Katalepsis

I first saw the 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) several years ago. At the time, I took it as more or less a cult B-movie and remembered it chiefly for its hilarious scene on business cards and its ridiculous violence. Indeed, the image of a naked Christian Bale brandishing only white Nike’s and a chainsaw has been burned into my brain.

Recently, I came across the novel while looking through a torrent of novels for the Kindle and decided to give it another shot. I’m glad I did.

It would be hard for any film to do justice to this novel — Patrick Bateman slowly spirals out of control throughout its pages, which are littered with countless references to 1980s fashion and product merchandise. Seriously…the extent of these references has to be seen to be believed:

In the early light of a May dawn this is what the living room of my apartment looks like: Over the white marble and granite gas-log fireplace hangs an original David Onica. It’s a six-foot-by-four-foot portrait of a naked woman, mostly done in muted grays and olives, sitting on a chaise lounge watching MTV, the backdrop of a Martian landscape, a gleaming mauve desert scattered with dead, gutted fish, smashing plates rising like a sunburst above the woman’s yellow head, and the whole thing is framed in black aluminum steel. The painting overlooks a long white down-filled sofa and a thirty-inch digital TV set from Toshiba; it’s a high contrast highly defined model plus it has a four corner video stand with a high-tech tube combination from NEC with a picture-in-picture digital effects system (plus freeze-frame); the audio includes built-in MTS and a five-watt-per-channel on-board amp.

A Toshiba VCR sits in a glass case beneath the TV set; it’s a super-high-band Beta unit and has built-in editing functions including a character generator with eight-page memory, a high-band record and playback, and three-week, eight-event timer. A hurricane halogen lamp is placed in each corner of the living room. Thin white venetian blinds cover all eight floor-to-ceiling windows. A glass top coffee table with oak legs by Turchin sits in front of the sofa, with Steuben glass animals placed strategically around expensive crystal ashtrays, from Fortunoff, though I don’t smoke.

And it goes on. And on. For pages. This kind of reading gets tedious fast, but in experiencing it I believe its effect is supposed to mirror the increasing insanity of the protagonist/serial killer. Bateman’s life is spent trying to find meaning and happiness in stuff, only to be tormented by his own need to satisfy his homicidal tendencies (his words, not mine). After several hundred references to fashion designer clothing and expensive gadgets, the meaningless of yuppie culture sinks in without any explicit diatribes on the author’s part. It’s quite clever.

American Psycho is best known for its casual and unconcerned description of violence. These scenes start out innocent enough, such as a description of one of Bateman’s past conquests:

A young girl, a freshman, I met in a bar in Cambridge my junior year at Harvard told me early one fall that “Life is full of endless possibilities.” I tried valiantly not to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom, and I calmly washed them down with the rest of a Heineken, smiled and concentrated on the dart game that was going on in the corner.

Needless to say, she did not live to see her sophomore year. That winter, her body was found floating in the Charles River, decapitated, her head hung from a tree on the bank, her hair knotted around a low hanging branch, three miles away. My rages at Harvard were less violent than the ones now and it’s useless to hope that my disgust will vanish — there is just no way.

But as the Bateman continues his downward spiral, the scenes become increasingly grotesque — almost to unimaginable levels. The language is so shocking that it’s difficult to read, though I was most affected by his casual murdering of a small child at the zoo, rather than his extreme cannibalistic tendencies.

In the end, if you’re a fan of the cult film, I highly recommend you take some time to explore the novel. It was penned by an author who was just 27 years of age — younger than I am today. Yet it shows a depth and complexity beyond its author’s years.

With the gift of a new Kindle for Christmas, I have been reading a bunch of fiction for enjoyment — much in the same way I might watch throwaway television shows for the same purpose. I never read the Narnia books as a child. I do remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I had little knowledge of the rest of the series until high school. And by then, there seemed little point in reading a children’s series.

Having read them now, I can’t say that my opinion has changed all that much. The books are extremely quick reads (~2,000 “locations” under the new Kindle formatting) and are suitable for a very young audience. They all exist in the fictional world of Narnia and feature the adventures of children (from our world) who get drawn into it. Here, I’d like to offer some basic impressions and thoughts.

Spoiler alert: the following contains plot details.

Much has been made over the reading order of the novels, since their internal chronology differs from the order in which they were written. However, since the narrative voice appears to follow the publishing order, I would recommend not deviating from what appear to be Lewis’s original intentions. That sets up the following order:

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. Prince Caspian
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. The Silver Chair
5. The Horse and His Boy
6. The Magician’s Nephew
7. The Last Battle

The arguments stem from the fact that The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel to the rest of the series and details the creation of Narnia, and The Horse and His Boy chronicles events that took place sometime during the original rule of the four children over Narnia — a reign that is glossed over at the end of Wardrobe before the children’s return to England.

Looking back over the series, I’d have to say that the first two remain my favorite. These books introduce you to the world of Narnia and detail the original adventures of the Pevensies (the four children). The books that follow pick up different protagonists to whom I never grew very attached. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader does feature the younger Pevensies (Edmund and Lucy), but their character development is lost to the format of the novel: essentially a classic “road trip” novel featuring the adventures they run into along the way. This puts it in a line of great “road trip” tales — from Homer’s Odyssey to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. But, of course, it cannot hold a candle to either.

The Silver Chair features Eustace (a protagonist picked up in the Dawn Treader) and a new one, Jill Pole, as they journey to the Northern reaches of Narnia in search of Caspian’s nephew. The Pevensie children are gone by this point. The novel drags in several places and never quite establishes its pacing and purpose.

The Horse and His Boy, as mentioned, leaps back in time to the reign of the Pevensies, yet the novel hardly features them at all. Instead, we get a new protagonist, Shasta, who escapes from Southern Calormen to Archenland, running into adventures along the way.

The Magician’s Newphew is somewhat interesting, in that it details the creation of Narnia and tells the story of the White Witch, the first “fall” of mankind, and the introduction of evil into the world. By now, the Christian allegory of the novels is getting rather heavy-handed, whatever Lewis’s claims may be.

Finally, The Last Battle features the coming of the anti-Christ and the destruction of Narnia. Unfortunately, Lewis seems to lose some of his best storytelling elements here. The description of “heaven” in the final few chapters is incredible — thinking of such joys, it is not hard to see how the promise of heaven will always remain a powerful incentive to believe in Christianity. Lewis is brave enough to feature the death of all his main protagonists (with the strange omission of Susan, who has apparently grown to “feminine” and adult-like for Narnia). Instead of ending on a bittersweet note, however, they are whisked all off to heaven and everyone lives happily ever. Except, of course, Susan. I’d love to read a story about Susan’s life after this point. She loses all of her siblings in a single train accident and they all live happily ever after without her.

My complaints about the series are really directed at children’s novels in general. There is not enough dark material here. The mythical background of Narnia is inconsistent and lacking in depth. When you read Lord of the Rings, you come away in awe of the amount of backstory that went into Middle Earth. You feel as if it is a real place with a history all of its own. In Narnia, Lewis often talks of other times and places, but does so in passing. You feel as if he’s given it about as much thought as you have.

Moreover, every problem gets resolved in the most fortunate manner, often within a paragraph or two of its introduction. The series is strongest when the White Witch is present, because she provides a serious counterpoint to the fortune of the children. In the novels where she is absent, the story suffers because of the need for a quality villain.

Ultimately, I cannot recommend the novels very highly. I think they are nice children’s novels, but offer little for the adult reader.