The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bret Easton Ellis · a novel in short titled chapters · Vintage Books, 1991 · scored on Ellis’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Satirical novel of manners as horror; consumer satire, slasher, confession and record guide in one voice
Mythos
Manhattan’s money district as a circle of hell, entered under the words over Dante’s gate and closed by a sign that denies an exit; the double with no original, a monster whose mask is the face of his class
Phase
From a taxi ride downtown past an inscription on a bank’s wall, through dinners, routines and killings, to a bar and a sign over a door, with the narrator unchanged between
Presentation
Fiction; a long run of short titled chapters with no parts, three of them given to popular music; first person, present tense, told by Patrick Bateman
Register
One flat register held across every kind of matter: the inventory sentence, the comic dinner talk in which no one hears anyone, the earnest pastiche of the record guide, and the refrain of an excuse
Scale
One consciousness, one stratum of one city, and a short span of the late 1980s
Governing Proposition
A young man at a firm on Wall Street tells, in the present tense and with the same flat attention, his grooming, his clothes, his dinners, his opinions of popular records and the killings he commits, which grow in number and in horror while no one around him notices; his confession, left on his lawyer’s answering machine, is taken for a joke. The wager of the novel is that a society which values persons as surfaces cannot see the person at all, and that a voice which gives a suit and a murder the same weight, held without relief, can make the reader undergo that blindness rather than observe it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens in a taxi going downtown. On the wall of a bank, in capitals, someone has written “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE”: the inscription over the gate of Dante’s hell, as graffiti on a bank. The words are read off the wall from the cab, and the book takes them as its threshold. What follows is set inside the place they announce, the money district of Manhattan in the late 1980s, and the book will not let its narrator out of it.
The narrator is Patrick Bateman. He works at Pierce & Pierce, on Wall Street, a firm whose name is taken from Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Around him move Timothy Price, Evelyn Williams, Courtney, Jean, Paul Owen, Luis Carruthers; on his television every morning is the Patty Winters Show. He tells everything in the first person and in the present tense. Nothing in the book is remembered and nothing is set in perspective by a later moment: it only occurs, and he reports it as it does.
The book is a long run of short chapters with no parts, and the chapters are titled as a diary of routines is titled, so that a meal, a pop group and a killing stand on the same footing in the table of contents, as they do in the narrator’s attention. The form announces at once what the voice will do: it will give everything the same weight.
Movement II
Bateman’s morning is given in full: every product named, every step of the regimen in order, the body maintained as a surface is maintained. His clothes, and the clothes of everyone he meets, are inventoried in the same way, by maker and by cut. The sentence that does this is flat and exact, and it never slips into an irony that would let the reader stand outside it.
The men eat out. The dinners repeat, with small variation, through the first half of the book: the restaurants, the clothes of each guest, the talk in which no one hears what anyone else says. Throughout, Bateman seeks a table at Dorsia, and cannot get one: it is the one thing in the book he cannot buy. His colleagues confuse one another by name, and Bateman is repeatedly taken for someone else. No one in the circle can tell one man from the next, and no one tries.
At the office the men compare their new business cards. Each card is described down to its lettering and its stock, and the scene turns a few cards on a table into a duel of status, fought in lettering and card stock. Bateman is sick with envy at Paul Owen’s. The comedy is exact, and it is the first place where the reader feels the voice’s pressure: a man whose worth is his card has a grievance against the man whose card is better.
Movement III
Three chapters are given to popular music: “Genesis”, “Whitney Houston” and “Huey Lewis and the News”. In each the narrator writes as a record guide writes, earnestly, album by album, about the most commercial music of his decade. They are exact pastiches, earnest and banal. The voice cannot judge; it can only praise, and in these chapters it is heard in its purest form, with nothing to describe but a product it admires.
Through the book runs an excuse: “I have to return some videotapes”. Bateman uses it at the end of evenings to leave, and uses it in the middle of atrocity. It is placed like a refrain, and it is the same sentence wherever it falls. The television brings the Patty Winters Show in the mornings and, once, a president’s speech; the state appears only on a screen.
Between the dinners the killings begin. Homeless men Bateman passes on the street are harmed, and then the violence grows, and it is told in the voice of the inventories, at the same pitch and in the same order of detail. The reader, trained by the inventories to skim the lists of clothes, finds himself skimming horror. That discovery is what the book has been building toward.
Movement IV
Bateman kills Paul Owen in his apartment with an axe, and afterwards uses Owen’s flat. A detective, Donald Kimball, comes to ask about Owen, and the two men talk past each other about where he might be. Nothing in the conversation touches what has happened. The detective is looking for a man who has gone missing, and he is talking to the man who killed him, and neither the law nor the talk can find the fact.
In the second half the killings repeat with escalation. In the late chapters, in his apartment, they pass beyond any human measure, and the flat inventory of what is done becomes a terror the reader cannot leave. The violence falls above all on women, and it is extended at such length that it competes with the meaning it serves. The voice that described a moisturiser describes these things in the same way, and the chapters lose control of their own escalation: each catalogue of the unbearable does less than the one before.
