American Psycho and Blood Meridian: Book ‘reviews’
A few months ago, I read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, followed by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I came in with no expectations, knowing next to nothing about either. After finishing them, I realised they connected to each other through a strong theme that made me regret not taking notes while I read them. They left such an impression, that I decided to start reviewing books. So this post isn’t a proper book review, but the thoughts that these books left me with.
American Psycho started shouldn’t work in today’s attention economy. It goes on and on about inane nothings. An extremely large portion of the book is dedicated to Patrick Bateman describing people’s clothes and the food he eats. There are three whole chapters dedicated to pure reviews of Huey and the News, Whitney Houston, and Phil Collins and Genesis. He also has a curious fascination with Donald Trump (this is in the 80s). If someone had told me all this before reading, I’d be put off. I skipped through the Lord of the Rings pages every time those italics meant someone started singing. I could not be bothered.
And yet, in this book, it works. It makes Bateman more compelling, showing how he focuses on pop music, the veneer of being a socialite, and the archetypal successful businessman. These topics are a skin he wears to mask himself as a normal person. He goes into extreme detail about them because, firstly he doesn’t have the empathy to understand when to stop, and secondly, he cannot understand people, so he finds the most shallow but effective concepts to cloak himself in.
He is a money man, surrounded by wealthy bigots - people who hate the poor, are racist, and are chronically incapable of being faithful to their lovers. He fits in between these, almost better than they themselves do. He’s found a group of shallow self-worshiping business people who idolise him for understanding the rules and protocols of their lives better than they do. He’s also helped in fitting in by the fact that nobody pays any attention to one another. Nobody really sees each other. They consistently go out and mistake one colleague for another - to the point that when Bateman tries to confess his crimes, he’s mistaken for someone else, and nothing ever comes of his confessing multiple murders.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Bateman is sick. Utterly depraved. And remorselessly so. He’s so inhuman that he passively observes how his colleague and friend is likely having an affair with his fiancé, but it doesn’t even occur to him that he’s supposed to care. He enjoys inflicting pain. He maims, blinds, and kills animals and people. Homeless people and their pets, strangers jogging with their dogs, and the many dates he brings home. It starts small, but progressively becomes worse (though it’s implied he’s only revealing it in that order and that the ‘worse’ bits have happened before). There are parts I struggled to get through, including where he ties down a victim and lets a rat eat her alive. He cannibalises many of his victims too, trying to make burger patties out of their organs, for example.
And these genuinely nauseating scenes play out in between him perpetually deciding what to eat, sitting at tables with people who mistake one another for other people, and explaining the protocols on pocket squares, brown shoes with whatever colour belt, and… just more frippery. There were also a few genuinely hilarious scenes where Bateman trips up and has no clue how to engage socially (I need to return some videotapes).
I won’t spoil it further than I already have, but I’ll say this: This book was brilliant in showing how American culture - the late stage capitalism, the excess, the hedonism and the solipsism is a shallow mask. The pop culture, groovy tunes, and infinite choices in purchasing choices cover something truly dark, something violent that stalks its victims while looking just like them. At the end, I found that more chilling than the graphic descriptions of violence.
I followed the book up with Blood Meridian. This was by far the harder read. Mostly because I believe a point of punctuation killed Cormac McCarthy’s father. Seriously, he seems to hate using anything except a full stop. No quotation marks, next to no commas, de nada. The verse is gorgeous though. The book oftentimes seems more like a poem than a novel. Here’s one example of a piece that people tend to love:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
Pictured above: about 90% of the commas in this book.
Where American Psycho was disturbing, Blood Meridian was simply bleak. Utterly, irredeemably bleak. I’ll have to reread the book to do it justice in description (it’s been a few months,) but I wanted to mention it here shortly because of the foil it gives to American Psycho. The one shows how hollow the 80s were, and the other does the same for the Frontier era. Between them, they deconstruct two of the eras most gilded in societal memory.
Blood Meridian is a slow-paced coast-to-coast trek around the US during the Wild West era. But there are no heroic cowboys and barbaric Native Americans. There is only blood, and rabid murderers on both ends of a stick where the centre is civilians living in dire poverty and fear. The book follows the Kid, who, at sixteen, joins up with a gang that’s looking to kill bandits for money. But townspeople are paid for just as well as bandits when you can’t tell where the scalp comes from. So they walk into towns, are lauded as heroes, and leave either as villains, or in the wake of innocent bodies.
In this amoral gang, the Kid alone seems to retain his conscience. He goes along with the gang, in order to survive, but he’s still willing to save lives where he can. Then there is judge Holden who takes exception to the Kid’s points of view. He is intelligent, resourceful, and genuinely evil. He finds compassion antithetical to the world he’s trying to build, and finds his victories in inspiring evil in others. He starts the book by discrediting a holy man, and turning a town against him for simple mischief.
Together, the Kid, Holden, and the Glanton gang carve a path of blood across the country.
And it makes you think, that perhaps American society was never as heroic and idealistic as the movies like to show it. Perhaps its foundation and its skyscrapers are both built with blood and bones. Even though America is/was great in many categories, they might not be the ones we normally give it credit for.
I don’t even smoke, but I feel like I need a cigarette after remembering these two.
