The history of book banning is almost as old as books themselves. But in a landmark 1933 U.S. court decision, a judge named John Woolsey, after looking at the book as a whole rather than identifying individual “obscene” passages, ruled that the novel Ulysses wasn’t obscene under American law. This paved the way for the publishing of such controversial works as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Howl, Naked Lunch, and Fanny Hill. By the time Bret Easton Ellis submitted his novel American Psycho to Simon & Schuster in 1990, it was settled law that the government couldn't censor books for their explicit sexual content. The question this book prompted was, “Is American Psycho so morally repulsive that a major commercial publisher should refuse to publish it?” As the government wasn’t involved, this was not a matter of “censorship.” It was a business decision.
The book became a scandal even before it was released. The manuscript leaked after female employees of the publishing house got their hands on it, and then all hell broke loose. The protagonist, Patrick Bateman was a serial killer by night with a day job as an investment banker on Wall Street. He dressed so well, and had refined manners—just like Ted Bundy. Ellis wrote graphic descriptions of this slick sicko torturing, mutilating and murdering women. He threw in some necrophilia and cannibalism. These are the unthinkable things that psycho killers do, and artists are supposed to have license to depict human behavior—even at its most depraved—but it was too much for many to handle. Feminists didn't dig it.
Critics called the work "vile," "worthless," and "pornography." The National Organization for Women (NOW) and activists such as Tammy Bruce and Gloria Steinem claimed the book glamorized sadistic violence against women and promoted misogyny. NOW called for a total boycott of the publisher and all of its titles. Simon & Schuster couldn't handle the heat. They cancelled the book just weeks before it was scheduled to be published, even though they'd already paid the author of Less Than Zero a $300,000 advance and completed the editing process. The publishers’ CEO, Richard Snyder, stated it was an "error of judgment” to put their name on a book of such questionable taste.
Patrick Bateman was a misogynist who enjoyed committing gruesome violence against women, but the detailed descriptions of his atrocities were not made in Ellis’ voice—or in the voice of anyone who wasn't a crazed sociopath. As Bateman derives pleasure from hideous acts, naturally he's going to get satisfaction by describing them down to the goriest detail. It was Ellis’ intention to demonstrate this, but the subtlety of his novelistic technique was lost on the detractors. Works of art depicting violence aren’t automatically pro-violence, but American Psycho spends so much time describing violence against women in sexually-charged, voyeuristic detail that it's not difficult to understand why some interpreted it as violent pornography.
In Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita, protagonist Humbert Humbert is, like Bateman, a morally bankrupt, unreliable narrator. But the two books have faced different reckonings. Lolita wasn’t easy to publish due to its taboo subject matter. A number of American publishers rejected the book, forcing the author to turn to Olympia Press in Paris. While American Psycho’s reputation has been rehabilitated in the intervening years, Lolita, a book narrated by a pedophile trying to make readers think he's in a beautiful relationship with a 12-year-old girl, is now a part of the literary canon.
One reason for the difference in treatment is that Humbert doesn't share his moves in the bedroom with Dolores Haze, which would’ve made the book unpublishable. Instead, he tries to mesmerize the reader with his elegant language, which makes his crimes much easier to handle than Bateman describing his use of a power tool to drill through a woman's clenched teeth. There's also a sadistic scene involving a naked woman, a piece of Brie cheese—the psycho narrator is very detail oriented—and a rat. I regret reading it. Bateman documents his tortures and murders with the flat, matter-of-fact tone one would use to explain the home assembly process for Ikea furniture.
There's no charming language in American Psycho to gloss over the horror, which is one reason why Lolita is regularly assigned reading in college English classes, while American Psycho is generally consigned to English courses engaging with extreme and satirical intentions. Ellis responded to the controversy by claiming the violence wasn't intended to give readers the voyeuristic pleasure of watching women being tortured. He added that writing some of the scenes caused him great distress. The writer presented his book as a semi-comic satire of 1980s Wall Street culture, the yuppie lifestyle, consumerism and masculinity. He said the flat, numbing style with which Bateman recounted his violence was aimed at highlighting the banality and desensitization of the era.
At least four writers from The New York Times trashed the book but, in the end, things worked out well for Ellis. He kept Simon & Schuster’s advance of $300,000, and when Random House immediately picked up American Psycho, they paid him another $350,000. The high-profile brouhaha surrounding his novel made for great publicity at zero cost.
Once again, the Streisand Effect came into play after an effort was made to suppress something. The 2000 film version of American Psycho, superior to the book, has succeeded in changing perceptions of Bateman. Christian Bale's portrayal turned him into a cultural fixture while illustrating the satirical dimension that the much more graphic violence in the novel worked to cloud over.