He may be a vagrant. He may be a writer sitting in a bare room. This erosion of the narrator's authority has long been intrinsic to fiction termed post-modern or experimental. Easton Ellis has admitted frustration with reviewers not because they dislike his book, but because they can't see what type of book it plainly is. American Psycho is a satirical reflection on the art of the monologue, yet few literary critics saw it as other than a deadpan slasher novel, and responded only to the emotional pitch of the violent scenes.
Critics are often uneducated.
Mostly this doesn't matter, because there are more intelligent readers than intelligent critics. But in this case, the philistinism of critics gave ammunition to the philistinism of the censors. The people who had this novel shrink-wrapped didn't need to read it, because literary critics were backing them. Ignorant reviewing became the stone on which the censor sharpened his knife. The censorship of American Psycho carries the usual mark of paternalism.