Pepys for creeps

yarb

May 21, 2025

American Psycho gets five stars from me purely for Pat Bateman's critical exegeses of Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis, each one somehow even more exquisite than the one before. They're pop-cultural shitposting at its finest, and to me funnier and maybe more macabre than anything else in the book. If Bateman is the acme of post-60's American reactionism, the needle-point convergence of Nixonian paranoia (the Fisher account; the dread of being reservationless at dinnertime) and Reaganite consumerism, then these three paeans to musical conformity and commerciality are the only true statements of his credo. Plus it just simply fires me up reading something that its author (Ellis, not Bateman) obviously had such a blast writing and then successfully inserting into a novel.

But there are so many lovely things about the book. Here are three: the backdrop of Les Miserables imagery — its tunes on every yuppie's lips and Walkman (the original cast recording is the acceptable one), the ubiquitous handbills and billboards for it punctuating Bateman's Manhattan peregrinations. PB's sweet, starry-eyed obsession with Donald and Ivana Trump, caricatures even then, and seemingly the only people the equally two-dimensional Bateman has a non-predatory interest in. The business card scene, choreographed to perfection as it is in the film, and its laser-guided symbolism — the business card as the tangible expression of identity in a world of interchangeable job titles, restaurants, couture, even names.

It's not as well edited as the film, and it doesn't have Willem Dafoe, but it makes up for those shortcomings by dialling up the gore to a level of cartoonishness that dispels any lingering reliability in the narration, and by making a prose-poem both epic and comic, tragic and absurd, out of the litany of designer brands that gets inevitably diluted on the screen.

I think you can also read it as a satire on diarists, or maybe a tribute to them, or both. Inkblot Bateman in his namelessness and facelessness can take a lot of shapes, but in his untiring cataloguing of his daily routine, his attunedness to status symbols, his wanderings by night and day through the world's financial omphalos — through the guts of Mammon — he's not a million miles from Pepys. The best diarists are the totally unconscious ones, the ones who don't expect their diaries ever to be read, and that's how PB is, howling his psychopathic (but actually normal) need for significance into the hollow, dehumanized spaces of Yuppie Manhattan. This (good) kind of diary is, after all, a person talking to themself — long a byword for insanity, until normalized with the advent of the cellphone (right around when this book came out).

Pat Bateman's an Underground Man without an articulable grievance (like Dosto's antihero, he styles his narrative as a "confession"); a first-person narrator who isn't a person; a voice that only gets more disembodied as the bodies pile up in its wake. And in the end he's abstracted into impotent thirdpersonhood, hovering over the impenetrable banality of his world like the ghost of one of his victims, not even at the center of his own story.