It was a decade of surface veneer and the value of objects, something American Psycho obsessively recreates in its satire of the '80s. Patrick Bateman, the monstrous cipher at the center of Brett Easton Ellis' controversial novel, is a Wall Street Master of the Universe, and a Swiftian product of his times. Like most of the protagonists in Ellis' novels, he is vacuous, possessing neither a moral center nor a conscience for his reprehensible deeds - perhaps because he is among the elite, and from that feeling of having everything, there's nowhere else to go other than into sinful revelry. Even that is not enough to make him actually feelsomething.