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Get Me Out of Here
Henry Sutton. Europa (Penguin, dist.), $15 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-60945-007-6
Sutton's unsettling psychosexual thriller effectively satirizes the post–financial crisis world, though its heavy debt to American Psycho mitigates some of its pleasures. The novel opens with a quotation from Kim Jong-Il, setting the tone for a no-holds-barred exposition of the flaws and foibles of Western society, as explicated by an unreliable narrator who runs a dodgy London banking business with operations in Pyongyang. Matt Freeman is a tweedy Patrick Bateman--though slightly less attractive and successful. Obsessed with sartorial elegance ("I wasn't going to be seen dead in a pair of Gap trousers"), exclusive restaurants, and younger women, Matt is, perhaps not surprisingly, revealed to have quite a nasty side as his uneasy facade crumbles and a series of crimes are committed against the women in his life with Matt looking ever more the likely culprit. Matt's fetishizing of material goods and appearances, and the possibility that he is an unhinged sexual deviant and sociopathic killer, will sound very familiar, and it's unfortunate that these shopworn elements are so prominent in what is otherwise a pretty great book, with Sutton's prose having an energy all its own, and Matt--despite his predestined unraveling--remaining sharp, funny, and nicely creepy. (June)
Reviewed on: 04/04/2011
