Bret Easton Ellis received 13 death threats before American Psycho was even published. He had to sign a declaration saying he had read them all. That way, if somebody did murder him, his parents couldn’t sue the publisher. This was in 1991. “I would not have the impulse to write that book again,” Ellis says now, during a visit to the Guardian. “It came from that time and place ... And does anyone remember that there was no one there for me at all? I had to pretty much go through a trial by fire on my own.”
Ellis’s publisher, Vintage, had only taken on the book because its original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew at the last minute. There had been what they called “aesthetic differences over what critics had termed its violent and women-hating content”. The National Organisation for Women called for a boycott of the book, and every other book from the same publisher. “This is not art,” said Tammy Bruce, president of NOW’s LA chapter. “Mr Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck.”
Ellis seemed bemused at the time, and not apologetic. He thought the violence in American Psycho, which was made into a film starring Christian Bale in 2000, so obviously exaggerated that it could not be taken seriously, let alone considered dangerous in real life. Talking to the New York Times, he said: “You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you.” The justification, in other words, is that you don’t need a justification. Ellis wrote about a man torturing women to death because, for him, it felt right.
In retrospect, American Psycho, and perhaps Michel Houellebecq’s 1998 novel Atomised, look like the end of a long line. In the last century, a great novel was half expected to shock its early readers. Distinguished examples included Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Jude the Obscure, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Portnoy’s Complaint. Like American Psycho, many of these books had to fight their way into print, which was often perversely helpful. Hearing that a book is too shocking to read, people naturally become eager to read it. Vladimir Nabokov published 14 novels in Russian and English without the world much noticing until he sold Lolita to a Parisian pornographer. That route to fame is now closed, and some of the most transgressive novelists of the 1990s – people such as Kathy Acker, Darius James, Dennis Cooper and Stewart Home – are today relatively little known. “I can’t imagine releasing American Psycho now,” Ellis says. “Would it get a response? Would you have to self-publish it on some weird edge of the web?”
Still, you can’t say that novels have grown milder, or that shocking ones go unnoticed. The following books feature a central female character who seeks out violent or degrading sex: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013), Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018), Adèle by Leïla Slimani (2014), You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian (2019), How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti (2010) and Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce (2013). In these books, children are raped, tortured or murdered: Lullaby by Leïla Slimani (2016), My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent (2017), The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016), A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing again, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (2015), Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (2015), The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (2014). You might expect to find evidence of any trend you like in a decade’s worth of novels, but to find these examples you only need to look at prize lists and bestseller charts. None attracted much in the way of scandal. Many contain scenes of sexual violence which, in the UK, might be illegal on film. (The law is tricky. It would depend whether the film was made “solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal”.)
If Lolita is a scandalous novel about child abuse, why are A Little Life and My Absolute Darling, which are much more graphic, so much less so? Times have changed since 1955, of course, but the idea of the novel’s purpose has changed too. “My aim is never, and never was, to be shocking or provocative,” Yanagihara tells me. “I have always maintained that all kinds of lives belong in fiction, including violent lives or ones marked by suffering: extreme lives, in other words. But extreme lives are all around us, every day, and fiction must reflect them, too.”
In an interview with this newspaper Tallent said something similar about his main character, Turtle. “I wanted to write her so that the damage we do to women would appear to you, as it appears to me,” he said, “real and urgent and intolerable.” Nabokov knew that Lolita would shock people, but wrote the book anyway because ultimately, like Ellis, he wanted to. By contrast, Yanahigara and Tallent feel that shocking readers is justified, even necessary, because they hope that it will be of public benefit. Either way, readers still devour shocking novels, just as they devoured the memoirs of suffering, and especially child abuse, which were one of the biggest trends in publishing in the 2000s. Altogether it suggests that having an outward social purpose is now an important part of making shocking books successful.
“It’s shocking because it’s true,” says Slimani. Her first novel to appear in English, Lullaby, tells the story of a nanny driven to murder the two children in her care; her second, Adèle, which she wrote first, tells the story of a woman experiencing sex addiction. “I never meant to shock people,” she says. “I just meant to disturb them, make them feel something. I think that literature is here to disturb us.” For Slimani, there is something almost immoral about picking up a novel in order to feel better. “I hate the expression ‘feelgood books’,” she says. “The meaning of a book is to awaken you, to make you feel alive, to make you open your eyes and look at human beings differently.”
Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others includes scenes of torture, coprophilia, child rape and murder, and, like A Little Life and Eileen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. In a conversation with Yanahigara last year, Mukherjee captured the different attitudes to a novel’s purpose, including his own. “The world is divided between two kinds of writers,” he said. “Those who think that the self is the only true subject, and those who think that only the world outside the self is worth writing about; in other words, fiction as mirror versus fiction as window pane.” In this reading, perhaps, Mukherjee, Yanahigara and Tallent are window novelists. Ellis is a mirror novelist. In Mukherjee’s view, the mirror side is prevailing.
