broader contemporary American literary tradition; the Music Criticism chapters (in which Bateman analyzes Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News across pages-long structural interruptions of the narrative arc) are the structural-comic-formal innovation that the broader American literary-satirical tradition has been working with since. The 2000 Mary Harron film adaptation with Christian Bale and Reese Witherspoon brought a broader contemporary readership to the novel and remains the canonical contemporary screen adaptation.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading with explicit caveats about the violence material and the broader thirty-year structural-interpretive controversy, as the right Ellis entry point alongside Less Than Zero (1985), and as one of the canonical late-1980s-into-1990s American literary novels. Compare to Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), and the broader American literary-satirical tradition. The Pablo Schreiber audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.