In an interview on Essential New York Novels

Next let’s flash-forward to the late 1980s and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Tell us about it.

It’s a brilliant satire of greed and the mindlessness of popular culture, of American life and of New York in the 80s. It’s a very thorough catalogue of the fixtures of urban existence in that era. This is the anti-romantic novel among my five books. It says that New Yorkers are so busy trying to get ahead that they don’t even notice when people are being killed next door. The killer in their midst, the main character, Patrick Bateman, is described by others as banal, boring. American Psycho was very controversial at the time because of its violence, but I think it’s a novel that justifies its violence.

You, Ellis, and a few of your contemporaries were called a literary “brat pack” by the press. How did what your pack wrote impact on the New York novel?

When I published Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, it didn’t seem that there was a New York novel. It had been a very long time since anyone had succeeded with writing about New York. David Epstein, my publisher, told me that although he liked my book he thought few people would be interested in New York as a literary subject. It had been quite a while since any book about the city had attracted a lot of attention.

After Bright Lights, Big City, suddenly there were dozens of novels by young writers set in New York. I like to think I helped to revivify the New York novel and inject it with fresh aspects from the contemporary culture. My publisher also said to me that nightclubs and cocaine were hardly the material of literary fiction. At the time, the subject matter of Bright Lights, Big City was deemed to be beneath literature. But the book was popular and it spawned a lot of imitations.