Rating: 
Summary: good, not great, still better than most
Review: bret easton ellis is a genius. His dialogue is entertaining, his prose rambling and elegant, and his book a pleasurable read. using song lyrics as Victor Ward's dialogue is funny and poignent. Overall, a good work, by a great writer.
Rating: 
Summary: Sadly, will be overlooked.
Review: Ellis is a great writer, period. Anyone who has experienced the density of his misguided college students in "The Rules Of Attraction" will be thrilled to find them back in action in "Glamorama." That he likens the fashion industry to social terrorism is a bold step, and it works-- but many reviewers and readers will dismiss it as silly and sophomoric-- despite the fact that the fashion industry is continuing to deteriorate the self-images of young girls and others everywhere. With humor and horror, Ellis shows what a pit this falseness of character and glamour beholds, and thank God he's around to do it. Despite his many critics, I still think Ellis will be regarded as one of the most important writers of his day. You go, Bret.
Rating: 
Summary: The Star Report
Review: Combine Kenneth Starrs salacious (possibly 1998's most over used word)Starr Report, plus a Years worth of New York Magazine articles incessantly praising Cosmopolitans, (possibly the most cliched cocktail in Town)Prada (The most overhyped Label) and Balthazar (thankfully replaced by Lot 61 as the most overtalked about restaurant in New York) a healthy dose of Lost Highwayesque (David Lynch Film)wierdness and viola Glamorama! As a New Yorker I have only three words for Glamorama: passe, passe, passe.
Rating:
Summary: Let's all slide together, baby! It's all so Glam(orama)
Review: Some people don't get Ellis. Some people won't get Glamorama. Some people won't care. And that is fine. Most of the characters in Ellis' new Glamorama don't care, but they should. Glamorama is a wild ride of fame, fashion and the famous. Enter the world of Victor Ward and his endless pursuit of the celebrity world. Ward sits on the out skirts of total fame and offers us a peek into the world of modeling, clubbing, drugs, and sex. And murder! Always a little murder laterly from Mr. Ellis. I won't bother the details, I will leave that to Mr. Ellis, but will suggest that this is an important novel that everyone should read. It is a reflection of what the 90s society has become. The seekers of fame and celebrities. Paperazzi chasing stars, murderers becoming stars, everyone seaching for their picture in a magazine. Our facination with celebrity has led to an overwhelming lust for fame. We eat, breathe and want to live the lives of the jet set, just as Victor Ward does, but within this lust is a hidden world, a world unseen. There is a darkness to this lust that, while perhaps not as vile and insane as Mr. Ellis' world, leds to a world of despair and desperation. Read Mr. Ellis, not because of this crappy review, but because it is a book that will make you think and look at the culture around. Read it becuase it will make you laugh as well as flinch in revulsion. Read it because Ellis is one of the few writers that is still willing to challenge your mind and won't put the same old thing on paper. "It's cool, baby. It's cool."
Rating: 
Summary: You'll hate yourself in the morning...
Review: ...or perhaps you'll just hate yourself. From the first page, I was exhausted. By page two I was angry. By page five, I had already gone through the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of death - but instead of reaching "acceptance" I just called ATT and asked for Dr. Kevorkian's home number. I just wanted the pain to stop, you know? Yeah, I'm bitter.. who wouldn't be? He got 500,000 in US dollars for this elongated InStyle profile. Clearly, Random House has lost thier collective marbles, not to mention thier credibility. Those folks in New York should do less indoor smoking and more editing. (No offense to Disney, proud owners of the irrelevant island of Manhattan - the lengths a city will go to for a Pocahontas tie-in, huh?)File this one under CRAPORAMA.
Rating:
Summary: Disagree with NY Times
Review: Before I bought the book, I read the New York Times review (it was not good) and thought, what a shame. I loved Ellis's American Psycho because it was such a brilliant, dark, humorous (to miss the humor of American Psycho is to miss the point) masterpiece. A work that went against the grain of what is acceptable. An envelope pushed too far. So at 180 degrees from the review of the newspaper, I purchased Glamorama. Ellis fans will be pleased to know that Glamorama is his best book, as they will discover upon reading. People who don't know or like Ellis should also read this book: it's fascinating, original and flawlessly crafted.. Personally, I feel this book is so brilliant that it could be easily misunderstood. Case in point: the New York Times review. The reviewer, Kakutani writes: "...pages and pages of crashingly awful dialogue that would make Judith Krantz cringe. People in "Glamorama" say things like "You know I put the stud back in star-studded" and "Take your passion and make it happen." They talk about "power florists" and "spokesmannequins," and they boast about knowing people who signed suicide notes with smiley faces." What this person fails to understand, is that Glamorama is an astoundingly deep portrait of shallowness. The ultimate oxy-moron. To say the dialogue is "crashingly awful" is to miss the point. Naturally, much of the dialogue is awful. It's supposed to be awful. It's supposed to be profoundly empty. How a "professional" reviewer could miss this point is simply beyond me. Glamorama is hilarious, dark, shallow, riveting, awful, wonderful and totally original. It's a must-read for people who read. People who are true word-junkies will totally get it. Glamorama deserves its place on the New York Times best-seller list. A position I feel certain it will achieve, despite what one reviewer thinks. What's that phrase? I'll eat my hat? Kakutani: eat your hat.
Rating:
Summary: Define Cool for Me
Review: Being cool is very important to lots of people. Media executives, models, celebrities of all sorts, and all those who worship at their feet. In fact, to these people, and to the people who want to be like them, cool is good. Everybody wants their own good. Most people think of it in terms of their "happiness". So, to the extent that all people want to have their own good, and to the extent that for celebrities (and others) the good can be maximized by being cool it is easy to see why being cool is so important. Bret Easton Ellis understands how important being cool is in America. I don't think he likes it. His books strip coolness down and exposes it as the morally bankrupt personal philosophy that it truly is. Glamorama is his best book yet. To the extent that an indivdual cares about being cool, she (or he) owes it to herself to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: In this insightful and hilarious novel, Bret Easton Ellis show that he has finally reached maturity in his writing style, living up to the promise of earlier works such as Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Glamorama is an amusing and provacative look at a society that has come to revolve around images of Hollywood glamour. This novel provides an interesting commentary on the mixing of art and commerce with a faint aura of paranoia that mimics the bustle and confusion of contemporary life. The fast pace and compusive repetitiveness left me exhausted at the end, but it was worth every minute. A truly wonderful novel.
Rating:
Summary: Needs to read again and again and again.
Review: Glamorama will make you laugh and cry. The unfamilar is so richly inmixed with the familar you'll always be one or two steps behind the real and unreal. There is no salvation in this novel although in a twisted way people do "become whatever they're not." Just when you think you're ready to put the book down everything changes. All in all it is a really fun book that all English majors should be required to read.
Rating:
Summary: Don't read this if you don't know the ending!!!
Review: This book is absolutely brilliant for 300+ pages, before it collapses. The confusion of the reader matches that of the protagonist brilliantly. Ellis' genius is in satirizing a certain lifestyle; what he doesn't realize is that writing about these people is a form of validation. He then has his main character explicitly repudiate all the he stood for, leading one to question why everything Ellis wrote isn't a waste of time. How absolutely disappointing that Ellis is a COMPLETELY generic, PC thinker at heart, who feels the need to rail against looks-ism. Shame, shame, shame. Mock the beauty cult, but don't condemn the basis for all your writings.
|