There is a chase across Manhattan, a spree in which Bateman kills by chance, and the horror rises there as high as anywhere in the book. Nothing follows from it. No one is looking for the man who did these things, and the dinners go on, because for the people at the table nothing has happened.
Movement V
Bateman confesses. He leaves the whole of it, at length, on his lawyer’s answering machine. When he meets the lawyer later, the lawyer takes the message for a joke, and says that he has dined in London with Paul Owen. Owen’s apartment, where killings were done, has been cleaned and is offered for sale. The book plants evidence each way, and settles nothing: whether the killings happened, or some of them, or none, it does not say. In a world of surfaces even atrocity cannot be verified, and the confession has no addressee because no one is listening.
Bateman states his condition himself, and exactly: “there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman”, and, of the person the idea should stand for, “I simply am not there”. The two phrases are the book’s self-portrait: a figure made of surfaces, a name others confuse, a man who is a vacancy in the shape of a man. His family appears thinly, a mother in a sanatorium, a brother, Sean, at dinner, and does not change what he is.
The last scene is a bar. Over a door there is a sign, and the book’s last words are what it says: “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT”. The opening inscription named the gate; the closing one denies the way out. Between the two the narrator has not changed, and the book has not let him. It ends where it began, inside.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book’s defence is that the excess is the argument. The restaurant scenes, the morning routine, the inventories of what each guest wears and the reservations sought at Dorsia repeat with small variation; the killings, in the second half, repeat with escalation. Cut the repetition and the argument becomes an anecdote: the claim is that a life composed of interchangeable surfaces has no events, and the reader must be made to undergo that sameness. The three music chapters are required, as the purest form of the voice, which can only praise. What holds the axis is that the repetition outlasts its point. A reader grasps the law of the catalogue well before the book stops applying it, and several killings and several dinners could go without the knowledge changing, perhaps a fifth of the whole.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a society that values persons as surfaces, the cut of a suit, the stock of a business card, the table secured, cannot see the person at all, and violence done inside such a society leaves no mark on it. Bateman is repeatedly taken for someone else, and his colleagues confuse one another by name. When he confesses, at length, to his lawyer’s answering machine, the lawyer takes it as a joke and says he has dined in London with Paul Owen, whom Bateman has killed. The confession has no addressee because no one is listening. Bateman’s own statement of it is exact: “there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman”, and “I simply am not there”. Held at the gate and not above it because much of the condition is a numbness, a mood, and because the violence against women is so extended that it competes with the meaning it serves.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is what the book is built to refuse, and the refusal is its law and its limit. A voice that describes a murder in the cadence of a complaint about dry cleaning allows no height, and it is meant not to. What rises does so as horror, in a few places and at real height: the chase through Manhattan, a spree of killing by chance; the late chapters in his apartment, where the killings pass beyond any human measure and the flat inventory of what is done becomes a terror the reader cannot leave; and the last scene, the bar and the sign. Frequency is low by design, and the long middle of dinners and clothes stays at ground level. What holds the axis there is the design itself: a flatness that caps the height it would have to reach.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Part of the myth is built. The book opens with the inscription over Dante’s gate, read off a bank’s wall, and closes on a sign that denies an exit, so that Manhattan’s money district is framed as a circle of hell from which the narrator never moves. Within the frame Bateman is the double who has no original: a monster whose mask is the face of his class, nearly a vampire in his appetites and his invisibility, whose name sounds the motel keeper’s in Psycho. The figure has outgrown the book as only an archetype does: the smiling killer in the good suit. Held below the gate because the frame is set at the two ends more than carried through the middle; the descent does not structure the chapters, which are a diary and not a descent; and the monster is evoked against the culture as much as built into a pattern that bears load.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Dostoevsky’s underground man; de Sade’s catalogues; the consumer litany of DeLillo and, before him, Perec’s Les Choses; Tom Wolfe’s Wall Street, from which the narrator’s firm, Pierce & Pierce, takes its name; the blank minimalism of Ellis’s own first two novels; the slasher film and the true-crime confession. The turn is in the fusion and in the levelling. The book holds the satirical novel of manners and the pornography of torture in a single register, so that the brand of a raincoat and the dismemberment of a woman receive the same attention, and it gives whole chapters to a narrator’s earnest pop criticism. The stake was as high as a novel’s can be: cancellation by its first publisher, protest and boycott before publication, reviews that urged readers not to buy it. Held below the gate because each element was inherited, and the swerve is in their combination and in the risk, not in a new instrument.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first person in the present tense, with no memory and no judgment, puts the reader inside a consciousness that gives a suit and a murder the same weight. Told in the third person, or from outside, the book would become a satire about a killer; as it stands, the reader is made to share the levelling and, worse, the boredom. The catalogue is the instrument: when the killings arrive, the reader has been trained to skim inventory and finds himself skimming horror. The ambiguity of the end, Owen said to be alive in London and an apartment where killings were done cleaned and offered for sale, is form too: in a world of surfaces even atrocity cannot be verified. Held off the top because the chaptered diary is loose, and many chapters could stand in another order.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and the evidence is thirty-five years of return in which the central questions stay open. Whether the killings happen, or some of them, or none: the book plants evidence each way and settles nothing. Whether it is a satire of misogyny or an instance of it: the question the protest raised before publication, and still argued. Whether Bateman is a man or a vacancy. The book is studied and taught, and the questions have not closed. Held below the higher reaches because much of its yield lies on its surface: once the law of the catalogue is seen, a return finds the same law, and the open questions are fewer than they first appear.
