When word started getting around late last year that upper-echelon executives at Simon & Schuster and its parent company, Paramount Communications, were canceling the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho¹ after learning that it was filled with horrendously explicit scenes of sexual torture and dismemberment, it seemed for a moment that we were in for another series of lectures from our elites on the stern imperatives of artistic freedom. “A black day for American publishing,” cried the Authors Guild.

Yet it was not long before it became clear that something altogether different was astir in the life of the culture. How had Simon & Schuster’s hierarchy been alerted to American Psycho in the first place? From, it turned out, articles in the press by writers who had seen the circulating galley proofs and been appalled by them. These early pieces in Time and Spy were soon joined by a chorus of pre-publication denunciations in such places as Newsweek, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, and the New York Times. And since its release in March—the novel having been snapped up by Random House, an even more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster—not only have feminist groups run a determined boycott of American Psycho, but it has received widespread critical condemnation, even from Norman Mailer, reigning champion of extreme experience and the author of a novel, An American Dream, that may have received tribute in the title of Ellis’s book.

What accounted for this unusual behavior? After all, only a few months earlier, during the uproar over government funding of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, we had all been instructed on the artist’s absolute right to express himself freely in whatsoever manner he wished. If we did not like Mapplethorpe’s photographs, we did not have to look at them, did we? One might have expected that this attitude of each-to-his-own would apply even more to a book, with its contents between closed covers, than to an exhibit mounted on the walls of a big-city museum. Yet suddenly the doctrine of absolute aesthetic freedom was taking a beating. “Standards, anyone?” Roger Rosenblatt asked at the end of his piece in the New York Times Book Review, apparently undeterred by fear of the automatic retort that had for so long followed even the tentative pronunciation of so much as the first syllable of that word: Whose standards? Who is to decide?

Granted, there was some confusion among Ellis’s critics about whether his book was offensive on moral or on aesthetic grounds. Half the time it was denounced for what was in it, the other half for how badly it was done. Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), asserted, “This is not art.” But if it were, would “those” scenes be acceptable to her, or did she mean to suggest that such depictions could not, by definition, be art?

In the meantime, Ellis himself was playing all sides of the question. In a Sunday New York Times piece that appeared some months before his novel was published, he remarked that American society in general, and his own twentysomething generation in particular, were “basically unshockable”—hence the need to render an extreme portrayal of violence. Indeed, the indifference of society to the moral nihilism of the young was a set theme in his much-acclaimed first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), which concerns a group of young and overprivileged Los Angelenos spinning aimlessly in a void of utter permissiveness.

As often happens with artists who set out to shock society, however, when society started to register the presumably hoped-for shock waves Ellis ran for cover. The reaction to his book, he orated, “reflects the intolerance of our culture to deal with anything that falls outside the acceptable.” The twist in this case was that the “culture” being intolerant of him consisted not just of the stereotypical Yahoos of the Right, always to be counted on to censor all that is daring and progressive and bold, but, as Ellis specifically complained, the “politically correct” crowd as well, with its peculiar sensitivity on the topic of women. Still another twist—a real complication, this—was that in many ways American Psycho is quite PC itself.

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The novel’s anti-hero, twenty-six-year-old Patrick Bateman, the character who commits the horrible murders described by Ellis in such grisly detail, is, in fact, an example of one of the most reviled figures of our age, the 1980’s Wall Street yuppie. Moreover, he is clearly meant to embody Reaganite America gone amok, from the portrait of Oliver North that hangs in his bedroom to his ruthless treatment of the pathetic homeless people who approach him, Dickenslike, as he leaves a restaurant after a three-figure meal. Although he is supposed to be a broker, we never see him broker anything, which is evidently part of the point; his six-figure salary from Pierce & Pierce is no more earned by him than is his large family inheritance.

Patrick spends most of his time tending to his appearance; his morning toilette makes the lazy hedonists of Les Liaisons Dangereuses seem like bustling careerists by comparison. Between facials, massages, manicures, and picking designer clothes to wear to restaurants where he and those who pass for his friends and colleagues scream at each other uncomprehendingly over the din, he is one un-busy boy. While all of this is described in ludicrously overdone detail, it does represent an attempt by Ellis to convey something about the psychopathology that drives Patrick to hideous acts of sexual torture and humiliation, murder, even cannibalism. As Mailer, whose piece appeared in the March Vanity Fair, ponderously interprets it: “American Psycho is saying that the 80’s were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror.”

