![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
As American Psycho’s last line suggests, there is no way out of the 80s for Bret Easton Ellis’s novel. Focused on details like Perry Ellis ties, rayon, and walkmans, which might have provoked ideas of perfection or fashion then, the novel is now more likely to evoke the bargain basement or the school bus. On its 20th anniversary, that leaves us with the question of whether or not we can take this novel in 2011 as a relevant and meaningful cultural critique.
-- ONTD
I don't know about the young people today, those who were just being born in the eighties and those born since, but American Psycho's reliance on eighties pop culture only endears the novel that much more to me. Moreover, the eighties really were the Big Bang of this plutocratic world that we live in today, and therefore merits its literary place in capturing the amoral and excessive vibe of the new era.
The fact that it is a horror novel may have always limited its reach for the shelves of highest literature. I may also be happier with the novel because of its heavy misogynistic energy, a factor which only hurts its prestige that much more, given the cultural ascendancy of feminist values. I know it has a special place in my reading life, and I am glad it is on the menu, which one may take or leave.
-- ONTD
I don't know about the young people today, those who were just being born in the eighties and those born since, but American Psycho's reliance on eighties pop culture only endears the novel that much more to me. Moreover, the eighties really were the Big Bang of this plutocratic world that we live in today, and therefore merits its literary place in capturing the amoral and excessive vibe of the new era.
The fact that it is a horror novel may have always limited its reach for the shelves of highest literature. I may also be happier with the novel because of its heavy misogynistic energy, a factor which only hurts its prestige that much more, given the cultural ascendancy of feminist values. I know it has a special place in my reading life, and I am glad it is on the menu, which one may take or leave.
