Harron expresses similar feelings when she suggests that she was part of the Eighties But I also

Harron expresses similar feelings when she suggests that she was part of the Eighties “But I also sort of disapproved of it. I think that in any satire you need that ambiguity, between loving and hating your subject.”There can be no doubt that Ellis too has this ambiguity in his approach to his subject. It can be argued that his book was far from being a dark satire of the Eighties and instead one of the most stark outcroppings of the self-indulgent nihilism which marked the most loathsome excesses of the decade. Certainly Ellis appeared to see no problem with writing a book violently satirising materialism and at the same time accepting a $300,000 advance for it from a vast corporation. Morgan Entrekin, who as a young editor at Simon and Schuster had first discovered Ellis and signed him up to adapt his first novel, Less Than Zero, from his own journals, saw trouble ahead from the moment he read an early manuscript.He had become good friends with Ellis and had spent a great deal of time with him while he was writing the book. He had known that “Bret was going to dark places, he was reading FBI reports on serial killers, he was very intense.” He found the book “disturbing, hilarious, everything that it is” He also felt that S&S would not know how to handle it “I didn’t think anyone would understand it.

I believed that while it is rarely the role of a publisher to explain a book, with this one you had to take that position.” He made an offer to take over publication with his own small imprint, which has now grown into Grove/Atlantic, one of the USA’s leading independent publishers. His bid was unsuccessful.Meanwhile, months passed and gradually gossip began to circulate about the book. The art department at S&S had refused to design a jacket, and some staff were leaking galleys of the offending passages. Finally, almost a year after the book was finished, the press broke the story. Juxtaposed in the same issue of Spy magazine, were two stories. One was a gossip item about how Ellis’s book satirised the behaviour of senior executives at Gulf & Western, the parent company of S&S.

The other was a report on the reactions of such magazines as Hustler and Chic, which had been sent galleys by Spy, offering them for publication. Letters from these porn magazines rejected the material in the strongest terms, and S&S cancelled the book. Entrekin tried again to argue that the work could be best served by publication with a small independent imprint, but instead the book was picked up by Vintage, and published to the farrago of abuse which Entrekin had predicted and feared.Entrekin’s version of the story is instructive, not least because it strikes at the central dichotomy of Ellis’s position. Entrekin would strenuously deny that Ellis had much choice when it came to plumping for the big advances of the huge corporate machines which deliver to him the kind of lifestyle which he satirises so effectively. But the fact remains that while all of Ellis’s work rails against late-20th-century capitalism, he is unable to offer more than the smallest hint of an alternative vision.American Psycho is at heart a simple book, not least in the crudity of its evocation of the darkness beneath perfect surfaces It works least effectively when read at face value. We’re all in agreement now that the Wall Street or City yuppies of the Eighties were monstrous, as was the general cultural preoccupation with serial killers.