With this thesis, of course, Mailer and the rest of the “politically correct” crowd could hardly agree more. Nevertheless, it was not enough to save Ellis from their disapprobation. There are perhaps two reasons for this: first, Ellis goes so far with the yuppie stuff that his novel is always threatening to turn into a satire not of Reaganite America but of people who hold such clichés about Reaganite America; and second, even a reader convinced that Ronald Reagan is the fount and focus of evil in the world may be hard put to add power-tool torture and sexual murder to his many crimes. Thus Alfred Kazin, a critic whose denunciations of Reagan and the Reagan era have rarely been equaled in their hysteria, protested in his review of American Psycho: “But really, Mr. Ellis goes too far. . . . [It] is finally difficult to be as indignant as he is about Patrick’s poster of Oliver North, the ninety dollars gentlefolk pay for a pizza, or his cruelty to homeless people with dixie cup in hand.” Mailer for his part does his best to “entertain the thesis that the unbridled manipulations of the money-decade subverted the young sufficiently to produce wholly aimless lives for a generation of Wall Street yuppies.” But then he pulls back: “But was it crowned by the ultimate expression of all these meaningless lives—one total monster, a Patrick Bateman? Can he emerge entirely out of no more than vapidity, cupidity, and social meaninglessness?”

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This astonishing admission—that there may be worse evils than those allegedly produced by Ronald Reagan—is followed by Mailer’s almost Aristotelian analysis of the problem presented by Ellis’s minute descriptions of horror. While he does not retract his own long-held insistence that the artist must be allowed—indeed encouraged—to explore forbidden territory, it does occur to Mailer that when a writer goes as far as Ellis, he ought to bring something back from the abyss:

Since we are going to have a monstrous book with a monstrous thesis, the author must rise to the occasion by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him. We pay a terrible price for reading about intimate violence—our fears are stirred, and buried savageries we do not wish to meet again in ourselves stir uneasily in the tombs to which we have consigned them. . . . If one is embarked on a novel that hopes to shake American society to the core, one has to have something new to say about the outer limits of the deranged—one cannot simply keep piling on more and more acts of machicolated butchery.

We should remember these points in future literary controversies. Suddenly, it seems, “standards” are not so impossibly difficult to invoke or define; suddenly, the encounter with the extreme in literature can have a corrupting effect on readers; suddently, freedom of expression is not an absolute.

Mailer is certainly right that the brutal scenes in American Psycho are gratuitous, coarsening, horrific, absolutely unjustified. But if Ronald Reagan did not produce Patrick Bateman/American Psycho, what did? This novel, says Mailer, shows us “where the hands have come to on the clock.” Where is that? An answer begins to peep obliquely out of Mailer’s own ramblings on American Psycho, which, he worries, ends by making evil look banal rather than satanic. “For if Hannah Arendt is correct,” he comments,

and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic. The extension of Arendt’s thesis is that we are absurd, and God and the Devil do not wage war with each other over the human outcome. I would rather believe that the Holocaust was the worst defeat God ever suffered at the hands of the Devil. That thought offers more life than to assume that many of us are nothing but dangerous, distorted, and no damn good.

This may seem odd coming from the mother of all literary bad boys, yet it is true in a qualified but measurable way that over the decades Mailer’s own flirtations with the abyss, with the void, with the forbidden, have been contingent upon some sense of a traditional moral universe as backdrop, whereas for Ellis such a backdrop seems to have all but completely collapsed. Why and how it collapsed is suggested in an epigraph by Miss Manners (Judith Martin) he has placed at the beginning of his novel:

One of the places we went wrong was the naturalistic Rousseauean movement of the 60’s in which people said, “Why can’t you just say what’s on your mind?” In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every impulse, we’d be killing one another.

In one way or another, then, Ellis seems to have absorbed a sense of our age as one in which a deluded permissiveness has badly misread human nature and the contingencies surrounding the human condition. In this light, his caricature of Reaganite America becomes a mere epiphenomenon of a deeper cultural holocaust. Indeed, when Patrick Bateman speaks his mind, he invokes not the culture of Reagan, which for better or worse is only the culture of middle-class America, but rather a phantasmagoric, quintessentially postmodernist landscape from which all traditional structures, values, truths, have been eliminated:

. . . where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire—meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in . . . this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged.

In the end, Patrick is trying to be stopped, hoping to be found out, literally screaming his confession at people who simply cannot take it in, who are, as the novel repearedly emphasizes, obtusely unaware even that crimes have been committed, let alone being ready to place him under the slightest suspicion. In a deconstructed world of jagged surfaces, devoid of hierarchies of meaning, there are no depths to cry out of, and none to receive the cry.

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I am not suggesting that Ellis really means to say all this. In fact, the catastrophic inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity that turns the novel into an example of the very disease it purports to diagnose. But just so, we should make no mistake as to what we are witnessing: a novel that both seeks to portray and at the same time is itself a manifestation of extreme cultural breakdown. As such it inadvertently forces a number of politically incorrect truths on our attention—that civilization does not cause barbarism, it controls it; that the weakening of civilized restraints does not mean the flowering of the individual but the rise of savagery; that when we deny the moral law, people will just go farther to hit bottom, to feel, if only negatively, the boundaries of their humanity.

In the meantime, Ellis’s critics, despite all their new-found moral indignation—and welcome as that is—are still missing the point, refusing to see the connection between what they denounce in him and the cultural values they themselves usually celebrate and defend. As for Ellis himself, he is getting what he called for (which is not what he wanted): a boundary, a barrier, a point at which people will fight back. But alas for all of us that it has had to go so far.

¹ Vintage Contemporaries, 399 pp., $11.00.