Summary
Patrick feels anxious before and during his lunch with Bethany, hoping that she is not seeing an old mutual friend named Robert Hall. At a restaurant named Vanities, the two discuss The Patty Winters Show before Patrick asks Bethany to read a poem he composed laced with racial slurs, which draws the attention of other patrons. When Bethany wonders why Patrick chooses to work given his family's enormous wealth, Patrick says, "I want to fit in." Bethany tells Patrick her boyfriend is Robert Hall, the chef and co-owner of Dorsia, and after confusing him for another Robert Hall from college, Patrick upsets Bethany by alleging he is a closeted gay man. Patrick apologizes and remembers murdering another woman as a junior at Harvard while Bethany continues to speak. Patrick convinces Bethany to return home with him, where she notices his David Onica painting is hung upside down. Patrick knocks her unconscious and attacks her with a nail gun and Mace, brutally raping her before she dies.
In a cab on the way to Nell's from a Morgan Stanley party at a club named Goldcard, Patrick, Craig, and Courtney debate the differences between bottled water brands. Patrick suspects Courtney desires Craig, and longs to go home so he can watch a film called Bloodhungry about a killer clown. Back home, Patrick contemplates Bethany's corpse and strikes it with one of her dismembered arms. Later, Patrick pauses to consider the merits of Whitney Houston's albums Whitney Houston (1985) and Whitney (1987), concluding that although the former is the stronger effort, Houston remains "the most exciting and original black jazz voice of her generation."
At work on a Monday evening, Patrick invites Jean to dinner, letting her choose the restaurant. When she picks Dorsia, Patrick calls and haplessly pretends to secure a reservation. Once there, Patrick spots Sylvester Stallone and pretends to be the first name he spies on the maitre d's list -- "Schrawtz." Though they are seated, an angry maitre d' soon returns with the real Schrawtzes, forcing them to leave. Though Jean is amused, Patrick is humiliated, and the two wind up at a restaurant named Arcadia. Patrick thinks about how pornography is easier than sex when declining Jean's invitation back up to her apartment, first by saying he wants to watch Late Night with David Letterman, then that he needs to return videotapes. Patrick resists Jean's kiss, then in a cab home imagines both of them happily running around Central Park.
Sometime in August a detective named Donald Kimball, who has been hired by Meredith to investigate the disappearance of Paul Owen, visits Patrick at his office. The detective notices Patrick is visibly nervous and asks his whereabouts on June 24th, the night of Paul's disappearance. Patrick is momentarily shaken when his first alibi—having a date with a girl named Veronica or Victoria—does not line up with the detective's notes, which place him at a bar named Atlantis with Craig and other Pierce & Pierce colleagues. However, the detective quickly relents when Patrick revises his story, confiding to Patrick that Paul is likely hiding out because he owes Meredith money. Patrick later runs into Meredith and her new boyfriend Brock, but the two do not discuss Paul.
A disappointing date with a woman named Jeannette causes Patrick to call Evelyn, who invites him to the Hamptons. They stay at Tim's house, to which Evelyn somehow has access. At first Patrick and Evelyn spend their days and nights pursuing romantic endeavors together, even adopting a black chow puppy named NutraSweet, but eventually Evelyn's boredom and Patrick's returning psychoses prompt them to return to New York City via helicopter. Patrick drowns NutraSweet, but Evelyn fails to notice. Back in the city, he has dinner at a restaurant named Free Spin with a date named Elizabeth and two of her acquaintances named Robert Farrell and Carson Whitall. Patrick momentarily leaves the group at Nell's to pick up Christie, who waits in the limo. Back at his apartment with Elizabeth and Christie, Patrick spikes Elizabeth's drink with ecstasy and coerces her into having sex with Christie. After joining in, Patrick bites Christie's breast, fatally stabs Elizabeth, and tortures Christie to death with matches and jumper cables. Patrick contemplates their dismembered bodies the next morning, wondering if he should cancel his lunch date.
While shopping at Barney's, Patrick is once again confronted by Luis, who tells Patrick that he is transferring to Arizona because of his infatuation with Patrick. Luis has an emotional breakdown in Barney's that draws the attention of security, and Patrick threatens to murder Luis under his breath. Later, in a darkened corner of the penguin habitat in the Central Park Zoo, Patrick stabs a five-year-old boy in the neck, then slaps the boy's mother while posing as a physician, before casually walking away. Because of the stench of Christie's corpse and the fact that he knows Donald Kimball to be in London, Patrick uses Paul Owen's apartment for a "date" with two escorts named Torri and Tiffany. Torri tells a peculiar story about having to babysit a rich man's pet monkey. While the three are having sex, Patrick bites Tiffany's crotch then knocks them both unconscious with a nail gun. Patrick, who now discusses filming his murders, ties Tiffany to the bed so she can watch him decapitate and rape Torri, before torturing and killing Tiffany as well.
