The Business Card Scene Ruined Me For A Week

A Guy Who Really Cares About Restaurant Reservations

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six, works in “mergers and acquisitions” at a job that seems to require nothing of him, and lives for reservations at Dorsia, the right haircut, the right stereo equipment, and knowing exactly which button-down is Valentino and which is a cheap knockoff worn by someone beneath him. He is also, we’re told fairly early and then told again and again in increasingly graphic ways, murdering people. Homeless men, coworkers, sex workers, an ex-girlfriend’s dog. The murders escalate throughout the book the way his obsession with the right olive oil escalates. Same tone of voice for both. That’s the whole trick.

Here’s the thing though: nothing in this book is really presented as more or less important than anything else. A ten-page rant about Huey Lewis and the News gets the same flat, obsessive attention as a chapter where he does something to a woman with a nail gun that I’m not going to describe here because I don’t want to and also because Ellis already did it in more detail than any human needs. The plot, such as it is, barely moves. Bateman never gets caught. Nobody really seems to notice or care. That’s the point, and it’s also, if I’m honest, sometimes agonizing to sit through.

The Boring Parts Are the Whole Argument, and I Still Wanted to Skip Them

Let me be the friend who tells you the truth instead of just hyping you into a corner: this book is about forty percent incredible and about sixty percent a genuine slog, and the slog is on purpose, which doesn’t make it less of a slog to actually read.

The satire is genuinely, viciously good. Ellis nails the specific horror of late-80s Wall Street status anxiety so precisely that entire passages read like transcripts from a support group for people who are afraid their business card isn’t good enough. The scene where four men compare business cards and Bateman starts sweating, actually sweating, because someone’s card has a “tasteful thickness” his doesn’t, is one of the funniest and saddest things I’ve ever read about masculinity and money. Nobody in this book has an interior life except the one interior life Bateman has, which is entirely made of brand names and rage. That’s the satire. It’s a portrait of a person who has been so thoroughly hollowed out by consumerism and status games that murder barely registers as a bigger deal than a bad restaurant table.

I get why that’s brilliant. I also spent long stretches of this book bored out of my skull, because the flatness that makes the satire work is the same flatness that makes fifty pages about Bateman’s skincare routine and Genesis discography feel like homework. You’re supposed to feel the tedium. You’re supposed to want to skip it. I skipped some of it, and I don’t feel bad about that, and if you tell me you read every single word of the Whitney Houston chapter with rapt attention I will not fully believe you.

The violence is the part everyone talks about and it’s worth being straight with you: some of it is genuinely upsetting to read, not thrilling, not cool, just grim and clinical and long. I don’t think Ellis wants you to enjoy it. I think he wants you to feel a little sick that the prose style makes it possible to read it at all, the same flat affect that describes a lunch reservation describing a murder. Whether that’s a genius formal choice or a guy in 1991 finding an excuse to write extremely disturbing material and call it commentary is a question I have gone back and forth on more than once. I’m not fully sure I’ve landed anywhere. That’s an uncomfortable thing to admit about a book I’m supposedly reviewing.

And then there’s the ending, which I won’t spoil except to say it deliberately refuses you the satisfaction of knowing what was real. Some readers find that a cop-out. I found it the most honest thing the book does: it denies you the comfort of a clean answer the same way it denies Bateman any real consequences.

This is not an exit.

About Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis wrote Less Than Zero at nineteen and became the reluctant poster boy for a certain kind of blank, cocaine-lit literary fiction about rich young people feeling nothing. American Psycho got him death threats, a canceled publishing deal with one house before another picked it up, and a reputation that has never fully cooled off. He’s spent the decades since being alternately dismissed as a one-trick provocateur and reclaimed as one of the sharpest satirists of American emptiness we’ve got, depending on who you ask and what year it is. He still writes, still gives interviews that annoy people on purpose, and seems entirely unbothered by any of it. Which, honestly, tracks.

If This Book Got Under Your Skin, Try These Next

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, for the same rage at consumerism wearing a different jacket and a lot more plot momentum.

Less Than Zero, Ellis’s own earlier novel, for the blueprint of the emptiness before it curdled into violence.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, if what actually got you was the flat, dissociated narration of a mind coming apart rather than the gore.

You can find copies of American Psycho and the rest of Ellis’s catalog right here if you want to see for yourself.

For your book club

1. Does the flat, deadpan narration make the violence more or less disturbing than a more emotional style would?
2. Is Bateman meant to be a specific critique of 1980s Wall Street culture, or something more timeless about masculinity and status?
3. Why do you think Ellis includes so much detail about music, fashion, and restaurants? Did you find those sections tedious, or essential?
4. The ending leaves open whether the murders were real. Does that ambiguity strengthen or weaken the book for you?
5. Is this book actually feminist satire exposing misogyny, or does it just replicate the thing it claims to critique? Where do you land, and why?