padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
there are multiple bits in The Big Short - the book - where Lewis describes how you can tell exactly what someone does in the financial world by how they dress

makes one feel that the endless lists of clothing in American Psycho are not as gratuitous as they seem
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Fair point... but this is the best conversation in the books thread for a long time so I'm happy.
Tom Wolfe again, he wrote a book called I Am Charlotte Simmonds about a girl going to college. It could be called a kind of poor man's Rule of Attraction in the same way that BofV is a poor man's AP. But here I'm talking about a very very poor man. I remember my friend saying how he was horrified by how bad it was.... but he couldn't stop turning the pages in a kind of appalled wonder.
 

version

Well-known member
Mailer is cancelled for me. pretty rare when it comes to art but in his case, yeah, no fucking thanks. what an actually terrible person. having said that, unlike most of New Journalism he has genuine insights, but they're overwhelmed by all his hangups on race/gender/sexuality. as far as fiction, I read The Naked and the Dead as a teen. I recall it being alright? Albeit no patch on Thin Red Line.

Didion is female Tom Wolfe (or he's male Didion). what's the famous essay say, "her only subject is herself"? yeah.

I've only read The Fight by Mailer. Great when he stuck to the boxing, terrible when he got into race. As for Didion, I think I enjoyd The White Album but there's definitely something off about her. I watched the Netflix doc a while back and she described getting a call from someone that she "had to see this" and a bunch of adults had given a child acid. That was bad enough, but her response was so detached and amoral that it turned my stomach.
 

version

Well-known member
It's interesting that there are a handful of moments in AP where Bateman softens. Jean hugs and kisses him after their date and he talks about a warmth he's never felt before then imagines the two of them running through Central Park, hand in hand. "We buy balloons, we let them go."

There's also the summer in The Hamptons where him and Evelyn actually act like a normal couple for a while and it almost feels like a different book until they can't stand it anymore and she keeps going back to the city and he starts microwaving jellyfish, drowning dogs and making himself throw up into plant pots round the house.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Disappointed that no-one wanted to discuss Woops' book... I can confirm it was good though. Luka is one of the first people thanked in the acknowledgments in the back.
Now I've moved on to a Turkish novella called The Book of Devices.... looks promising so far. Basically I've always wanted to visit Istanbul and that seems kinda unlikely for a long time now so books set there are about as close as I can get.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
moments in AP where Bateman softens
idk if it's softening exactly

he's desperately unhappy, and utterly existentially adrift. the violence, actual and fantasized, is a compulsion, survival tactic/coping method.

part of that is his inability to imagine any suitable life alternative to "fitting in", trapped in the straitjacket of symbols that substitute for self-worth

the episode with Evelyn in the Hamptons is the ultimate attempt to force that normality (after which he breaks up with her iirc)

Jean is different because she actually cares about him for himself rather than as a collection of symbols (clothes, things, wealth, degrees, etc)

allowing him to briefly envision some other life, where perhaps wouldn't have the violent impulses, or would be able to cope with them.

the desire to escape a pointless, meaningless, life that he hates is also what drives him to repeatedly, futilely confess. this is not an exit.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
@jenks I hear you, but I'm only moved to discuss things I'm really interested in, i.e. intensive luka-style poetry discussion for one passes me by

I wasn't around a lot for along so I may have missed some of your attempts - what literature are you interested in? why are you interested in it?

I'm here for basically escapism purposes only these days. god knows I don't want to talk more about COVID, or the fucking mess my city is rn.

so I'd be happy to discuss literature
 

version

Well-known member
One thing I rarely see is people describing it as a sad book. You usually get people talking about the violence or the comedy, but I think it's also very sad for the reasons you've described above. As much as Bateman's a monster, you're still watching someone or some thing flailing around in agony.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
it's an extremely sad book. it's a book about crushing existential depression.