Patrick recounts the items he bought in October, including several electronics and a new David Onica painting to replace the old one. One day a rat emerges from his toilet, which Patrick keeps after struggling to trap and subdue it. Another night, Patrick struggles to schedule dinner reservations with Craig, who invites along Luis, a colleague named George, and a Texan client. Patrick panics at the thought of dining with Luis, but learns from George that his work dinner with the Texan is in fact the following week. While trying to plan dinner over the phone with Craig and David, Patrick inadvertently tells both Jeannette and Evelyn to meet him at a restaurant named Kaktus. Infuriated, Evelyn calls him from the restaurant, only to find him still at home on the phone.
Analysis
American Psycho has been hailed as a postmodern novel for the way that it largely casts aside the idea of reliable knowledge, and depicts late-capitalist modernity as an amoral, simulacra-immersed dreamscape. One key forebearer to Ellis's postmodern pastiche is surrealism, in particular, the Surrealist impulse to shock and offend. For instance, in the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali sought to scandalize the moral sensibilities of the French bourgeoisie with a close-up of a razor blade slicing a woman's eye. The iconic surrealist image helps explain the novel's gory descriptions of eyeball trauma, which may symbolize the obliteration of reliable forms of knowledge—in Ellis's case, the ideological status quo of late-1980s Wall Street.
Ellis draws a subversive link between Patrick's anti-social, pathological behavior and his avid consumption of mass cultural products like Late Night with David Letterman, Top 40 pop music, and Hollywood film. Patrick, who from a certain angle represents the collective unconscious of the typical American male, is a classic voyeur—a person who derives pleasure from watching others in vulnerable states of exposure. Patrick is particularly fond of exploitative genres, such as pornography and tabloid talk shows. His favorite film, Body Double, is an updated reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 mystery thriller Rear Window, which like American Psycho probes the male voyeur's questionable relationship to reality.
Patrick films his victims, who are forced to watch films of previous victims, creating a recursive, fractal-like media structure that typifies many postmodern works. Patrick describes filming the murders "in an attempt to understand these girls," a mysterious remark that suggests that Patrick's violent actions are the result of his inability to comprehend or accept women, his own feminine traits, or perhaps femininity in general. Indeed, Patrick's elitist white hyper-masculinity—the ideological foundation for his misogynist, racist, classist, and homophobic rage -- often seems to confine him within an exceedingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, a claustrophobic space with no exit, rendering him pathetic even in his fantasies. Patrick's loathsome yet hapless nature has led some to recuperate American Psycho as something like a feminist black comedy, an interpretation that filmmaker Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner pursued when adapting the novel into a 2000 Hollywood film.
Like Patricia, Bethany is another character whose existence the novel calls into question, given her uncanny ability to reflect Patrick's insecurities back at him. Patrick in fact admits "I'm really dreaming all this" in passing near the beginning of the "Lunch With Bethany" chapter, a direct indication that the narrative has been oscillating between reality and fantasy. As Patrick approaches her, Ellis writes, "this is all happening in slow motion"—an allusion to a cinematic technique typically reserved for fraught or dreamlike moments. Patrick's lunch with Bethany is an emasculating exercise in self-torment, during which Patrick imagines Bethany is dating a wealthy, handsome man named Robert Hall, co-owner of Dorsia. Patrick's crude, desperate attempt to emasculate Robert Hall only leaves him "more humiliated than I have ever been in my entire life," a feeling further compounded when Bethany notices that his Onica painting is upside down. Patrick imagines violently slaying Bethany—"her life reduced to nightmare"—seemingly as a way to compensate for the self-torturing nightmare of his own making.
Another key element of Ellis's postmodern pastiche is film noir—a postwar genre of cinema that features morally flawed protagonists, femme fatales, and complex plots rife with cases of mistaken identity, double-crossing, and institutional corruption. The intrusion of private investigator Donald Kimball into the plot of the novel raises the possibility that at least some of Patrick's crimes have actually taken place, and their conversation—filled with suspenseful moments and near-giveaways—is similar to the kind of rapid-fire, hard-boiled exchanges one tends to find in film noir narratives. However, unlike the convoluted backstories of film noir, Paul's sudden disappearance receives no narrative explanation, nor does Tim's—another example of the novel's postmodern attitude toward reliable knowledge, and elliptical, surreal approach to storytelling.
