Brutality As Contrivance: With `American Psycho,' And Wants To Call It Art

More than anything else, ``American Psycho'' is the work of a kid.

At 26, author Bret Easton Ellis may no longer fall within the strictest parameters of youth, but his controversial new novel reeks of adolescent contrivance. As an artist, Ellis is still a kid.

``American Psycho'' is the novel dropped by publisher Simon & Schuster on grounds of taste in November, mere days before it was due in bookstores. Ellis got to keep the $300,000 advance, and the novel was quickly snapped up by Vintage, the paperback arm of venerable Alfred A. Knopf.

Reading the book last week - a reporter's duty that I hope will spare you the task - I kept feeling dragged back to my own teen-age years: railing against parental restrictions; chafing at the social boundaries presented by a dull Midwestern suburb; embracing - at least intellectually - the freedom promised by Kerouac and Co.

Of course, the difference with ``American Psycho'' is that Ellis is not rebelling against Mom and Dad's Friday-night curfew. By having his soulless protagonist, Patrick Bateman, stack up human (and animal) bodies like so much cordwood, in a numbing catalog of ever-more-grisly butchery, Ellis pushes beyond whatever limits of taste and conscience previously existed in our literature. And he wants to call it art.

Ellis - and presumably Vintage - wants to be recognized (rewarded?) for having extended art's frontiers. There is something sadly, profoundly sophomoric about that artistic stratagem.

``You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience,'' intoned Ellis last week to The New York Times, his first interview since the controversy arose. ``You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you.''

What intrigued Ellis was a tiny segment of Manhattan society, yuppified Wall Streeters of the twentysomething generation, who seemingly epitomized the greed, arrogance and social myopia of the 1980s. Onto what could have been a dark comedy of manners - Patrick and his interchangeable cronies are consumed with little more than designer apparel and reservations at the right restaurant - Ellis has grafted the first-person ``confessions'' of a deranged psychopath.

Apparently he wanted to make his point about the 1980s perfectly clear.

It ``seemed clear to me that Bateman would describe these acts of brutality in the same numbing, excessive detail and flat tone that he recounts everything else . . .,'' said Ellis in the interview. ``It seemed to me that he would not avoid telling the reader what he does when he murders people. For me, it was an esthetic choice that made sense.''

The book, however, never shakes the sense that Patrick's brutality is somehow peripheral to an indictment of the Reagan years - as if it were a misguided ``esthetic choice'' that Ellis somehow believes will skewer an entire social class while also raising the ante in a high-stakes Game of Art in which he holds all the cards. What could have been a wicked social satire comes out seeming like the ugly two-headed goat on the cover of a tabloid; one of the heads clearly is unnecessary.

For all its violence, ``American Psycho'' takes a long time to settle into its catalog of horrors. First comes Ellis' paralyzing portrait of a 27-year-old Harvard-educated broker obsessed with appearances, and his circle of shallow, like-minded friends. I quote, purposely at length, and with apologies:

``I debate between two outfits,'' says Patrick. ``One is a wool-crepe suit by Bill Robinson I bought at Saks with this cotton jacquard shirt from Charivari and an Armani tie. Or a wool and cashmere sport coat with blue plaid, a cotton shirt and pleated wool trousers by Alexander Julian, with a polka-dot tie by Bill Blass. The Julian might be a little too warm for May but if Patricia's wearing this outfit by Karl Lagerfeld that I think she's going to, then maybe I will go with the Julian, because it would go well with her suit.''

That, incidentally, is the high point of Patrick's consideration for another human being. Clearly such a technique can be used effectively to lampoon a group of twits, even a whole generation of twits. But for 399 pages? ``American Psycho,'' unfortunately, is a book with one idea - and Ellis bludgeons it to death.

Mercifully, when Patrick's rampage finally begins, a full third of the novel is finished: He blinds a homeless wino with a knife and snaps the front legs of the man's small dog. From there it escalates: a gay man (throat slashed) and his Shar-Pei (disemboweled); a business acquaintance, Paul Owen (ax in the face); a former Harvard girlfriend (nail gun and scissors) . . . the list goes on, as the power tools come out.

This also is where ``American Psycho'' develops an overwhelming sense of being the product of a juvenile mind: Each death seems calculated to push ever further into the outrageous - just as I tested my parents' limits as a 17-year-old.

``But the murder sequences are so over-the-top, so baroque in their violence, it seems hard to take them in a literal context,'' protests Ellis. Perhaps. But only if one's imagination is as numbed, as immune to assault, as Patrick's.

In Los Angeles, the National Organization for Women is boycotting Vintage and Knopf books in response to Ellis' depiction of brutality toward women. In Seattle, reaction is more low-key, with the NOW chapter electing to write a letter of protest to the publishers asking them ``to consider the social ramifications of publishing such work,'' according to Chris Gaston of the Seattle NOW office.

Though some stores are not stocking it, ``American Psycho'' is available (for the truly outrageous paperback price of $11) at most Seattle bookstores. Yet it is being carried without fanfare, and may die a quicker death than many of Patrick's victims.

There is a curious disclaimer at the beginning of ``American Psycho.'' The ``incidental references,'' it says, ``are not intended . . . to disparage any company's products or services.'' Would that Vintage had been as concerned about the human beings in their young author's product.