American Psycho.

BRET EASTON ELLIS seems, was puzzled by the universally unfavorable reception of his third novel, American Psycho. Small wonder. Ellis's all-too-obvious purpose was to write a scathing satire of Eighties materialism that was politically correct in every possible way. Patrick Bateman, the narrator of American Psycho, is a Wall Street yuppie who watches pornographic videocassettes, calls blacks "niggers" and homosexuals "faggots," and gets his after-hours jollies by killing and dismembering people. Though most of his victims are women, Bateman is an equal-opportunity psychopath, for he also butchers an aging homosexual, a homeless man, and a dog. (The dog is a particularly nice touch.) Much to his surprise, Ellis ran afoul of the feminist wing of sensitivity fascism, and subsequently received the same treatment in the popular press that Bateman's girlfriends receive in American Psycho.

Moral: In the Nineties, you can never be pure enough.

At first, I actually felt a mild twinge of theoretical sympathy for Ellis, in much the same way that a softhearted member of the National Association of Scholars might pity an Ivy League leftist who inadvertently ran afoul of the PC police and suddenly discovered that his old friends wouldn't return his calls.

This sympathy lasted exactly as long as it took me to get through the first half-dozen pages of American Psycho. Every bad thing you've read about it is an understatement. It's ineptly written. It's sophomoric. It is, in the truest sense of the word, obscene. And the main charge of the feminists is right on the mark: Ellis describes the bestial acts committed by his cardboard hero in a way that is positively lascivious. One would hate to be his next date.

It would take more space than the task deserves to catalogue all of Ellis's myriad ineptnesses, but I'm especially struck by the utter incredibility of the events he describes. Though Patrick Bateman chops up one or two women, cabbies, and sushi delivery boys every week, his leisure-time activities attract little attention from the New York Police Department. And though he does his dirty work in a pair of Manhattan apartments, nobody ever hears any screaming and nobody ever smells anything funny.

Bateman himself is equally preposterous. A devoted thirtysomething fan who thinks Whitney Houston is "the most exciting and original black jazz voice of her generation," he is obsessed with upscale creature comforts (more products are identified by brand on an average page of American Psycho than in any chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities) and with safe sex (I suspect Ellis thought this a positively Swiftian stroke of irony). A graduate of Exeter and Harvard, he displays a poster of Oliver North in his West Side apartment, and prefers not to blow away his girlfriends with Soviet-made automatic weapons. Anyone who knows anything about serial killers knows that all of this is perfect nonsense. They are weak, nondescript, maladjusted loners who kill women in order to satisfy their twisted sexual longings, not Masters of the Universe with a taste for human flesh.

Bret Easton Ellis would presumably argue that American Psycho, being a satire on the Reagan era, need not be overly literal. But having chosen to write his book in an ultra-naturalistic style, Ellis is stuck with the conventions of naturalism, which include a certain amount of surface plausibility, of which American Psycho has none whatsoever. In any case, Ellis undercuts his satirical intent by asserting (through the medium of an epigraph drawn from, of all people, Dostoyevsky) that "such persons ... not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, considering the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed." Sorry, but no sale. Manhattan may be crawling with serial killers, but I find it highly unlikely that any of them are doubling as investment bankers.

It isn't hard to see why Ellis chose a serial killer as his subject. Serial murder is a theme of enormous literary potential, just as the psychopath is one of the great untapped character types. Its power is suggested by a number of purely popular novels about serial killers that are genuinely compelling, including Jim Thompson's The Killer inside Me and the novels of Thomas Harris, creator of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, America's hottest antihero. Harris's books are exceptionally interesting in this connection. Though they make no pretense to literary seriousness, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs take seriously an issue that American Psycho ignores altogether: the question of evil. In The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Lecter, a psychiatrist who kills and eats his patients when they become boring, refuses to allow his captors to explain him away with therapeutic cliches.

You can't reduce me to a set of influences," he says to Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee who asks him to fill out a questionnaire. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You've got everybody in moral dignity pants-nothing is ever anybody's fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I'm evil?"

By contrast, there is no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination. It is as if he knows nothing of good and evil. If so, it wouldn't be surprising. Where, after all, would a novelist born in 1964, raised in Los Angeles, and educated at Bennington College have picked up such quaint bourgeois prejudices? No doubt Ellis spent his undergraduate years steeped in the modish brand of academic nihilism that goes by the name of "deconstruction," a school of criticism in which works of art are verbally hacked to pieces in order to prove that nothing means anything. He seems to have learned his lessons well, if a bit too literally.