Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137333 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Synopsis
A man in what is recognizably New York is drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society and then finds himself trapped on the other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism, and family and politics, are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable.

Customer Reviews

an original idea
Whereas I found `American Psycho' an easy and absorbing read, I found this much harder work. Although rewarding in the end it took a while to get into. The part on the cruise ship became confusing for me and I was uncertain at times when we were focusing on a real plot or not. I enjoyed the concept of the camera crew, always having your life in the spot life etc but then I felt it lost something. If you don't reflect too much and try to analyse as you are reading it then this is a great read. I found myself trying to link characters together and once all the pieces of the jigsaw started to fall into place it was as if one of them wasn't quite right and you had to start all over again. However, it is a clever thriller and you never know which character to trust. Your ideas are continually blown to pieces as another piece of the puzzle is unravelled.

I loved the chapters going down in number, like a countdown. But a countdown to what exactly? A new script, a new scene, a new conspiracy? Both clever and intriguing to read this novel rather surprisingly sucked me in and even though at times I didn't have the foggiest idea what was going on, I was in the full long journey. It's difficult to work out Victor with his change of surnames - can we change our identity so easily and become someone different? Or is it something new to hide behind, to prevent us from having to reveal what lurks underneath the skin? Bret Easton Ellis takes celebrity culture and slowly picks away at it to let us see what exactly goes on behind the images we see on screen and in print.

I've had this book lounging on my shelves for quite a few years now, (6 to be exact) and I finally decided it needed to be read. I wish I'd read it sooner! Although not quite five stars for me, I'd happily recommend this novel and I certainly look forward to reading the other Ellis novel I own - The Rules of Attraction. It's a clever book and it's one that needs time devoting to it. You can't pick this up and then put it one side whilst you read another. It'll keep reminding you that it needs to be read! Devote some time to it and you will be rewarded with an intelligent and interesting masterpiece.

Dullarama
First things first - i have never been totally convinced by Ellis's minimalist literary style. It can work brilliantly, such as in his scabrous 80s satire American Psycho, but it can be irritatingly banal, peripheral and boring such as in career nadir, The Rules of Attraction. There can be no doubting either that Ellis is capable of insightful, superb passages of prose, of which there are many in Glamorama. No, the real problem with this novel is that there is no real plot, development, story or indeed characterisation whatsoever. Just a seemingly unconnected series of dots and anecdotes thrown together on a whim. It is a book unsure of what it's saying and how to say it.

Perhaps that's the point, the fact that it's all style and no substance ? Well, maybe, but Glamorama is long-winded, boring, mostly nonsensical gibberish and like it's major characters - lazy, self-obsessed, and one-dimensional. Yes, I know the characters are supposed to be shallow morons, but surely an author as skilled as Ellis can offer us more than who's sleeping with who, who's listening to whose albums, who's wearing what and where ad nauseum for 500 pages ? Ellis dissects this dull and superficial morass of models, would-be stars, hangers-on and beautiful people with easy laughs, preferring to mock and embarrass, instead of providing any sort of social insight or comment on our fixation with celebrity. So these people are vain, moneygrabbing, insecure, boring, careerist, starf@@ckers who'd shop their own mothers to get ahead ??? Really ? Who'd have thought.

Save the odd brilliant set-piece, witty one liner and typical Ellis propensity for sadism and/or violence, this is a confused, contrived, and unedifying mess. He's written worse, but is capable of far, far better.

Career Low Point
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.