I closed my eyes again. I did not want to go back to that book. It had been about my father (his rage, his obsession with status, his loneliness) whom I had transformed into a fictional serial killer, and I was not to put myself through that experience again - of revisiting either Robert Ellis or Patrick Bateman. I have moved past the casual carnage that was so prevalent in the books I'd conceived in my twenties, past the severed heads and the soup made of blod and the woman vaginally penetrated with her own rib. Exploring that kind of violence was 'interesting' and 'exciting' and it was all 'metaphorical' anyway - at least to me at that moment in my life, when I was young and pissed of and had not yet grasped my own mortality, a time when physical pain and real suffering had no meaning for me. I was 'transgressive' and the book was really about style and there was no point now in revealing the crimes of Patrick Bateman and the horror they's inspired.
Sitting in my office in front of Kimball, I realized that at various times I had fantasized about this exact moment. This was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this book, B.E.E. was to blame. Gloria Steinem has reiterated this over and over to Larry King in 1991 and that's why the National Organisation for Women had boycotted the book (In a small world filled with black, Ms Steinem eventually married David Bale, the father of the actor who played Patrick Bateman in the movie). I thought the idea was laughable - that there was no one as insane and vicious as this victional character out in the real world. Besides, Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator and if you actually read the book, you could come away doubting that these crimes had even occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman's mind.
The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fueled by his rage and fury about how life in America was structured and how this had—no matter the size of his wealth—trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book's thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this? Yet because of the severity of the outcry over the novel the fear that maybe it wasn't such a laughable idea was never far away; always lurking was the worry about what might happen if the book fell into the wrong hands. Who knew, then, what it could inspire? And after the killings in Toronto it was no longer lurking—it was real, it existed, and it tortured me. But that had been more than ten years ago and a decade had passed without anything remotely similar happening. The book had made me wealthy and famous but I never wanted to touch it again. Now it all came rushing back, and I found myself in Patrick Bateman's shoes: I felt like an unreliable narrator, even though I knew I wasn't. Yet then I thought: Well, had he?

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на американския пазар от 16 август 2005.

Редактирано от Бoзa Kocмaтa на 10.10.05 23:00.