I DNF’ed halfway through on my first read. For pages and pages it goes on about brands and what brands other people are wearing, shallow pop music and dinner reservations and which colours went best together, so it just felt ridiculously dry no matter what underlying message the author was trying to convey. I dropped it and didn’t think about it for weeks after.
Then I read somewhere that the book was supposed to be a mocking critique of wallstreet culture at the time (the author famously hated wall street and wrote this book because of it) and I decided to give it another try. Everything instantly became so much funnier because the mc is such a shallow piece of shit that even his long rants have no substance. There’s like three pages worth of rambling on Whitney Houston’s song album and I kept looking for an individual opinion or some independent thinking – but nothing. The entire monologue read like he’d copied generic statements off of marketing blurbs to sound insightful. When people ask him for personal opinions he basically has a panic attack until he can rattle off (word for word!) Donald Trump’s opinions instead of giving a direct answer. Reading turned into a game where I was just looking for evidence that he was an actual human person and not a blob of ralph lauren ties but nope.
Even his murdering, the only thing special about him, reads like a pathetic hallucination where he’s desperately trying to convince himself he’s different from all the shallow mirrors he surrounds himself with.
My favourite scene will forever be the one where, in the middle of cannabilising some girl alive, he pauses to go on a tangent about the camera he’s using to record the murder, it’s lens the brand the superiority it has to other cameras and that shit just about killed me. I don’t read comedy (are there comedy books out there in general?) but American Psycho reads like one, and has become the funniest book I’ve read so far. The film did an a amazing job capturing the spirit of that.
The author’s distaste for wall street is evident in every line of dialogue and I love that. It’s a great book, give it a shot if you haven’t yet.
by OvergrownTurd