Score: 8.2 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together; the field is American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is real: the book brought the extremity of transgressive fiction into the literary novel of manners and joined the consumer satire to horror in one voice, a reorganisation of what the realist novel of money could hold; but it worked with instruments others had made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the defining novel of its decade’s excess, and a touchstone for later fiction of corporate and consumer violence and for what was called blank fiction; its figure passed through Mary Harron’s film of 2000 into a lasting place in the culture, and Bateman remains a common type and image thirty-five years on. The charge: much of that reach belongs to the figure, carried by the film, more than to the novel’s form, which few later novelists took up.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on what has been shown. The form survives whole, the text as published. Presence is wide: the book is in print and read thirty-five years on, more read now than at publication, and kept in view by the film. The surface is heavily dated: the brands, the restaurants and the music of the late 1980s, and a property developer named as the narrator’s hero. That surface is the book’s subject, not its accident, and the book has outlived the decade it catalogues. Two charges hold it a tenth below what its span alone would give: the dated surface, which needs more annotation each year, and the share of its presence carried by the film’s figure rather than by the text. Thirty-five years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Ellis’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a register, and of its control over the length of a long book. The flat inventory sentence never slips into the irony that would let the reader out; the comic dialogue of the dinners, where no one hears what anyone says, is exactly timed; the scene of the business cards turns a few cards on a table into a duel of status and envy; the music chapters are exact pastiches of the record guide, earnest and banal. The recurring excuse, “I have to return some videotapes”, is placed like a refrain. Charged: the voice’s monotony is a design but also a ceiling, and the sentence, chosen to be anonymous, can do little besides list; and the killing chapters lose control of their own escalation and become catalogues of the unbearable whose effect diminishes with each.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the music chapter on Huey Lewis and the News, a comedy of earnest banality, and a killing in the late chapters, a horror past measure. They obey one law: a consciousness made of surfaces registers everything as product and value, and the same voice appraises an album and a body. The law governs the uncanny too. In a world where persons are interchangeable, even reality cannot be fixed, and the evidence at the end that points both ways is the book’s physics, not a breach of it. The frame, the gate at the opening and the sign at the close, holds the whole. Charged: the satire of the dinners and the pornography of the killings sit under one law but at a distance the book does not always bridge, so that it can read as two books bound together.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held are several, and one consciousness holds them. Finance and class, in Wall Street and in the homeless men Bateman passes and harms. The consumer economy, at every level from moisturiser to restaurant. The media, in the Patty Winters Show and the pop chapters. Sexuality and violence, above all against women. The family, thinly, in a visit to his mother in a sanatorium and a dinner with his brother Sean. The state appears on television, as a president’s speech. They are integrated, not listed: every order arrives priced. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent, by design or not: labour beyond the trading desk, history, the sacred, the natural order, and any consciousness but one empty one. The field is a stratum of one city over a short span.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.5. A disclosure that holds, that a society which values persons as surfaces cannot see the person, made literal in a confession taken for a joke; a form, the first person in the present tense with no memory and no judgment, that makes the reader share the levelling it shows; a text that survives whole and is more read now than when its brands meant something; and one law, the same voice appraising an album and a body, holding from the gate at the opening to the sign at the close.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: finance, consumption, the media, sexuality and violence are held by one consciousness and arrive priced, but labour beyond the trading desk, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, in a stratum of one city over a short span. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.5, where a voice built to refuse height rises only as horror, late and in a few places, and The Inevitable at 7.8, where the repetition that is the argument outlasts its point.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment at 8.5 and The Imperishable at 8.5 meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall a tenth short, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 falls five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met exactly, since The Sublime at 7.5 is the lowest axis it counts, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.2, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, published by Vintage Books, New York, in 1991, as a paperback original: his third novel, after Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987). Simon & Schuster, which had contracted the book, cancelled its publication in November 1990 after advance extracts drew protest, and Vintage, an imprint of Random House, took it up. It is scored as one novel, a long run of short titled chapters with no parts, in Ellis’s English as first published. Mary Harron’s film of 2000 is not part of the work, and is used only as evidence of the book’s reach and presence. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Ellis’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain, in short phrases; the inscriptions at the opening and the close are given in the capitals in which the book sets them. Chapters are named only where their titles are certain, the three given to music. The proportions of the book, the share of its pages given to inventory, to dinners and to killing, the share of dialogue and the length of its chapters, are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the month of publication, the page and chapter counts, the titles of the other chapters, the epigraphs, the exact span of the action, whether and where the narration leaves the first person, the size of the cancelled advance, the leaders of the protest, the record of the book’s critics and its adaptations beyond the film, are not given. Citations are by episode.