Glamorama

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 :)