I wrote about Megan Crane's comparison of Bret Easton Ellis and chick lit yesterday and last night I was thinking about it some more and I remembered American Psycho.
I studied American Psycho at university and I can't tell you how much I loathed it. But that's not my point, my point is that it is filled with brand names and pop culture - two things that chick lit is constantly criticised for. For example:
Though I view "Casual Fridays" as an excruciatingly middle class invention, I slip on an ecru Polo cashmere turtleneck over chocolate brown suede pants and matching Bottega Veneta loafers. I finish this off with a Vicuna Zegna Blazer that I had made for me in Rome last season, and a Rose Gold Rolex from the early 1940's that once belonged to Porfirio Rubirosa.
In chick lit, of course, the use of brand names is constantly used as an example of the genre's vacuousness (brand names are “so prominent you wonder if there are product placement deals,” said Naomi Wolf). But in American Psycho, it was simply assumed to be satire:
"The novel's long enumerations of brand name consumer goods, denoting the fashion-dictated materialism that constitutes yuppie life," said Kooijman and Laine in their critical essay American Psycho: a double portrait of serial yuppie Patrick Bateman.
Interesting, don't you think?