‘It wouldn’t be published today’: why American Psycho was branded ‘repellent’

The 30th birthday of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho is not a universal cause for celebration. Many people have found something almost offensive about the anniversary falling at a time when men are being asked to think urgently about how to make the world safer for women. Even Ellis himself, when I ask him about his most famous work, admits, “It wouldn’t be published today.”

The fact that it remains in print – and has spawned a hit film and even a stage musical – will be seen by some as an indictment of the fundamental misogyny of Western society. Back in 1991, one feminist campaigner denounced American Psycho as a “how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women”.

There is an alternative view, however. Its admirers cite its unmatched insight into the mindset of a late-capitalist generation of American men that sees women as disposable accessories. Some feminists even risked the wrath of their sisters by pointing out that it was meant to be an exposure of the banal preoccupations of its era. Fay Weldon said: “He [Easton Ellis] gets us to a T. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his.”

My first encounter with the book, at school in the 1990s, was not exactly in a feminist context. A copy was passed around that fell open at certain passages in the way that Lady Chatterley’s Lover did for a previous generation: those in the know would invite others to read the passage involving an abducted woman and a hungry rat, and sniggeringly wait for them to turn green.

One ought to note that the novel’s narrator, Patrick Bateman – investment banker, disciple of the business style of Donald Trump, fan of Phil Collins, and serial killer – is an equal opportunities sadist. His victims include several men, a couple of dogs, and a five-year-old boy. Although there is some suggestion that the killing sprees are merely Bateman’s fantasies or hallucinations, the book remains queasily ambiguous.

When American Psycho was first published, Ellis was, at 26, widely regarded as something of a has-been. He had become a celebrity while still in college after his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), a mildly controversial study of disaffected Generation X-ers, became a critical and commercial hit; but the follow-up, The Rules of Attraction (1987) was conspicuously less successful.

Many commentators thought American Psycho was a confected publicity trap designed to project Ellis back into the limelight. However, Robert Asahina, the editor at Simon & Schuster who worked on Ellis’s first three novels, insists that he took the writing of the book very seriously.

“Bret did tell me at the time how difficult he had found it – what a psychological strain it was – to be inside the mind of a fictional madman. But the book is very clearly a black comedy, a satire, and a scathing portrayal of a corrupt consumer society.”

Nevertheless, when the magazines Time and Spy got hold of some of the novel’s most hair-raising descriptions of sexual violence and denounced the book, Simon & Schuster dropped it on the eve of publication. It was then immediately snapped up by another US firm, Alfred Knopf. Ellis, who was allowed to keep his $300,000 advance (equivalent to about £330,000 today), should have been laughing all the way to the bank, as morally affronted reviewers and activists fuelled the flames of publicity.

But he was angry at the way he felt the book was misrepresented, and also spooked by receiving death threats, some of them accompanied by photographs of him with his eyes scratched out. He was obliged to read them all and then sign a disclaimer saying he understood the risks of publication, so that his family couldn’t sue if he was murdered.

In Britain the book was published by Picador, at a time when publishers were still sometimes prosecuted for obscenity. “I remember we were very nervous about it, but we felt that it was the right thing to do, to publish it,” recalls Jacqui Graham, who was publicity director at the time. “There was even a suggestion that the MD, Alan Gordon Walker, might go to prison. He said he’d take the risk.”

Graham had met Ellis when working on his previous novels – “he was sweet, I liked him. He was young and he seemed it” – and wasn’t quite prepared for the content of the new book: “I remember buying a baguette for one of the journalists and a baguette for me, sitting there reading some of it, and both of us not being able to go on eating.”

Because of the death threats, Ellis’s promotional tours in both America and Britain were cancelled; in the wake of the Rushdie fatwa, nobody was prepared to take threats against an author lightly. But in the event Ellis survived and none of his publishers have been incarcerated.

Some of the book’s critics seemed to have been vindicated in 1995, however, when the Toronto serial killer Paul Bernardo was alleged at his trial to be a devotee of the novel. And, following the murder of Sarah Everard in London in March, it seems like an apt moment to wonder whether the would-be censors had a point: does this kind of book contribute to misogyny in society by glamorising violence against women?

Kris Doyle, Ellis’s current editor at Picador, defends the novel, which is now published as a Picador Classic. “It depicts violence, cruelty and greed in order to satirise them; that these issues still remain some of our most challenging and urgent is an indictment of us as a society. Bret is a writer who engages with the darkness so it can be interrogated.”

He notes that Bateman’s obsession with brands and self-image is now mainstream. “If more people had heeded Ellis's warnings, perhaps things might be a bit less awful.”

Whether the book is malign or not, it still has power. I reread it recently, swiftly followed by Ellis’s most recent novel, Imperial Bedrooms. The latter features rape, torture and paedophilia, but Ellis seemed to be simply going through the motions. With American Psycho, I felt myself in the presence of real evil, and was desperate for a good scrub in the shower every time I put it down.

I had expected to find the book less disturbing than I remembered. As a thriller reviewer, I read a lot of books in which women are violently murdered and imaginatively maimed. There is even a label for this sub-genre: “femjep”, short for female jeopardy. But although there are plenty of other fictional serial killers – Hannibal Lecter, say – who are no less depraved than Bateman, I found that American Psycho remains a uniquely unsettling reading experience.

Perhaps this is because most writers of this kind of book, however prurient they may be, loudly assert that their killers are evil. Ellis, however, passes no explicit moral judgments and puts the reader right inside Bateman’s head. As Asahani puts it: “The real horrors are not to be found in the Grand Guignol set pieces, but in the reader’s guilty complicity – even if barely self-acknowledged – in Bateman’s avarice, lust and all the other deadly sins.”

When I ask Ellis himself about the book 30 years on, he’s reluctant at first to discuss it: “I wrote it so long ago, and I haven’t picked it up in 20 years.” Does he think it deserves to still be the best-known of his novels? “Books don't deserve anything – they just are and the public decides.”

I ask him if he regrets that there’s such a gap between his own intentions for the book and the way it was received. “I think the gap doesn’t really exist any more – audiences always understood the novel. Maybe feminists didn’t, but I’m not sure the book is feminist – definitely satirical, though… I understand [that] the lens through which we view things makes it somewhat problematic now.”

Perhaps there are still readers who get nothing more out of it than a dubious thrill but that’s the risk a writer takes in exploring the darkest places of the human psyche. American Psycho is a repellent book in many ways, one that makes you feel guilty for enjoying it, but that is the point of it: it acts as a warning against the seductive power of amorality, not by denouncing it but by embodying it.

American Psycho is published by Picador Classics at £8.99 (ebook £4.99)