Phew. This one had been on my list for a while, since I'd heard such strong (negative) reactions to it from a couple of people in my life and I wanted to know what the deal was. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a certain delight in enjoying something everyone else seems to dislike, too. And after watching the movie for the second time a week or two ago, I thought, hey, why not?

The pace of this book was sort of nauseating. Bateman's narration style focused heavily on expressing things in excruciating detail. The first you see of it is with the clothing. If you excluded all of the clothing descriptions, I'm sure the novel would be a third of the length. He also uses this narration style when describing scenes with graphic sex or violence. The stilted, almost robotic recounting of the sex scenes manages to drain all of the eroticism from them that could have existed. On the other hand, the descriptions of violence were shockingly detailed and almost cartoonish at times.

The movie really had to tone down a lot of Patrick's, uh. 'Quirks'. He drops a slur nearly every page, appeared to target people based on their race alone several times, and at one point killed a child for no reason whatsoever. His psychosis is explored a lot more in the book, and it seems reasonable to assume he's dealing with some sort of dissociative disorder too. The narrative will occassionally have abrupt jumps to other scenes, chapters will end in the middle of sentences, and at some point it flipped from first-person narration to third-person narration and then back again. From time to time he drops into thoughtful chapter-length music reviews that end up sort of acting as palate cleansers after more graphic scenes. He is obsessed with Donald Trump and will find every opportunity to bring him up, which is, of course, funny for other reasons now.

In addition to all of these factors that make the book difficult to get through, there's also an underlying theme of repetitive mundanity. Every conversation Bateman and the guys have is about what restaurant they're getting a reservation at, how to wear clothing 'properly', and what 'hardbody' they're sleeping with. Every new sequence of time, Bateman has to tell us that he went to the gym and worked out (for two hours) and what was on the Patty Winters Show that morning. Every man that Bateman works with looks exactly the same -- tan, with slicked back hair and glasses. Every other scene, there's a reference to Les Miserables. Every day looks exactly the same to Patrick Bateman, with the only things breaking his life up into meaningful chunks being his random acts of needless violence.

This is going to be the case for most things I review, but I'm of the opinion that if a work accomplishes what it set out to do, then I'd consider it 'good'. I personally really enjoyed reading this for that reason. It was tedious and exciting and nauseating and funny and it constantly kept me wondering how far Bateman was going to go. I'm adding this to the list of things that I thoroughly enjoyed but would never recommend.