Glamorama

Rating:
Summary: NOTHING gets resolved.
Review: I do not understand the people giving this book a five. My guess is that they're little Ellis puppets and treasure whatever he does, even if it's crap like this book was. This is the most UNSATISFYING read you'll ever endure, unless you like paying $10 for bits and pieces of lukewarm erotica. This book is not at all thought-provoking. There is no point to this book.

Rating:
Summary: Laugh-Out-Lound Funny
Review: Fine work by Ellis. Ellis continues to expose society's general emptiness and love of celebrity through his well crafted, biting satire.

Additionlly, this book qualifies as a first-class thriller that takes place in New York, aboard the QE II, London, Paris, and Milan.

Rating:
Summary: Glamour Rocking Model Terrorists and Nose Drugs!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: Like American Psycho, Ellis' Glamorama acts as another brilliant social commentary, although this time without as many ravaged corpses and workout sessions. If American Psycho is an overcrowded room at the Ritz erupting in flames, Glamorama is the bloated feeling one gets when overeating caviar. Ellis has taken a step away from wrathful mutilations and embraced the art of name dropping. Victor Ward, our beloved romping protagonist and hippest cat east of Hollywood, is a male model, who's dating one model, and sleeping with another...one that happens to be his boss's girlfriend. Victor accepts a job to open a new night club, hopefully succeeding before his fame has elapsed. In the meantime, the apathetic Ward plans to open his own club, working around his boss. Learning that Ward's having sex with his girlfriend, and planning to uproot the club and open his own, Ward's Boss forces him into financial (in this case worldly) turmoil. Soon enough though, he accepts a commission to go to France to find an old college roommate, Jamie. Little does he know that she, a model, and her counterparts are wrapped up in terrorist activity (I'm not joking). The plot turns here into a cliché story of thriller commentary and eventually the text breaks apart into babble. All the while, the characters are forgetting their script lines in a world that is, "just a stage." Now Ward, who is called upon to be an unlikely hero, comes to the rescue, but only with a traveling film crew that joined him on the way to Europe. And so the question stands: Could anyone other than Ellis polish this fashion runway to a brilliantly force fed poignant literary sheen?
In the novel Ellis flexes his completely ruthless and satirical critique of western culture. His characters are brand names, just like everything else. Virtue graces the stage from behind the curtain only when the camera is rolling. Glamorama's characters are so shallow and narcissistic that it makes the reader's job of identifying, or even having empathy toward them impossible. They are the social progenies of an insane social reality. A society which morbidly consumes its beautiful by dressing them in Kevlar-lined Armani suits! Ellis' world is one of the inflated pop-culture, where celebrities rule the world, not because of merit but because of beauty. His world is one where the effects of the consumerist age of the late 80s hairspray period in American history transpire into the morally malnourished coke binging elitists of the nineties. His world...is one that could create Patrick Bateman.
Ellis gives the voice of countless marketing ploys and advertisements a social echo. Wear this, do this, be cool, be rich, buy Stridex or you will get pimples, and if you have pimples no one will like you and you will die lonely, unemployed, without a nice pair of cuff-links and miserable. The books depiction of the current state of consumerism is eerily reminiscent to an inflated capitalist society. While warning the reader about the escalating consumerist culture, he also mocks his author counterparts by using a cliché like thriller plot with the babbling sentence structure similar to the current post-modern movement. Whether Ellis is sincere in this presentation of current affairs, or whether he is launching martini soaked spitballs at his audience, and at the world becomes meaningless, what has been said has been, and by the ferocity of which Ellis writes, needed to be.
Ellis' acute eye for societal endangerments and his complete disregard for anyone's emotions and psyche have led his novels to the front of contemporary American literature. I can imagine Ellis, sitting on a papier-mâché couch of glamour magazines, in front a sixty three inch plasma television, blasting the E channel, smirking like the Mona Lisa at all the minds he has sent squirming. Deservedly so, He has gained fame for his exploitation and satirical wrecking ball of western culture and the state of modern assimilated literature. And, just like American Psycho, Glamorama is a book that can be hated, loved, praised, or dismembered with an axe, but one thing that it cannot be is ignored. This kind of social commentary is very rare, lucky for us though; we have Ellis to deliver this social gouging with the figurative ease of stuffing a kitten into an ATM.


P.S. Huey Lewis f-ing rocks!



Rating:
Summary: Dead On 90s
Review: This book has all the details right. The setting of this book is in the mid 90s, a time I remember pretty vividly. Cyber space? I remember that. Pulp? Oasis? Everything But The Girl? I remember all that stuff too. This book is spot on about the horrible, horrible mish-mash of 80s decadence and self righteous babble that pop culture had turned into. Victor Ward is vainglorous, but not any more than the other characters; he is however, a bit more idiotic. I especially likes his responses to the MTV interviewers questions. This is a fun read and I recommend it to anyone that likes Bret Easton Ellis, Don Delillio, or anything darkly comic. Don't get confused by the plot; it's not really there (and neither are the characters)!

