Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62479 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-10
• 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

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.

Are you guys reading the same book?
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
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.