Bret Easton Ellis (1964 - )
Related: transgressive fiction - American Psycho (1991) - American literature
American Psycho (1991) - Bret Easton Ellis [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] more ...
American Psycho is Ellis's 'succès de scandale', it bears many resemblances with Huysmans's À Rebours, both in terms of its 'nihilism' and its focus on materialism. It's his most controversial work, it was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster, but they withdrew after external protests from interest groups due to the exceedingly misogynistic nature of the book. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive fiction. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.[Jan 2007]
Biography
Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the Generation X 1980s authors. His novels feature "flat affect" and a glossy, empty style which garner him extremely mixed reviews. Ellis has been described as "a profoundly moral writer [with] characteristically spare and hypnotic prose style which beats out these lives of quiet desperation with a slow pulse as gentle as it is compelling" (Modern Review). He has called himself a moralist, while he has been penned as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacant people, who understand their depravity, but choose to enjoy it. Ellis prefers to set his novels in the 1980s to use the overt commercialism of the entertainment industry of the decade as a symbol. The novels are also linked by common, recurring characters, dystopic locales (Los Angeles, New York), and more recently, fantastical elements (vampires). The adoption and appropriation of such tropes and motifs prefigure other postmodern genre works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Fight Club. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Easton_Ellis [Jan 2005]