Glamorama

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Summary: Glamorama -- The Pop Culture Ulysses
Review:

That's what I bet Ellis was saying to himself, over and over again, monomaniacally, as he bashed out his massive catalogue of all things 90's: "This is the pop culture Ulysses." Surely that's his dream blurb for Glamorama, and it's a grandiose ambition he very nearly lives up to. Stylistically, Ellis is nothing like Joyce, but what both writers have in common is something I'll call a "non-escapist tendency." Both of them want to be the definitive, panoramic chroniclers of their respective eras and milieus: Joyce with early 20th century Dublin, Ellis with late 20th century New York. Both of them attack the universal through the specific. Both of them are illusionless. And both of them get their effects through concrete, willfully unpoetic detail. When they describe a smell, you don't just smell it -- you get it caught in your nostril hairs.

Joyce is by far the greater of the two, of course. The tone of his books is older, wiser, both more accepting and more forgiving of human weakness. But I think it's an important comparison to make, since Ellis is currently facing the same criticisms that assailed Joyce in his day. Glamorama -- like Ulysses when it came out -- is being deemed ephemeral, trivial, a book to bury in a time-capsule and forget about. Indeed, I just bought it and already it seems dated. All those references to Oasis! But I promise you that twenty years from now some numbskull English professor, missing the point as usual, will write "The Comprehensive Guide to Glamorama," where you will see entries like "Oasis: British rock group of the mid 1990s, whose phenomenal success was the greatest their country had seen since The Beatles ( see "Beatles, The" page 42. ) Ellis does not name-drop for the sake of name-dropping; instead he is attempting, through exaggeration and apocalpyse, to capture the texture and rhythm of modern life. And modern life, as we all know, revolves around celebrity: either we are one, know one, or want to be one.

There are very few nouns in Glamorama that aren't proper; who needs words, Ellis seems to be asking, when we have so many NAMES? Glamorama is a laundry list of names: the famous, the near-famous, the semi-famous, the quasi-famous, the pseudo-famous, the soon-to-be-famous, and the would-be famous all scramble and vie for attention in the warscape of its pages. Two things are clear: ( 1 ) that these people are celebrated for little more than their looks, and ( 2 ) that once those fade, they'll be left with absolutely nothing. Whoever said "There can be no true beauty without decay" described Ellis's worldview perfectly: It's just that he's more disturbed by the decay than admirous of the beauty.

Ellis also succeeds in ringing a few alarms. Never before Glam had I realized just how debased the English language has become. Nothing is ever said plainly. We speak in a neverending stream of movie-and-music references; nearly everything that comes out of our mouths is coded in this way. While every moderner worth his salt can extract layers and layers of meaning from a cryptogram like "Johnny Depp," and a few of us are even hip to "Todd Oldham," only the uppermost among us, the elite, hold the secret to "Fern Mallis." Who, you ask? Exactly! The great revelation of Glamorama is that it's the Fern Mallis-savvy who control the universe.

And that's really scary, when you stop to think about it.

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Summary: If you dig your own grave, is it groundbreaking?
Review: Remember those Twilight Zone episodes where a guy would find out his life was one big movie and he didn't know what was real anymore? They ran 30 minutes. You know Glamorama, that new Ellis novel where a guy finds out his life is one big movie and he doesn't know what's real anymore? It runs 464 pages. The choice is yours.

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Summary: Countdown to...less than ever
Review: Cute gimmick Ellis uses in his new book: all the chapters in each section are numbered backwards to zero, except for the last section, which counts *up* from zero. Still, all the gimmicks in the world can't hide the fact that this is the same fake "oh, the world is so shallow" routine from an author well-known for his nightclubbing and partying. I count this book backwards to...one star.