Even so, the purpose of a novel can be hard to pin down, because what a writer puts into a book and what readers take out may not be the same thing. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce tells the story of Marie, a teenage mother adrift in a life of compulsive promiscuity, self-harm and drug-taking. Tierce agrees that novels don’t seem to cause the scandals that they used to, but when I ask if people ever say that they found hers emotionally gruelling, she says: “Oh, all the time.” Tierce was for three years executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, which helps people to pay for abortions, and she too hopes that her book will benefit the world, at least a little. “It wasn’t constructed with that purpose,” she adds quickly, “although I don’t know why it feels important to me to make that distinction.”
Perhaps because a novel written consciously as a social duty sounds dull and manipulative. In any case, Tierce’s real purpose was personal. When she discusses how much of Love Me Back came from her own experience, she sounds less like Mukherjee and more like Ellis. Never mind other people’s suffering, “I felt a lot of allegiance to my past self as the sufferer,” she says. “And there was a way that recording some of my experiences really did give them some value that they didn’t have as long as they were unrecorded.”
Despite Slimani’s sense of social purpose, her true subject sounds like the self as well. “There is nothing off-limits in literature. Nothing,” she says. “I can do whatever I want, and I can say what I feel is true but is impossible to express in real life because it would be hard to accept, or people would judge me. Actually I feel very free when I write, and I want to use this freedom to go as far as I can go. So when I kill the children it’s not really shocking for me when I’m writing it. In a way it’s liberating, because I’m so scared, like so many mothers and fathers in the world, to lose my children … When I write it I have the real impression that it can’t happen now. That it can’t happen to me because I wrote it. It’s some sort of catharsis, the fact of writing.”
This is important, because it shows how a novel can end up having a social purpose even though its author didn’t, at least at first, intend one. It’s another result of there being so many novels. Readers, publishers, critics can filter the pile for whatever pleases them and discern what looks like a trend in writing. Right now extreme material with social value does well, maybe because readers want to be better people, maybe because they are artistically curious. Maybe they want a pretext to enjoy the titillation of sex and violence, just as they always did.
If you doubt that people would be so ingenious in their search for extreme reading, consider the Victorians. It’s easy to dismiss it now, but people who seriously believed that masturbation damages your health had a good reason to ban erotic books. Naturally it was sometimes necessary to document sexual matters for practical reasons, in medical texts, for instance, or legal reports. Lawmakers therefore tried to allow sensible, learned people (all of them, in practice, wealthy men) to read whatever they wanted, while protecting the health of those less able to control themselves. It wasn’t easy. Almost anything can be erotic in the hands of someone with few options and a determined frame of mind. This gave rise to some very convoluted pornography, which smuggled titillation into print under the pretext of a higher purpose. The Confessional Unmasked, a suspiciously popular exposé of the obscene things that Catholic priests were allegedly asking women in confession, was banned in 1868, because its readers’ motives might have been more recreational than spiritual.
Later, the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed the defence of “innocent dissemination”, and added a new one. An otherwise obscene novel could now be justified if it brought some public benefit – for instance, if it was art. This was the defence Penguin used successfully for their hastily reissued edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover a year later.
Shocking material in novels has been justified on practical, artistic and social grounds, but apparently it still needs justifying. Few people are ready to say that it is normal and harmless, and that they enjoy it. In its high school study guide for The Underground Railroad, Penguin Random House warns teachers about the “numerous scenes of violence (sexual and physical)” that their students (aged 16-18) will encounter. But teachers “should not”, the guide adds, “avoid exposing students to these moments; rather, helping students navigate them through discussion and critical analysis will deepen their knowledge of the impact of enslavement as experienced by so many”.
That may well be true, but it is strange to consider it a warning. Scenes of violence, sexual and physical, are reliably popular, even – perhaps especially – when they show us the very worst things that people do. If you doubt this, just look at newspaper coverage, war movies, misery memoirs, video games, serial killer documentaries, Game of Thrones …
And isn’t this something that most publishers know perfectly well? The review quotes on my copy of Eileen try to attract readers by promising that the book will be “squalid”, “ugly”, “shocking”, “merciless”, “unsettling” and “disquieting”. My own book, Consent, boasts of being “unsettling”, “disturbing”, “nasty” and “shocking”. Visit another page of the Penguin Random House website and you’ll find someone saying that The Underground Railroad is “horrific” being called an example of “praise”. Readers of crime fiction or erotic fiction know perfectly well that they are paying to be titillated. Maybe some readers of literary fiction, like the Victorians, pay not to know.
