American Psycho is the tale of Patrick Bateman, a twenty-six year old man who works and loves in New York, where he earns a lot of money doing something unclear in the financial world.  He is smart, fit, handsome, rich, and well educated.  When he is not at work he divides his time between an exclusive gym club, expensive trendy restaurants, or fancy clubs.  He is surrounded by other young women and men, doing and enjoying exactly the same as him.

But this is not your idea of a fun book to read, sitting in the shade of a tree on a summer afternoon, a cool drink at arm's length and with and the playful laughter of children having fun in an inflatable pool two gardens away as background music.  It is not because of Bateman's other side: at night he is a sadist who maims and murders beggars, hookers, and anyone who happens to be near him at the wrong moment.  His brutal acts are not aimed at killing, but at enjoying the sight of a suffering victim.  He uses nailguns, axes, lighters or knives, in combination with poison or acid.

Patrick Bateman's biggest problem is that the life he leads is quite empty.  The environment he lives in judges and labels people by the clothes they wear, the places they visit, or if they're female: what kind of body they have.  That life he and his so called friends lead is so shallow that most people don't even remember each other's names, and the mixups are a constant Patrick sometimes uses to his advantage.  They are perfectly able to tell what brands of clothes someone wears or where they bought them, but even so much as a description of their features, let alone of their character, thoughts or beliefs, is too much to ask.  Some fill this shallowness with alcohol, others with all sorts of medication -trendy medicines of course- , and most of them with drugs, quite openly.  And Patrick has his own medicine: the bloody violence he uses to fill the void he feels, to actually feel something for a change.

It's an ugly story.  The violence and bloodshed, and the sex too, is quite graphic at places, I can imagine people being shocked or having their stomach turn.
It's a strange story too.  Nothing really happens.  Pages and pages full of descriptions of clothes are followed by pages and pages of empty conversations, followed by cruelty or violence.  But there is no storyline, not really.  There is no evolution anywhere, except maybe the madness of Bateman, going from cruel behaviour -not even violent- via murder to bestial savagery which influences his daily surface functioning.  It could be desperate cries for help, but his shallow buddies don't even notice there is something going on with their "friend".
It's also a deceiving story, or it could be.  Near the end a baffled Bateman learns that the friend's flat where he was sure to have committed some gross acts is now being sold and nobody so much as mentions what they ought to have found there - as if it never happened.  It could be an explanation for the total absence of a police inquest into the many murders and disappearances.  Did everything really happen?  Or was maybe most of the cruelty part of Bateman's imagined attempts to actually feel something in that empty wealthy life of his?  It could explain the almost detached way in which he tells his story.

Would I recommend reading this book?  Yes, most definitely.  It's about the yuppies of the eighties, but at the same time it's about everyone today chasing material goods and forgetting to live.  It's about a wealthy upperclass, but it's also about today's society where the right brand at the right moment earns you more respect from your friends than getting up to let an old man sit down in the bus does.  It's an exaggerated satire, but at the same time it's a mirror, and not a fun one.