Glamorama

Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than 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 break up, 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 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

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Career Low Point - Rated
Most of the negative reviews have nailed this book on the head: it's a rambling and pointless trawl through the fashion industry with brief interludes of international terrorism. Sounds confused? It is. And it leaves you with nothing except disappointment and mild confusion.

I won't give it one-star because there are a couple of incredibly powerful, and very violent, scenes in the book, which are described in wonderfully stark prose, reminding me of DeLillo's colder, more sinister moments. One of these is a description of a 747 exploding mid-flight and the subsequent damage to the people on board. However, it is difficult to stomach and - unlike American Psycho, The Informers, etc. - you're not entirely sure that Ellis is justified in being so graphic. Also, Victor - the protagonist - is irritating, and the humour derived from his various shortcomings (low intelligence, vacuity, etc.) does not compensate for this.

I feel that Ellis wrote the book not because he wanted to but because he was contractually obliged to do so. Forget about this career low point and buy Lunar Park instead.

Are you guys reading the same book? - Rated
I think possibly some of the other reviewers here are confused about what this book is about and, possibly, what Bret Easton Ellis is about. To say the book is 'confused' is entirely missing the point.

Ellis' work is a little like pointillist art; no one dot means anything but the overall effect is astounding and the power behind the barrage of discontinuous threads that hold this work together is undeniable. Style is the utmost principle throughout because that's the world he's trying to convey.

Even if there was no plot at all this would be worth reading just for some of the dialogue and portraits of a slice of society at its flimsiest.

Nothing to get hung about - Rated
Or, nothing is real, as John Lennnon sang. Which is what this book is about, and the use of pop lyrics to tell the story as well as interminable lists of fashionable clothes, magazines, furniture, fashion shows, drinks, drugs and above all people, celebrities, minor celebs, would be celebs... well you get the idea. These lists create a curiously potent sense of realism. Whether this will work in twenty years time, but, hey, who cares. Anything can be changed and manipulated, faces, photographs, events, relationships and above all identities, and what would be the best cover for that most secretive of occupations, namely terrorism, but celebrity itself? The writing is powerful and enthralling, the social observation merciless, the plot bewildering yet fiercely logical, the characters grotesque yet human, the off-hand comments trite yet profound. You could try listing the lists, but the point would be? Gripping to read, impossible to explain or review. When is the next one out? You'll need to be seen with it.

Total waste - Rated
I have read and enjoyed all of Ellis' books except "The Rules of Attraction". This book is another exception: I read but feel it is very poor even now, years afterwards.

This is the story of Victor Ward, a very cosmopolitan and fashion-obsessed model who appears in every billboard and magazine cover and lives New Your City. The usage of the word "story" is pushing it a bit though. Nothing really interesting happens in NYC. Then the "story" moves to Paris and London and whatever happens is such a load of nonsense that you will find yourself thinking: "Exactly what is this I'm reading and WHY am I wasting my time with this?".

The narration being in the first person, something Ellis has accustomed us to in other books, Victor Ward spends 90% of his time describing what he sees (just that - what he sees, not what he *thinks*), what people are wearing (shirt by Comme des garçons, cuffs by whatever else) and what people are saying. Needless to say, it is all but devoid of any interest at all, leading one to think this model's got absolutely nothing worth keeping inside his skull and therefore nothing we can get from reading about him.

Then there's that thing about going on to Paris and London. By boat. The story gets very confusing and incoherent so it's impossible to actually understand and make sense of why this guy is going to Europe in the first place and by boat too. Ok, so he's afraid of flying, but why in the first place does he go to Europe. The explanation is there but it is so feeble that it wouldn't stand in a light breeze for more than a second.

Ah, and he's recruited for some terrorist group made up of models and seemingly empty minded people. They blow up things for no reason at all. Hey, maybe they were just bored with their meaningless lives? I thought people with those problems would just jet off to some island in the South Pacific to meditate with their personal yoga teacher or something. NOT blowing up the Ritz or shooting a stupid, meaningless movie in London.

Frankly, I was so curious to see where this book would take me that I decided to keep on reading this piece of garbage just to find out. In the end, when nothing interesting happens, I just felt empty. Maybe that's the point?

A muddled affair for an otherwise sharp satirist - Rated
The sheer volume I was presented with when buying this book in relation to Ellis's other novels gave me an inkling that perhaps the author had outdone himself somewhat in story and bulk. The reason for this suspicion lies in the fact that Ellis's writing works best in sharp, short doses, whether this be in his chapters/scenes or in the entire lengh of his novels. Bursts of sporadic violence as Ellis continuously employs in his writing work far better than using tension and climactic scenarios for the society he is representing through his characters. Characters who skip through acts of torture with the same immediacy as skipping through channels on their television set as they often do (MTV being the channel usually settled on). This suspicion aroused by the size of the book when purchasing it proved to be well founded as Ellis tries to stretch his story to the point of breaking in order to fill all 482 pages. It just feels like a novel where he's maybe tried a bit too hard. If condensed into maybe half the size I feel the impact would be properly felt because I do believe the morals in the book do have the potential to make a significant impact and are saying something important about the artificiality of some people's aspirations in this media-fueled culture we live in. The main problem with this book is that, in creating a larger piece of writing than he is used to doing, the author is somewhat forced to create a plot. Something that detracts from his sucessful writing style of sparseness and dis-interest, where one scene merges loosely into the next and there is no beginning or end, where the entire novel is just a brief snapshot of these desperately lonely soul's lives. This attempt by the author to create a hollywood conspiracy theory movie feel and to stretch out the novel may very well all be very intential and he may be trying to prove his point on media culture by doing this (the references to the terrorism activities being filmed by a film crew for example) but in doing so it still detracts from the important meaning in the author's writing by creating an overly long and somewhat muddled affair not quite sure of what it is.