I’ve been a big Bret Easton Ellis fan since the release of his debut novel, Less Than Zero in 1985. Written in a semi-autobiographical style, and based on his own adventures at university, the book is a drug-fuelled romp through a degenerate Los Angeles. He didn’t break any new ground with the follow up, Rules of Attraction (1987), which felt like retreading ground he had already visited, but then he quickly broke those boundaries with American Psycho (1991). It was here that the presence of his more satirical voice became stronger and stronger, more dominant in amongst the obviously improved sense of narrative control.
His characters were all terrible people: cold and vacant, lost in the consumerism of their own version of New York, but none more so than the novel’s extravagant centre, Patrick Bateman. Where most novels are concerned with delivering a protagonist that the reader is compelled to associate with, to try and understand, Bateman is a monster with a nice business card. He’s dressed in suits that he explicitly talks about, going into terrific detail about every thread, picking them out with delicate precision. His relationships, his drug use, his slightly demented sexual encounters – all are sold as the products of his job (which is what, exactly?) and the crude balance of his social group – identical businessmen with their identically drug-dependent girlfriends.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment