A Revolting Development

By R.Z. Sheppard

Old joke. Two small boys leave a theater after seeing a gushy movie. "Wasn't it terrible?" says the first boy. "I didn't think it was too bad," replies the second. "During the kissing scenes, I just closed my eyes and made believe he was choking her."

No joke. Bret Easton Ellis, 26, author of Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, emerges from the 1980s grade-B romance with uninhibited capitalism, shuts his eyes and imagines a childish horror fantasy about a Wall Street yuppie whose tastes run from nouvelle cuisine to the most appalling acts of torture, murder and dismemberment ever described in a book targeted for the best-seller lists.

American Psycho, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in January, runs 362 pages in edited manuscript. Crawls, actually. Barely distinguishable chapters are stuffed with the brand names of expensive suits, shoes and wristwatches, endless spoofs of nightclubs and restaurants and rambling reviews of pop records. The litany of the trivial is intentional, though Ellis seems to be writing for people who take forever to get the point. Instead of a plot, there is a tapeworm narrative that makes it unnecessary to distinguish the beginning of the novel from its end.

Many readers will not have the stomach to get past the middle. By that time, the novel's narrator, Patrick Bateman, is in full graphic babble about his adventures as a serial killer. With knife and pistol, he dispatches pets, children, high-fashion colleagues and ragged beggars. These are only warm-ups for what the M.B.A. monster does to women with nail gun, power drill, chain saw and, in a scene that should cause the loudest uproar, a hungry rodent. Those who are interested in the gobbets can exercise their rights as free American consumers early next year -- that is if they are still interested after reading one of the tamer examples of Ellis' zombie prose:

"I start by skinning Torri alive, making incisions with a steak knife and ripping long strips of flesh from her legs and stomach while she screams in vain, begging for mercy in a thin, high voice. I stop doing this and move over to her head and start biting the top of it, hoping that she realizes her punishment is ending up being comparatively light compared to what I plan to do with the other one."

George Corsillo, the New York City artist who designed the jackets for Ellis' previous novels, refused the assignment for American Psycho. "I had to draw the line," said Corsillo. "I felt disgusted with myself for reading it." Many Simon & Schuster employees were disturbed by the manuscript, copies of which have circulated around town. Some women staffers are especially outraged by Ellis' descriptions of atrocities against females. But no one wants to say so on the record. Here is a hot property that may be too hot to handle or, says a staffer who requests anonymity, "too hot to even talk about." John McKeown, publisher of the trade division, will not offer his personal opinion of the book, though he has strong feelings as a businessman: , "We plan to market it aggressively, with muscle and energy."

For S&S, caught in a profit squeeze like many other U.S. publishers, grossing out readers could mean netting a big return on Ellis' advance, estimated at $300,000. Yet American Psycho could backfire on the accountants. Penguin turned down the chance to publish the paperback edition. Executive editor Nan Graham is relatively diplomatic: "I had to read for an hour and a half before getting to the bad stuff. I was bored and annoyed." Is a new paperback deal being negotiated elsewhere? The terse reply from S&S's subsidiary-rights department: "We're working on it. No takers. No comment."

It would be naive to think that American Psycho will not find its market, although some stores might be shy about displaying the book prominently, and an Ellis promotion tour might run into resistance. Even Geraldo might take a pass.

A 1 1/2-page interview prepared for reviewers and booksellers by the author and his editor Robert Asahina attempts to explain Ellis' intent and confront the inevitable controversy. "I don't think it's a novelist's job to give little moral lessons," says Ellis. But making moral judgments is precisely what he does, not only in the novel, with its hateful portrayals of Manhattan yuppies as mindless consumers, but elsewhere in the muddled handout that is intended to clarify his aesthetic. "The characters in all my novels are superficial," he writes. "They don't understand what's really going on in their own lives."

But to write superficially about superficiality and disgustingly about the disgusting and call it, as Ellis does, a challenge to his readers' complacency does violence to his audience and to the fundamental nature of his craft. So when editor Asahina comes to his writer's defense by claiming that American Psycho "succeeds in taking readers into the mind of a madman," the obvious question is, How long do they have to stay there? Ten pages, 50 pages, 150 pages? Less than zero?