Glamorama
Ratings21
Average rating2.7
The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially. Set in 90s Manhattan, Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. He's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another onthe eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York City history. And now it's time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind. With the same deft satire and savage wit he has brought to his other fiction, Bret Ellis gets beyond the facade and introduces us, unsparingly, to what we always feared was behind it. Glamorama shows us a shadowy looking-glass reality, the juncture where fame and fashion and terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards, coming in January.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
What a slog. Who would imagine international terrorism, rampant hard drug use, and a seven-page bisexual fuckfest could be so bland? The first third of the book is about our insipid lead, Victor Ward, organizing the opening of a club. Nothing else.
When the explosions finally kick in, so do Victor's incessant screaming, crying, panicking, pleading, and whimpering, along with his total confusion about every single event that occurs. Since he's our narrator, that deep haze of befuddlement is especially taxing. Ellis tries to use Victor's stupidity and limited vocabulary to comic effect a few times, but it always falls flat.
The novel attempts to satirize the superficiality and consumerism of celebrity culture the same way American Psycho did for Wall Street culture's latent sociopathy. It uses the same recurrent insertion of decade-specific brand names throughout every page, along with constant celebrity name-dropping. Glamorama retains the gruesomeness, drugs, and graphic sex of American Psycho, but none of the inventiveness, humor, or fascinating characterization.
Well. This was interesting. I don't quite know how to describe what I just read. This is my first book I've read from Breat Easton Ellis. Previously I've seen both Rules of Attraction and American Psycho so I had a clue of what I was getting into. Except this book kind of blew my mind in the worst and best ways.
Victor Ward is a completely inept, male model living in New York City who gets mixed up with the wrong crowd and his whole world kind of caves in. That's what I KNOW the book was about. Everything else is pure speculation and there were so many elements that were unexplainable. Like the film crews and the confetti and the people who were who they seemed to be.
I read a couple of reviews that said everything resolves itself in the end. Well if that's the case I must be stupider than I realized because nothing seems resolved to me. Is Victor crazy? Was all of that cooked up by his drug addled mind? Who is that other Victor Ward masquerading as him? Is this some Fight Club nonsense where none of this has actually happened?
Either way, it was a great read. I'm satisfied with not knowing how anything I just read makes sense. It seems like I have some more Ellis books to read :)
