Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 560 pages
• Published by: Vintage March 21, 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0375703845
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0375703843
• Book Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 15.5 ounces

Product Review
Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.

You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 o's. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The evil twin of fellow brat-packer Jay McInerney's Model Behavior, Ellis's (The Informers) terrible trip through glitterary New York has everything his fans (and critics) have come to expect: graphic sex, designer drugs, rock 'n' roll allusions, splatterpunk violence and characters as deep as 8"x10" glossies. Protagonist Victor Ward, a "model-slash-loser," is opening his own trendy Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and back-stabbing his partner. After some adventures in clubland, the plot takes a turn for the paranoid. Victor is recruited by a mysterious figure, F. Fred Palakon, to track down a former girlfriend gone missing in London. There he becomes unwillingly drawn into a terrorist group?run, like so much else in the novel, by a supermodel?that bombs fashionable hangouts, hotels and jetliners. Throughout, Ellis clutters his hallmark proper-noun realism with excessive name-dropping and strung-out plotting. The satirist in Ellis seems to want to indict celebrity-obsessed, materialistic and superficial contemporary culture. With this novel he, perhaps unwittingly but certainly ironically, provides Exhibit A. 100,000 first printing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
'The tyranny of beauty', says Bret Ellis in an interview, is played off against 'the tyranny of terrorism'...like, please, baby, spare me! Elsewhere he complains of our age's obsession with celebrity, but when asked why he thinks this has arisen, he limply offers an 'I don't know'. One begins to suspect that here we have a satirist almost as shallow as his subject matter, or at least one content to laugh at 'the surface of things'. * For half its length 'Glamorama' amounts to a comedy of manners, enhanced by Ellis's ear for dialogue and his, rather surprising, virtuosity in shaping the word surface. There are sentences that have you riding along merrily, enjoying their rhythm and their unexpected twists and turns. Whole scenes crackle with a light-hearted energy. Ellis cites Don Delillo as an influence, but the music in his language seems more indebted to Updike and others. This makes for an entertaining read...up to a point. * There is a much-noted rupture half way through the book, and initially I took this to be the protagonist's fall into insanity - specifically, a drug induced psychosis. Such an interpretation appeared foreshadowed by earlier references to hallucinatory perceptions - ice, as perhaps a sign of the pervasive lack of human warmth, and confetti, evoking weddings and possibly ironically suggesting that such commitment would be impossible in the superficial milieu depicted. Of course, psychosis would be, in a sense, too obvious a move, and the book complicates such a reading, until it is virtually untenable. But to take events, such as ex-models turning to unmotivated terrorism and gratuitous torture and murder, as actually real...well, it's so unbelievable as to be uninteresting. Worse yet, there are pathetic attempts to 'explain' all these ridiculous goings on by gesturing towards internal American politics and geopolitics - these gestures are crude, inconsistent, and more befuddling than explanatory. Ellis's interviews are readily available on the web, and unfortunately he confides that plot or, as he prefers to term it, 'narrative' was one of his central concerns in 'Glamorama' - he wants the second half of the book to work as a plot-driven thriller. I'm afraid he's no James Ellroy. * The length of the book also betrays another weakness - Ellis's shallow rendition of shallow characters. The protagonist, Victor, may be superficial, but the reader's understanding of him need not be. Ellis does not render him with enough depth or nuance to afford us understanding, and so Victor is denied both our empathy and our sympathy. The minor characters are even more weakly drawn. The homosexual male characters are little more than bundles of stereotypical traits, and meagre bundles at that. The female characters leave Candace Bushnell looking like a latter-day Shakespeare - many are indistinguishable. The villains of the piece are pure cardboard. * Despite all these shortcomings, the book proved disturbing for me. The sense of disorientation and impending disaster created from around half way in to three quarters, was impressive and distressing. Victor, desperate for somebody to trust, finds he can trust no-one, including himself. His predicament approached poignancy, only to be scuttled by the aforementioned absurd 'plot'. * It might also be surmised that economic concerns prompted the inclusion of some of Ellis's 'signiatures', namely, several pornographic sex scenes and grotesque descriptions of torture and violence. The sex in the early chapters is quite skilfully rendered, with little hint of embarrassment in the narrator's tone; later, it (along with the book in general) becomes laboured and ungainly in tone. The violence harks back to 'American Psycho', but here seems to have been forced into proceedings. Controversy, I'm sure Ellis realises, sells units. * By book's end, I did not think that Ellis fathomed any of his characters. Any questions raised by the book were not going to be answered within the bounds of its pages. So I looked for insights in his interviews. None were to be found, instead my impression was extended - Ellis does not appear to fathom his own character, nor his strengths and weaknesses as a writer. * I would not recommended this book, since I feel its virtues (humour, wordplay, and the depiction of a drug-addled state of mind) are outweighed by its confusions, the result being ultimately unsatisfying. If someone commends it to you, I suggest you ask them why, and plead for detail, since being told 'it's funny', or 'it's really dark', is really not much of a guide.