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Summary: better than anything he's written before
Review: Back in "American Psycho's" Manhatten, Glamorama once again portrais a society bereft of all soul. Victor the protagonist is - like APs Patric Bateman - an empty vessel but while Patrick retains some intelligence, Victor seems borderline retarded which makes it very difficult to identify. For some reason even American Psychos atrocities didn't repulse me as much as Victor's idiocy. This is a decadent society in decline but unlike in Heller's Closing Time there is no catharsis. No redemption. Bret Easton Ellis has done it again, after he diappointed me badly with The Informers, this book is again a maelstrom that sucks you under into a world that is a apocalyptic vacuum. Like the Spiegel correctly stated, Ellis is foremost a moralist but without a trace of polital correctness. This book will again polarize the readers and that's good, because it might cause people to stop and think about how much of Patrick Bateman or Victor Ward is in each of us. Even if this novel is sometimes mindmumbing in the portrayed stupidity it is a thinking novel. Highest rating.

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Summary: a shockingly mature novel
Review: You start this book and think, "more of the same old Ellis." Now I'm essentially a fan of Mr. Ellis. I'm not one of the ill-informed crackpots raving on endlessly about American Psycho being the greatest book of all time. I liked it. I wrote a review for it here. But let's admit--it has a lot of problems with plotting and the overall writing. This book, however, is the first of his novels that appears to have been slaved over. It is the same, yet different (a theme present within this dark fantasy.) The characters are more human, less the yuppie automotons, and moreso just despicable, self-absorbed semi-celebrities who have no self-control, no real talent, and, ultimately, no confidence in anything they do, regardless of how blustery and obnoxious they can get. There is a lot happening in Glamorama. It is composed mostly of dialogue, and the narrative itself is a questionable first person, something that really is an extention of the remarkable, tape-recorder accuracy of how people such as this speak. This is probably Ellis' best book. It grows leaps and bounds chapter after chapter as you get more and more absorbed in the horror being played out before you on the page. There is maturity here, perhaps indicating that Ellis is finally growing past his early success and popularity, rattling off the fame all contraversy causes, and realizing that he is, finally, a writer.

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Summary: WOW!
Review: I haven't read anything by Bret Easton Ellis in years, and was fully expecting to loathe this new one. But like it or not, I couldn't stop reading it, laughing at it, being drawn along on the exhilarating ride. His view of modern life, and the way in which we all play a role in this empty headed feeding frenzy, is completely dead-on. That he manages to entertain as well as put the reader on edge is a testament to his abilities as real writer/reporter.

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Summary: Horror vacui
Review: In AMERICAN PSYCHO, Bret Easton Ellis elegantly captured the pathology of the eighties in a serial-killer antihero who viewed every character around him as a literal enumeration of his designer clothing and home appliances. In GLAMORAMA, Ellis equally deftly captures the nineties vibe--not a compulsive listing of objects, but of celebrities. GLAMORAMA features skull-crushing, Novocaine-like chunks of name-droppings (and club-droppings and party-invite-droppings) that serve not only to wittily drop a butterfly net on the Zeitgeist, but to suggest the hollowness behind that Tourette's-like list-compulsion.The fascinating thing about Ellis always is the creepy shuttling between lip-smacking fetishism and finger-wagging moralizing. Ellis wants us to know that we, E! Channel-watchers and Movieline-readers, are hollow, soul-sick, and Devoid of True Values, but the novel is so funny and so on the mark that he clearly digs (and is a deeply entrenched part of) this world as well. A sample: club promoter's flunky runs to him with this breathless news--"The DJ says he's going to have to play 'Do the Bartman.' It's a signature piece. It's kind of inevitable."Like Bruce Wagner's "I'm Losing You," "Glamorama" suggests a genius locked in a monastic cell with seven thousand copies of Entertainment Weekly. The vacuity and virtuosity are interchangeable. Ellis has the distinction of contriving the single most vapid and repellent protagonist in the history of literature, which has its pluses and minuses--the plus being the frisson of sheer effrontery in mounting a Trollopean epic satire with a character like Madonna boytoy Tony Ward as the hero; the minus being...well...basically, the same thing. Male model-cum Kate Moss clone boyfriend-cum club promoter Vincent Ward (Ellis couldn't even think up a different last name) hustles for a buck, another cute chick, a free drink, entree back into the Edenic kingdom of Calvin Klein--then, when he out-hustles and philanders on everybody in sight, finds himself in a whirl of international intrigue that suggests a Martin Amis novel rewritten by Austin Powers. Blatantly silly, lightly frosted with Joan Didion-style angst and ethical judgment (a common Ellis ingredient), and wildly, explosively entertaining, "Glamorama" is as impressive as it is appalling. Ellis seems to have taken Tom Wolfe's edict for contemporary fiction writers to heart: There's a big, happening outside world out there in America--get out of your damn trailer parks and condo rec rooms and make fiction on a big canvas. Unfortunately, Ellis' canvas always involves trust-fund graduates of second-tier safety schools with very high cheekbones and a penchant for switch-hitting. That has its pulpy allure, but I found myself wishing Ellis would go back to the material that made up most of his masterly collection of short stories, "The Informers"--stories that were as quietly observant, accurate and drily compassionate as they were titillating, lurid and kicky. Ellis has it in him to be a great American novelist. I only wish once--just as a stunt--he'd write about people who aren't vacant, listless, rich, and indicative of millennial decline.

