Summary
Patrick Bateman rides in a taxicab through the Financial District of Lower Manhattan with Timothy Price. Both are mid-twenty-something Wall Street executives at a firm named Pierce & Pierce. Price removes his Walkman headphones and rants cynically about sensational headlines in the newspaper about organized crime, child abuse, and the AIDS crisis. Price scorns the idea of providing welfare for the homeless, and announces he will soon break up with his girlfriend, Meredith. The men arrive at a brownstone on the Upper West Side owned by Patrick's girlfriend, a financial executive named Evelyn.
A woman named Courtney opens the door, and Patrick flirts openly with her in the entryway despite knowing she is dating a man named Luis Carruthers. Evelyn serves sushi in light of the group's canceled dinner reservations. In the living room, Patrick and Tim introduce themselves to a bohemian couple Vanden and Stash, whom Tim immediately dislikes. After Tim and Evelyn disappear together for twenty minutes, they join the others for dinner, during which Patrick and Tim silently express contempt for Stash, whose offbeat humor and unrefined dress make them uncomfortable. Patrick sarcastically delivers a long impromptu speech that extols the virtues of strong social welfare programs in the United States, bemusing Tim and confusing the others.
Evelyn serves sorbet for dessert, and after Courtney, Vanden, and Stash leave, Evelyn tells the men that Courtney is having an affair with her real estate broker. When Evelyn repeatedly calls Patrick "the boy next door," Patrick responds, "No... I'm a fucking evil psychopath." Tim mocks Stash's catering job and flirts aggressively with Evelyn in front of Patrick, who guesses the two are having an affair. In bed, Evelyn casually dismisses Patrick when he asks why she does not choose to date Tim, before telling him that Stash is HIV positive and likely to have sex with Vanden. When Patrick says, "Good," she becomes aroused and the two attempt to have sex but fail. Patrick later masturbates and climaxes thinking about a catalog model.
Patrick describes his state-of-the-art home furnishings and morning rituals, which include soothing his face with an ice pack, adhering to an elaborate skincare routine, and using a laser lens-cleaner on his compact discs. While eating breakfast, he reads USA Today and watches a tabloid talk show named The Patty Winters Show. After work, Patrick and Tim meet two men named David Van Patten and Craig McDermott at a bar named Harry's. The men argue over fashion etiquette and listen to Craig tell a raunchy anecdote about a Vassar alumna before a man named Preston joins them. Tim directs homophobic insults at a British man at the bar named Nigel Morrison, and Preston makes anti-Semitic comments about a Jewish man named Paul Owen. When Patrick scolds Preston for his remarks, Tim taunts Patrick, calling him, like Evelyn did, "the boy next door." Preston badly fumbles his way through a joke with a racist punchline that makes everyone but Patrick laugh.
Craig secures a table for the men at a restaurant named Pastels, where they order appetizers and talk to a wealthy man named Scott Montgomery. Scott introduces his girlfriend as Nicki and hands off his business card to Tim so they can play squash. After Scott leaves, the men discuss his enormous net worth, and David claims Nicki is an alcoholic. During a lull in the conversation, Patrick shows off his new business card, which prompts David to pull out his even nicer card, which catches Tim's eye. Tim brandishes his own card, and finally shows the group Scott's, which enthralls Patrick. Patrick belittles Craig for ordering the restaurant's "brittle" pizza, then forcibly bribes the waitress into letting the men smoke cigars indoors. David tells the group he owns a tanning bed. Scott sends over the men a complimentary bottle of champagne, which they ridicule for being non-vintage before leaving.
At an exclusive club named Tunnel, Tim gains entry for the group despite the tuxedo-only dress code. In line, Patrick mentions having to resist the urge to stab Craig with a "serrated blade." Once inside, Craig and David part ways with Patrick and Tim, who head to an area of the club called the Chandelier Room to buy cocaine from a man named Ted Madison. Madison takes Tim's cash and introduces them to his friend named Hugh, which Patrick and Tim mishear as "You." While the men wait for the drugs, Patrick tells Tim he is taking Courtney out, and Tim contemptuously suggests that he pay a prostitute instead. In a men's room stall, Tim becomes infuriated by the paltry, weak drugs, and nearly attacks a man in the next stall. After talking to Paul in the Chandelier Room, Tim tells Patrick he is leaving. Patrick, Craig, and David later find Tim balancing on a set of guardrails, and watch him leap off and disappear into the tunnel, before leaving themselves.
