He makes obscene phone calls to the girls at Dalton School.
He went to Exeter, Harvard and Harvard business school. His grandfather had an estate in Connecticut. He's often decribed as a yuppie, but he's not upwardly mobile. Bateman disembowels this gentleman's dog, then stabs him in the face. One of his victims asks if he's a model or a movie star. He spends most of his time making lunch and dinner reservations, eating lunch or dinner, working out at a health club to wretched excess, watching a morning talk show or porn videos - mostly involving two women - shopping for clothes and the other appurtenances of his life, and killing people. Bateman at one point turns to do something at a computer. He works on Wall Street, at what Ellis never makes clear, maybe mergers and acquisitions. He raped his first woman at 14, a maid on Christmas Eve, and went on from there remorselessly.
He's just had a bit of an anxiety attack.īateman doesn't have any real motivation for his murders. He makes meat loaf and sausage from a woman whose name he never learns.įour hundred pages of this stuff is not satire, it's tiresome.Įllis quotes Dostoevsky in an epigraph, but Bateman's no Raskolnikov. He hates his brother, Sean, because Sean can get the best table at a restaurant called Dorsia and Bateman can't even get a reservation.īateman and his friends dine on venison with yogurt sauce and fiddlehead fern with mango slices, smoked duck with endive and maple syrup, scallop sausage and grilled salmon with raspberry vinegar and guacamole.īateman also gnaws on his dying victims and sometimes eats their rotting entrails. Getting a good table in the hottest new restaurant is extremely important to Patrick Bateman. He is the fashion arbiter for his friends: "You are prep perfection," one purrs.Īnd you are what you eat for Patrick Bateman, as long as it's some bizarre combination of exotic ingredients in the newest, chicest restaurant. He's often outfitted in Giorgio Armani or Valentino Couture or Garrick Anderson suits, $90 ties - he quotes price tags a lot, $60 shorts from Comme les Garcons, $30 socks from Barney's, and "cap-toed leather slip-ons by Allen-Edmonds." There are thirty, forty, a hundred descriptions like that in "American Psycho." For Bateman, clothes are indeed the man - and the woman.īateman routinely wears a couple thousand dollars worth of clothes. He's like a butterfly collector recording new species in some Amazonian valley. He can't eat lunch with anyone without cataloging their clothes.
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