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Summary: Instant Addiction.
Review: Empathetic, mind-numbing, disgustingly funny & full of unexpected sad lyricism -- a profoundly moving reading experience.

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Summary: Not just a "Book for the 90s"
Review: It was hard for me to admit, after finishing "Glamorama," but Ellis is one of the most original satirists we have working today. Hard because I used to buy the criticism about his trendiness, the endless pop-culture references masking a lack of vision. Not so: in fact, one great irony of our ironic fin-de-siecle culture is that so many critics fail to recognize real irony! Folks, the vapidity and the inconsistency of the pop culture cataloging is done deliberately--deliberately--to invoke a sense of the impermanence and interchangeablity. I've read the hacks who think pop culture references are substitutes for cultural commentary; hell, most of them write for magazines, TV and Hollywood. Ellis, if you're willing to cut him the slack you'd cut any other writer who isn't Ellis, is cut from a different and classically American jib. His is a moral satire akin to some of the works of Hawthorne, West, even Fitzgerald. The use of surrealism in this work is probably it's shakiest premise because it asks you, de facto, to surrender your need for clear cut reality; this really is nothing new in writing. Glamorama works when you accept its surrealism instead of working against it. Why people work so hard to put this writer down, especially after the knee-jerk reaction to the underrated American Psycho (a very funny book!), is not hard to see. They mistake the writer for the soulless, vapid yuppie partyboys of his novels. Here's the news: Ellis is really one of the most talented and traditional writers working today. He deserves at least a little credit.

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Summary: And the point of this book is?
Review: I am a huge fan of Elli's work, I read them all and I love them all, but when I picked up Glamorama, I thought I was in for a good read, but I was proven wrong. Glamorama is about a fashion model named Victor Ward; if you read The Rules Of Attraction, then you know who I am talking about, but even if you didn't, don't worry you didn't miss much, who is opening his own club in Manhatten. He is being constanly interviewed since he is the 'it-boy' of the moment getting his 15 minutes of fame. The first 200 pages I found were kind of boring and repetitive (American Psycho is too), but he is then followed by a mysterious man, so now he decides to take a break from the life he lives. He takes a trip to Europe and that is when thing's go awkward. He then becomes part of a terrorist network making bomb's, so now he is a fashion model/terrorist. The rest of the novel lead's to more of a Chuck Palahniuk kind of ending. The point of the novel? I didn't find one, but still I thought I should give it 4 star's because the novel is VERY DIFFERENT from any work done by Ellis. This is not my favorite novel by Ellis, but I suggest that you read his earlier work like Less Than Zero to The Informers. If you like Chuck's work (like I do), then you will like this novel, but this novel is not for everyone. Some people will like it, some people won't. You make the choice either to read it or just get out of the library. Just get it out of the library and judge the book for yourself.