Eder. Óleo de Irene Gracia
Iván Thays
American Psycho, más interesante como crítica social. Fuente: papercuts En el blog Paper Cuts, Jennifer Schuessler comenta un artículo del crítico social Walter Benn Michaels titulado «Going Boom» en el que busca establecer las relaciones entre el crack (o el boom) económico y la novela. Para Michaels, la novela American Psycho de Bret Easton Ellis es más interesante de comentar desde esa perspectiva, antes que Beloved de Toni Morrison (elegida como la mejor obra narrativa de los últimos 25 años en el Book Review) o Plot Against America de Philip Roth. Así lo resume Schuessler:?For a great many Americans,? Michaels declares, ?the boom has been the problem, not the crash.? Well, thank God that?s over. To me, that sounds like something only a guy with lifetime tenure could say. And I?d be surprised if anyone on the unemployment line is raging against the outsized bonuses collected by the scouts for Oprah?s Book Club. But Michaels?s other big claim ? that Bret Easton Ellis?s ?American Psycho? is a more important novel than ?Beloved,? Philip Roth?s ?Plot Against America? or any other ?historicist work? ? is more interesting to contemplate. While Morrison and Roth were ?pandering? to ?the upper middle class?s sense of its virtue,? Ellis was ?problematizing? it, Michaels writes. ?You get a better sense of the actual structure of American society from any of Ellis?s famous descriptions of what people are wearing (?a suit by Lubiam, a great-looking striped spread-collar cotton shirt from Burberry, a silk tie by Resikeio and a belt from Ralph Lauren?) than you do from all the accounts of people reclaiming, refusing, or repurposing their cultural identities.?