Rating:
Summary: Glamorama
Review: Victor Ward is the It Boy of the New York modelling scene. He has a steady, super-model actress, an endless procession of equally beautiful women falling at his feet, a steady 'other woman', who also happens to be the fiance of his boss, an up and coming modelling career, easy access to drugs, alcohol and money, and thousands upon thousands of shallow, vapid celebrity friends. In Victor's world - and the world in which he circles - he is a King among Kings, one of the beautiful, perfect people we see on the covers of magazines and sometimes wish we could be like.

Not all is perfect, however. It is established pretty early on that Victor is a boor. He manages to (mostly) hide this from everyone with a facade of idle stupidity and the firm belief that everything is 'just cool'. Happily for him, the social circle he is involved with is just as shallow as he is, allowing him to rise to the top of an extravagant, ultra-glamorous group of people whose main concern is the next party, the next hit, the next affair, the next 'tragic' death. Gossip is the new bible.

A trip to England is required after an unfortunate turn of events involving his girlfriend, his mistress, and his boss, so Victor troddles off, puzzled by a few random events that had begun happening while he was still in New York. From here, the hazy confusion of the novel kicks in to full force. Victor, never an intelligent man to begin with, retreats into himself, creating - or is he? - a group of camera-men and a director to follow him around, seeing his reality as a series of camera shots and takes. By doing this, he is able to reject the more horrifying aspects of his life because it is 'all just a movie', a movie that unfortunately he never knows the script too.

In Europe, events become more intense. Through Victor's faulty 'movie-vision', we are introduced to more and more models, all of whom are vicious, brutal terrorists. Scenes of increasing violence are juxtaposed with page-long sex scenes, most unnecessary. Victor's confusion grows, and everywhere he sees confetti. Towards the end of the novel, he is a blubbering, confused mess of a man; all he wants to do is return home to the shallow lifestyle he was used to. Here, in Europe, with people being killed or brutally tortured, he is unable to cope with the reality, a reality he is increasingly helping come into existence.

Ellis' satire perfectly captures the shallow, vapid lifestyle of the model world. Nothing is real, it is all ephemeral. Everyone loves each other until backs are turned. Everyone is a friend until the next drug rehab. Everyone is cool. Everyone is beautiful. Victor, a shallow, stupid, vapid blob of ego, is the culmination of such a social group. Through his very confused eyes, we watch the world he knows disintegrate around him while all he can do is seek refuge in the world cool.

Rating:
Summary: This is the worst book I have ever read
Review: I read this years ago, and am still haunted by the experience. The author was so celebrated, the cover was so cool, the title was perfect. I heard that my favorite writer was reading it.

So I read the whole freaking thing. Model terrorists, explosive Prada... I can not scratch the tip of the ridiculous iceberg that is this incredible waste of natural resources. So awful was this story that I really thought Ellis might be using the badness to make a point that, through a decication to finishing the book, I would be rewarded with understanding. The numb realization that this was not going to be the case after almost 500 pages left me feeling truly hoodwinked.

Years later the book continues to look really good on my bookshelf. Also, there is one incredibly homoerotic scene somewhere towards the end. Some of the shallow dialogue is really funny, and often spot-on. As a final bonus, whenever guests say anything about the book, I have a lot to say about it in return. A conversation piece! These are some of the reasons that I am glad to have read it.

But really. Just save some time and read Paluhniuk instead. If you loved Less Than Zero or American Psycho and you absolutely have to read this book, please but it used. Look... there are even people selling it used on Amazon.com right now!

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant! Wallows in the Depths of Postmodernism
Review: And I thought American Psycho was a great read...

This book is American Psycho to the nth. The writing is phenomenal and the interwining of surreal and real to the point of insanity (that parallels the main character's) is exquisite.

This book is a satire on many levels. First on the shallow level of fame, money, and narcissism ("We slide down the surface of things."). Secondly as a joke of typical American thought and behavior. For instance, Victor knows the name and lyrics of every pop song ever, yet can't remember anything of significance even when his life depends on it. Thirdly, and most deeply, it's a satire of the pathological postmodern thought. This book has a plot, but nothing is unravelled, concluded, or resolved. You finish the book wondering what the hell happened, and what was it all for? Precisely, it's a mockery of valueless, nihilistic thought that's become so en vogue intellectually, by presenting a valueless, nihilistic life that not only is wretched and unrealistic, but it fails to even make sense after awhile.

If your are in on this inside joke, this book is uproarious, and I can't recommend it enough.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliantly ironic postmodern...
Review: This is the best book I have ever read. It was so out of control and engrossing I couldn't stop reading it. The confusion, heathenism, specs and stench is all too much.