American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Patrick Bateman is a designer suit wearing, Zagat guide toting, cigar clenching Wall Street banker with a bloodlust so furious it causes him to chop people up (to put it tamely). He lives in a world full of vacant, vapid and vacuous characters who constantly mistake him for other Wall Street suits (and whom he can barely tell apart) and no matter how many useless designer things he buys, episodes of The Patty Winters Show he watches, reservations he makes at trendy restaurants or girls he tortures and kills, he remains totally unsatisfied and restless. His voice is that of a frantic madman in a soulless void (and often reminded me of one of Hunter s Thompson’s characters; i.e. insane, on drugs, constantly becoming anxious and fretful as a result of ‘normal’ social interactions).

Ellis uses tedious repetition, adsurdism and extreme juxtaposition to illustrate this satire of early 1990s New York. His detailed and ridiculous descriptions of food, music and clothing create a pretentious world full of superficial clowns and court jesters, none of whom are ever listening to one another (as evidenced by the constant admissions of psychopathic thoughts and urges by Bateman, which his peers ignore/don’t hear). Yes, the violence is maddening but it is my opinion that any book which inspires emotion, raw & deeply moving, serves its purpose. Ellis obviously has a pretty dark mind but even though he described the book as being an ‘exorcism’ of his own feelings and frustrations, I don’t think it is entirely gratuitous. A very bleak and serious point is being made about consumerism and ‘yuppie’ culture, and human beings’ stifled ability to connect with one another in the modern world.

I went to see Bret Easton Ellis do a bit of a talk and Q&A about American Psycho last night, in association with the Guardian Book Club. It was really enlightening to hear him speak about such a harrowing work – about his writing process, the motivations behind his novels, and the fact that he has only recently (20 odd years after its publication) been able to come to terms with what the book was about (himself) and lower the barrier of constant defensiveness which he’s barricaded himself behind for a long time. A lot of people asked him ‘why’ questions: “why did you write it this way?” “Why did you decide to have him do that?” etc., which I found somewhat tedious and which poor Ellis simply couldn’t answer apart from with a repeated “it just felt right that way”. I think one of the great things about American Psycho is its ambiguity. Is Patrick Bateman as attractive as he claims? Does he really commit all these heinous acts, or is it simply a nightmare going on inside his head? I want these questions to remain unanswered: that’s the intrigue of it.

While American Psycho is by no means for the faint-hearted, it is a comedy of the blackest degree and a literary force to be reckoned with.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

The sublet apartment shared by four young singles with one of the most enviable views of New York skyline inadvertently becomes a front seat observation point of the horror of September 11 - planes tearing a rift through the clear morning sky. A gay art dealer tries to come to terms with his genius sister's mental illness. A woman visits her grandmother after she's had a stroke, and tries to find some resemblance to the powerful woman she knew as a child. A naive girl flees the fists of the gun dealer who is her boyfriend, and takes his son with her.

These are just some of the premises of the stories in Twilight of The Superheroes. Deborah Eisenberg has a disjointed way of telling them - her structure is unexpected and unconventional. In the title story, the chapters tesselate and bump into each other until finally, each piece finds its place in the whole (although the story still has a ramshackle feel to it). The confusion invoked relfects perfectly the chaos of the 9/11 aftermath - the detail of which I had never fully considered or understood. I mean the immediate, and the personal. The city being covered with ash; floating pieces of who-knows-what settling on every surface. People hurried past one another in the street, not wanting to make eye contact. Eisenberg brings to light in this story a devestating futility - one that she embodies in her main character's comic strip; PassivityMan.

In another story, Window, the sudden appearance of domestic violence is a shock and a rude awakening - once it happens, we can see it was always there, lurking behind the words. Eisenberg had just crafted them so cleverly it was easily overlooked until the moment of revelation. Her characters are not necessarily likeable but always well-voiced, and like all good short stories, these are condensed so that every word resonates and nothing is there accidentally. I loved the modern, poignant tone of each story, and how different each was from the other. I believe Eisenberg is an award-winning writer, and I think she has lots still to offer if these stories are anything to go by.