The Doings At Other Book Clubs

Never wanting to skip a reason to cross two entire states twice in one day, a week ago or so I bolted for the fantastic city of White Plains, took the much-touted Metro North into the city and attended a discussion on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, presided over by Gage McWeeny, a professor at Williams. This was part of the Williams Club’s series of discussions about books that have been made into semi-autonomous movies (that is, movie-book duos where both are agreed to be worth it; so like, The Cat in the Hat is out on one end, The Godfather on the other, and The Fountainhead on both).

This whole discussion was great good fun, because it was basically English class minus pressure and plus cocktails. What made it singular, or close to singular, or mentionable here in a context of more interest than pure praise, was that it represented to me a distinct way of talking about a book. Almost the entire discussion was geared around what I would call orientation. Normally the relationship between a reader and his book is one of use, and is assumed: at the most basic level, it is taken to provide amusement, and at higher, murkier levels, it may provide dignity or depth of feeling or whatever. But nobody asked what American Psycho might help us do, at least not at first; rather, we discussed what was the proper way to position ourselves to it.

I spent all day today watching baseball and reading book reviews from the Times, and while they ranged from high praise to sniffy contempt, they all took as their object – the thing under review – to be what the author had set out to do, and how well she had accomplished it. Not so, with American Psycho: what we talked about was how we related to it, whether we were allowed to take certain attitudes toward it or not. The capacity of this book – of any book – to cause real discomfort seemed a peculiar phenomenon. I don’t want to act as though I wasn’t made uncomfortable by American Psycho – it made me uncomfortable to the point that I opted out of lending it to a friend of mine who loved the movie – but I still wonder. For one thing, there are things as disturbing in other books that are not so discomfiting on the whole. Hannibal Lecter, from his cheesy books, is not less clinically creepy than Bateman. The problem maybe the first-person narration, a famously sympathizing gesture (though Ellis doesn’t use it much, and his robotic protagonist, even when he generates positive feeling from his readers, doesn’t quite get sympathy [I am at a loss to describe what quite it is he gets]). And the cinematic novels of Hannibal Lecter and his ilk, as David Foster Wallace said of mainstream films, “set us up so relentlessly to approve the villains’ bloody punishment in the climax that we might as well be wearing togas” (from “David Lynch Keeps His Head”).

Anyway, this seemed peculiar to me at that discussion. Can the merits of books that are utterly morally discomfiting sit at the table with books like Nicholas Nickelby? Can we shelve the moral problems with it and put its aesthetic merits (which are ample) on the same high-praise-to-sniffy-contempt scale that the Times uses? Are there other books that go in this slot where moral orientation is more important than artistic assessment? I have no idea. Post away, thereon, below.