one doesn't feel bad for Bateman, obviously, but we all have these kinds of doubts, fears, desires when we look in alone into the mirror - do I matter

we all want to feel a sense of intrinsic self-worth
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I think this is why it resonates in a way that something like Bonfire of the Vanities doesn't and never could

in a way that The Wolf of Wall Street doesn't (that guy never questions anything - he remains just a grinning huckster)

and why craner is right to identify it as an allegorical novel
 

version

Well-known member
I'm conflicted as I feel bad for both Bateman and his victims and it's difficult to reconcile the two.
 

version

Well-known member
I'd like to think it's a good thing, mind you. One of the things which separates me from the Batemans of the world.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I don't feel any sympathy for Bateman, but I definitely empathize with him

not the murderous rages or compulsion to violence, obviously, but I've experienced crushing existential depression

purposelessness, hopelessness, spiritual malaise, resulting weariness at day-to-day life

I've tried - with mixed success - to fill my void with exercise, philosophy, sex, drugs, etc
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus famously says the only question worth considering is suicide

is it worth it - whatever "it" is in both cases - to continue living? if not, all other questions become moot

understandable that existentialism has been attacked as bourgeois philosophy, and in a sense existentialist despair is self-fulfilling prophecy

but I very strongly believe that desire for greater meaning is an inherent human trait, be it overt or sublimated

Bateman is essentially murdering people to create an authentic self - it's hard to tell exactly as it's blurred with obvious mental illness

because he has no sense of self-worth independent of how others view him, he requires acknowledgment of his acts to complete them

for him hell truly is other people, in the sense Sartre actually meant that (as I understand it) - his identity is solely in the judgment of others

he is absolutely a grotesque monster. that gives the reader an out into ironic detachment, but it also brings the actual problems into stark relief.
 

jenks

thread death
@jenks I hear you, but I'm only moved to discuss things I'm really interested in, i.e. intensive luka-style poetry discussion for one passes me by

I wasn't around a lot for along so I may have missed some of your attempts - what literature are you interested in? why are you interested in it?

these are my last three posts in this thread:
Anita Brookner - A Friend From England (working my way through her oeuvre chronologically)
T J Clarke - Sight of Death (art critic looking specifically at two Poussin paintings)
Re-reading Stendhal's Scarlett and Black (love nineteenth century french novels - just finished an 25 hour audiobook of the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle by Zola)
Tolstoy's Short Stories (cos he's something else)
A collection of early English poetry (comfort read i return to over and again and i need comfort at the moment)

happy to chat about any of them if anyone wants.

…Just finished Lahr's massive biog of Tennessee Williams which is brilliant and depressing in equal measure - final 100 pages watching a talent burn out and screw up is particularly unedifying.

Reading The Five by Hallie Rubenhold - a book about the five 'canonical' victims of the Ripper. What i like about it is that it is not interested in how they died but in how they lived - it reclaims their lives and describes how they lived, yanking the narrative away from the myth and ripperology, instead it is a story of women's lives in the nineteenth century. It's really a book about unwritten lives - working class women who have ended living in the shittiest places and how it came to that.

Also re-reading Stendhal because he has the unflinching cycnical eye which focuses on middle class hypocrisy so well and Julien Sorel is just a brilliant character to follow through nineteenth century France.

…Lockdown reading;
Marion Turner's new biog of Chaucer - really an examination of public and private spaces as the world moves from a medieval world into the early modern era - great on the slow and subtle changes Europe was undergoing.

Re-issue of Vivian Gornick's The Romance of american Communism - an oral history of american communism from the twenties to the sixties - a seemingly erased era of history - would fit well with Vineland and Vonnegut fans.

Re-reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Perpetual Orgy which may well be one of the best books on a single book by another novelist - in case Flaubert's Madame Bovary - the section on the technical side of the novel is masterclass.

New novel Mr Beethoven by Paul Griffiths - just started it about a commission Beethoven received to write an oratorio in Boston.

Finally a really heartbreaking and brilliant non fiction book about how a father tries to communicate through music with his severely autistic daughter: In Her Room by James Cook.
 
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