Chapter Summaries 9: Chase Manhattan, 4 chapters,The Best City for Business, End of the 1980s, Aspen, New Club, Taxi Driver, At Harry's

These are the chapters that take us to the end of the novel, and me, probably just like you, feel like it ends very abruptly and without much closure. In Chase Manhattan, the arguable climax of the novel, Bateman is in the most panicked and sadistic frenzy he's ever been in, and runs around the city killing about 10 people and blowing up a cop car. Some of the people he kills includes many police, a janitor, a taxi driver, a man playing a saxophone for money, a lobby attendant, and a security guard. While a police helicopter shines a spotlight at the building he just fled from, he calls his lawyer and admits all of crimes and murders onto his answering machine. Why, I'm not exactly sure, but he probably wants some sort of relief from admitting all of this, like a burden lifted off his shoulders, but he receives nothing. I didn't include the names of the next four chapters because they are all around a page long and nothing of real significance occurs in them. He included them I'm guessing in order to give the reader a little time to digest what had just happened. Afterwards, in the next chapter, he revisits Paul Owen's apartment, a place he has not been since he tortured and murder a pair of prostitutes, and is shocked to see it is for sale. A real estate lady meets him, and soon after realizing he doesn't have an appointment to tour the apartment, ushers him away. Next, he has dinner with Jean where she admits she loves him. He reacts to this kind of oddly, not returning the same feeling, but saying that for some reason he can finally accept it. He wonders if Jean can see the darkness lifting from his eyes, and he feels the coldness that he's always felt leave him, but his numbness to the world doesn't. In random spurts of a stream of consciousness, he admits once again how nothing matters, no emotions, no talent or skill, or anything that lies below someone's surface. In Aspen, he finds out Jeanette is pregnant, but he tells her to get an abortion and never wants to see her again. In New Club, he confronts his lawyer about his frantic voice mail, which Harold thinks is a complete joke. The only flaw, he says, is that Bateman is a "spineless, ass-kisser, brown-nosed goody goody." (He thinks Patrick is someone named Davis." This is where the strangest part of the entire novel occurs. Bateman then says that he is Patrick and that he killed Owen and liked it, and Harold says that that's impossible because he "had dinner with him in London twice just 10 days ago." This would be extremely impossible because Bateman swung an ax through his head, but since Bateman has been the narrator this entire time, who knows if he's been telling the truth. For all we know, every single murder might have actually never occurred. This is a very abstract thought, and the fact that the entire novel I just read might be a lie is concerning to me, almost annoying. Anyways, in the next chapter he gets into a cab where the driver recognizes him as the guy who killed "Solly." (Solly must have been the taxi driver he shot in his frenzy a few days earlier.) The man pulls over and robs Bateman. The significance is that this is the first time in the entire novel that he's actually been caught for one of his crimes, which is really outstanding if you think about it. Too be able to kill that many people in so many different ways and never get caught once is an insane thing, and the fact that this man was able to pull that off is quite frankly amazing. Horrible and senseless, but nonetheless amazing. In the last chapter of the book, Patrick is sitting at Harry's with a few friends, where conversation is as mindless as ever. His final comment explains how everything he has done is what being Patrick means to him (whatever that means). All in all,slightly disappointing with the ending, but it fits perfectly for this book. It was a very good book, but one that I'm not sure I could read again simply because of its grotesque amount of detail.