American Psycho `wouldn't be published today'

Author admits his killer novel is more controversial than it was 30 years ago

The 30th anniversary 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 the novel remains in print — and spawned a hit film in 2000 starring Christian Bale 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, however, an alternative view. The novel's admirers cite its unmatched insight into the mindset of a generation of American men that sees women as disposable accessories. Some feminists even risked the wrath of their sisters by pointing out that it exposed the banal preoccupations of its era. Fay Weldon said: “He (Ellis) gets us to a T. And we can't stand it. It's our problem, not his.”

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 killers — is an equal-opportunities sadist. His victims include several men, a couple of dogs and a five-yearold 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 hasbeen. He had become a celebrity while still in college, after his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), became a critical and commercial hit; but the followup, The Rules of Attraction (1987), was less successful. Many commentators thought that American Psycho had been confected to project Ellis back into the limelight.

Nevertheless, when Time magazine 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 U.S. firm, Alfred Knopf. Ellis, who was allowed to keep his $300,000 advance, should have been laughing all the way to the bank, as morally affronted reviewers fuelled the flames of publicity. But he was angry at the way he felt the book was misrepresented, and spooked by receiving death threats, some of them accompanied by photographs of him with his eyes scratched out.

Because of the death threats, Ellis's promotional tours were cancelled; in the wake of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, nobody was prepared to take threats against an author lightly. But, in any 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.

When I ask Ellis 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 still to be the best-known of his novels?

“Books don't deserve anything — they just are, and the public decides.”