David Van Patten

David Van Patten is a young Wall Street associate whose importance lies less in an individualized biography than in his embodiment of the competitive social system surrounding Patrick Bateman. He appears as a polished participant in Manhattan’s professional and nightlife circuits, maintaining the codes of dress, speech, etiquette, and consumption through which this group recognizes itself. Yet his apparent confidence is inseparable from rivalry and mimicry: he is both a distinct social presence and one more interchangeable figure in a world where men are repeatedly mistaken for one another.

Identity and Social Setting

David Van Patten is encountered with Craig McDermott at Harry’s after leaving the Pierce & Pierce office. He and McDermott sit at a front table, hunched over the backs of paper napkins with a Scotch and a martini before them, while Timothy Price heads toward the bar and Patrick Bateman joins them. His clothing establishes him immediately as a member of the same affluent professional class: he wears a double-breasted wool-and-silk sport coat, button-fly wool-and-silk trousers with inverted pleats by Mario Valentino, a Gitman Brothers cotton shirt, a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass, and leather shoes from Brooks Brothers. The detailed inventory makes his appearance function as social credentials rather than mere description.

Van Patten’s presence is also defined by the group’s unstable recognition of individuals. The men’s conversations move through names, clubs, restaurants, and professional affiliations with the distracted ease of people accustomed to substituting one status marker for another. David belongs to this environment not as an outsider or a rebel but as an efficient performer of its conventions, able to occupy the same expensive, highly coded spaces as Patrick Bateman, Timothy Price, and Craig McDermott.

Status Competition and the Business-Card Scene

Van Patten’s clearest individual action is his response to Patrick Bateman’s new business card. After Patrick presents the card from his gazelleskin wallet and waits for the others to react, Van Patten offers guarded approval, calling it very cool while implying that it is not especially impressive. He then pulls out his own card and places it beside an ashtray. The gesture converts a casual exchange into a contest: the card is not simply a means of identification but a compact display of rank, taste, and professional legitimacy.

The card’s appearance produces an immediate reversal. Patrick experiences a brief spasm of jealousy at its elegant color and refined type, while Van Patten takes visible satisfaction in explaining that it is eggshell with Romalian type. Patrick can manage only a strained compliment. Van Patten’s victory is minor in practical terms, but it matters within the group’s economy of recognition, where a surface distinction can temporarily establish superiority. His guardedness, smugness, and attention to typography reveal how completely prestige has migrated from character to presentation.

The scene also exposes the fragility of the identity Van Patten is performing. The business card promises individuality, yet its importance depends on the existence of other nearly identical cards and nearly identical men competing over minute variations. Van Patten appears distinctive precisely by mastering a shared vocabulary of luxury materials, design, and professional polish. The object separates him from Patrick for a moment while confirming that both men inhabit the same system.

Etiquette, Consumption, and Group Performance

Van Patten participates in the social rituals that make the group’s public life appear controlled and exclusive. At the Yale Club, he asks what the rules are for a sweater vest, prompting the others to clarify what he means. The question is trivial in subject but serious in social function: clothing requires regulation, and regulation becomes a form of collective knowledge. The men treat dress as a technical problem whose correct solution demonstrates belonging. Van Patten’s later insistence that a waiter bring Evian rather than tap water extends the same logic from clothing to consumption. Even water becomes a marker of distinction and refusal.

At Pastels, the group divides a bill totaling $475, a sum lower than expected. Patrick places the charge on his platinum American Express card and gathers the others’ cash, while McDermott demands ten dollars back because his scallop sausage appetizer cost only sixteen dollars. Van Patten is part of this financial choreography, in which conspicuous expenditure and petty accounting coexist. The undrunk bottle of champagne and the men’s treatment of the beggar outside the restaurant make the contrast especially stark: luxury is discarded or carefully apportioned indoors, while poverty is converted into a joke outside.

Earlier, in a cab leaving Wall Street, Timothy Price describes himself as an indispensable asset and complains about work, money, and professional ambition. Van Patten belongs to the same culture that makes such self-descriptions plausible. Their world treats employment, clothing, memberships, restaurant access, and financial capacity as interchangeable proofs of worth. Van Patten does not need a separate manifesto; his wardrobe, card, table manners, and demands perform the ideology for him.

Relations with Patrick Bateman and the Circle

Van Patten is one of Patrick Bateman’s regular male companions and rivals. Their relationship is sociable on the surface but structured by comparison. Patrick wants the group’s approval for his business card, and Van Patten’s superior card wounds him precisely because the men understand one another’s standards. The exchange reveals competition without requiring an open quarrel: the conflict is carried by design, tone, hesitation, and the pressure to respond correctly.

Van Patten also appears alongside Craig McDermott at Harry’s and participates in the wider circle’s conversation about clubs and social opportunities. When the possibility of Nekenieh is raised, the question circulates through the group as another piece of nightlife intelligence. Such exchanges show that Van Patten’s social relationships are organized through access: knowing a place, securing a table, recognizing a maître d’, or possessing the right invitation. Friendship and networking therefore occupy the same space, and the distinction between companionship and professional positioning remains deliberately uncertain.

His relationship to Patrick is further complicated by the novel’s recurring identity confusion. In Patrick’s account, people are repeatedly mistaken for other people, and names often seem less stable than clothing or institutional affiliation. Van Patten’s polished sameness makes him particularly suited to this environment. He can be recognized by his style while remaining vulnerable to substitution, a paradox that turns his social success into evidence of the group’s homogeneity.

Narrative Function and Significance

Van Patten helps make visible the mechanisms of impression management that structure Patrick Bateman’s world. The clothing, the business card, the sweater-vest rules, the bottled water, and the restaurant bill are not decorative details; they are props in a social performance. Van Patten knows how to use them and how to judge them, and his authority comes from his fluency in the code. His public self is therefore assembled through objects and rituals that must be continually displayed before an audience of peers.

That polished performance stands against the violence and instability surrounding Patrick. Patrick considers whether Courtney Lawrence would prefer him if Luis Carruthers were dead and imagines strangling Luis, while still monitoring his own appearance in the mirror. Van Patten is not identified as the target of that fantasy, but his role in the same social world helps define the conditions in which such thoughts coexist with impeccably maintained surfaces. The group can discuss clothing and water while violence remains close to the edges of consciousness.

Later, after Patrick’s murderous rampage and his attempt to confess by leaving a message for Harold Carnes, Van Patten is placed on a three-way call with Patrick. The call connects the social persona to the private crisis without resolving either one. Patrick’s confession does not produce a stable public acknowledgment, and Van Patten’s participation does not establish whether he understands what has happened. The result is consistent with his larger narrative function: he belongs to a society so governed by repetition, anonymity, and surface recognition that even an apparent revelation can be absorbed into the same indistinct network.

Van Patten’s significance is consequently structural as much as personal. He is a representative of Wall Street yuppie culture, but not merely a caricature of wealth. His guarded praise and competitive display show how status is manufactured through comparison; his etiquette questions show how belonging is policed through small rules; and his recurring proximity to Patrick shows how ordinary social performance can exist beside extreme moral disorder. David Van Patten is memorable because he makes the novel’s central contradiction tangible: the more carefully these men distinguish themselves through clothes, cards, restaurants, and manners, the harder it becomes to tell them apart.