The next morning, Patrick arrives late to work. He tells his secretary Jean to cancel a meeting and to make lunch reservations. He also tells her he wants a tanning bed, and never to wear her present outfit again. Later, Patrick works out at an exclusive health club, where he suspects men are ogling him, and then stops by a video store, where he renews the film Body Double because he is aroused by a scene where a woman is drilled to death. At a local newsstand on the way home, Patrick suffers a nosebleed while buying Sports Illustrated and pornographic magazines, and in the elevator, he runs into Tom Cruise, his building's penthouse resident. The two have an awkward conversation during which Patrick mistakenly calls Cruise's film Cocktail "Bartender."
Analysis
Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American Psycho draws upon a deep well of literary and artistic influences, many of which are on display in its opening pages. Ellis chose to open the novel on April 1st, 1987, the same day that Andy Warhol's funeral took place at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The novel's vacant, hyper-commercialized prose style in many ways reflects the emotionally detached, artificial, and transgressive aspects of Warhol's visual and cinematic art, while at the same time providing a nihilistic epitaph for the youthful, progressive zeitgeist of the 1960s. The first chapter title—"April Fools"—suggests that what is to come may be a kind of satirical hoax. in his 2019 autobiography White, Ellis muses, "maybe it's all a dream, the collective sensibility of consumerist yuppie culture seen through the eyes of a deranged sociopath."
The novel's opening line—"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE"—is a quotation from the "Inferno" section of Dante's epic poem Divine Comedy, specifically a scene in Canto III in which Dante passes through the gates of Hell. Whereas Dante reads the words inscribed on the gate itself, Patrick reads them on the side of the Chemical Bank, drawing an immediate figurative link between the world of finance and the prospect of Hell. Dante describes Hell as, "a realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence," a canny description of Patrick's gradual descent into murder, torture, and cannibalism. Inferno's graphic catalog of gory trials, which the damned must endure in the various circles of Hell, is a key literary precursor to the painstakingly described gauntlet of tortures to which Patrick subjects his victims. Dante's moral excoriation of Florentine politicians also parallels Ellis's own disgust with the self-regarding decadence of Wall Street in the late 1980s.
Upon its initial publication, American Psycho also drew comparisons to Oscar Wilde's Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray—an unfavorable review in The New York Times remarked that "American Psycho is the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore." Indeed, one can almost view the novel as an updated reimagining of the plot of Dorian Gray, wherein the amoral and hedonistic appetites of a beguilingly handsome, narcissistic, sexually ambiguous upper-class man lead him to commit foul acts of murder. Both novels interrogate the relationship between pleasure and violence, innocence and evil, the observer and the observed; just like Dorian Gray's nickname in Wilde's novel is "Prince Charming," Patrick's nickname in American Psycho is "the boy next door."
Moreover, both Dorian Gray and American Psycho make liberal use of the gothic trope of the double, or doppelgänger, such as when Patrick ominously mishears Madison's friend Hugh's name as "You." The deceptive duality of Patrick's nature—"boy next door" versus "evil psychopath"—brings to mind not only Dorian Gray but another gothic text, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Whereas Jekyll's double is Hyde, and Dorian's is his portrait, Patrick has a number of doubles, including Marcus Halberstam and Paul Owen, whom Patrick often impersonates while committing misdeeds. Patrick is constantly mistaking—and mistaken for—other people, a running joke that seems to underwrite finance world hierarchies at the same time that it suggests that identities are unimportant, even interchangeable, within the confines of the novel’s stultifying Wall Street monoculture.
Literary influences aside, the style of American Psycho is also deeply indebted to mass cultural forms like cinema, television, Broadway, popular music, pornography, and advertising. Patrick's narration is often cinematic, as in the novel's opening paragraph—"like in a movie, another bus appears...”—and he is an habitual film-watcher, renting pornography and titillating Hollywood films like Brian DePalma's 1984 erotic thriller Body Double (yet another reference to doppelgängers). Patrick obsessively watches The Patty Winters Show, a fictional tabloid-style daytime talk show in the vein of Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael, presumably for its lurid representation of taboo subjects, which fascinate him. Several characters invoke Les Miserables, the 1980 musical based on Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, but in keeping with the novel’s theme of superficiality, they ignore its social message concerning poverty and injustice and merely argue whether the American or British cast recording is superior.
