American Psycho

Along with nearly all of his readers, Bret Easton Ellis had trouble with the violence in American Psycho. Even in his quasi-autobiographical novel, Lunar Park, published almost fifteen years later, the character “Bret Easton Ellis” is haunted by guilt over Patrick Bateman, the mass-murdering character he created. But Ellis also had trouble with American Psycho’s violence while writing it: the murder scenes remained unwritten until the rest of the book was completed, at which point Ellis read FBI criminology textbooks detailing actual serial killings and returned to insert the scenes that would be most unsettling to author, reader, and public alike. “I didn’t really want to write them,” he told an interviewer later, “but I knew they had to be there.”

What this leaves us with is violence that is mostly self-contained in a handful of brief chapters. To remove that violence would more or less be a clean excision, leaving the rest of the savagely insouciant satire intact. What’s more, the themes and dynamics in the novel would remain as they are; with a single exception, there is nothing in the plot that would be hindered by the missing chapters. Twenty years after the sensational publication that brought on a hysteria of denunciations, the loss of a publishing deal, and death threats against the author, the offending passages may not, after all, be necessary. But would we have a better novel—not just a more comfortable novel—without them?

This would be a thin-skinned exercise if the carnage were not so appalling. (The gore was drastically skimped in the 2000 movie.) Consider, as a token of the novel’s atrocity, that many victims lose consciousness while losing portions of their bodies: while Bateman is sawing off their legs or exploding their breasts, their eyes (if they still have eyes) are closing. It’s too much strain for a human being to endure; consciousness closes down in defense. And it’s likewise too much for the reader: we begin chapters with names such as Tries to Cook and Eat Girl with a queasy foreboding, as though something is about to go horribly wrong in our own nonfictional lives. We begin a chapter entitled Killing Child at Zoo unsure that we want to read any further.

And so this is what the novel has condemned itself to being known for: the carving-up of bodies (particularly women’s bodies) rather than unique and...