Glamorama

Rating:
Summary: The People You Love to Hate
Review: I'll admit it: Bret Easton Ellis writes about the kind of people I love to hate. Shallow and superficial, Ellis' protagonists are those glitzy, damaged, artificial souls that only emotionally fragile people find attractive; people who have no talent, no intelligence and nothing at all to be proud of yet seem to be proud of their shallowness anyway while deep down despising themselves and everything they stand for. They're the kind of people you'd meet at Hollywood parties, at the Cannes Film Festival, in the casino at Monte Carlo.

Ellis, however, doesn't let these icons of superficiality and stupidity get away with their silliness. Instead, he always reveals them for the monstrosities and curiosities they really are. He lets us know that behind a public persona is...nothing.

"Glamorama" is a dark and bizarre book that does a very good job of exposing the world of superficiality and banning its denizens into the hell they should rightfully inhabit. Sometimes it succeeds...brilliantly, yet at other times it seems to almost fall into the world of superficiality, itself.

The protagonist of "Glamorama," Victor Ward, is the perfect protagonist for this story. He's the ultimate "It-boy," a man with no personality of his own, a man for whom clubs, fashion shows, superficiality and pretension are nothing if they are not everything. In fact, Victor's entire world is tied to his media persona; take that away and Victor ceases to exist.

Victor Ward may seem quite stupid literally all of the time, but he's really not. That's one of the reasons he's the perfect protagonist for this book. Although he fails to have one rational thought process in the pages of "Glamorama," Victor is actually a college graduate and someone who could have, and should have, known better. Sure, we hate him, but that's exactly what we're supposed to do.

I thought the first half of "Glamorama" was dead-on perfect. It dealt with the opening of yet another "trendy" New York club and was so satirical it nearly shined in its brilliance. It did shine, in parts.

The middle of the book is where I had a slight problem with the story. After Victor is fired from his job, he's sent to Europe to find a girl no one in his right mind would really want to see. This, in itself, isn't bad, but the events surrounding Victor's search are just so bizarre, even for Ellis, that I thought he might have simply outdone himself and let his imagination run out of control. There are also strong hints, beginning with Victor's voyage on the QE2, that his life is not, well, really his life. Ellis is making a statement about the vacuity of pretension...I can accept that. Gladly. It is when the terrorists entered the story that I thought it was a bit over-the-top and incomprehensible. At that point, Ellis lost me and that's the only reason I gave "Glamorama" four stars instead of five. It's the only reason I don't think this book is an absolute masterpiece.

The book's ending, however, was a surprise and a very welcome one. I think Ellis truly redeemed himself and the bizarre twists on the QE2 with his superb (and very fitting) ending. There's a very strong and powerful message in the ending of "Glamorama" and it's one that's very thought-provoking as well. I think perhaps the people who didn't like this book might have been missing the point. I don't know, of course, but that would be my guess. I think anyone who doesn't think this a powerful and satirical book should reread it with an open mind. While it's not always enjoyable, it is absolutely brilliant in parts and it's quite a powerful commentary on the shallowness of life, albeit ultimately a very sad one. Sad, but oh-so-true.

Rating:
Summary: A story told with the wrong voice
Review: This book unfortunately proves that there are some things multiple rewrites just can't fix. In a 1999 interview, Ellis discussed the years of work that had gone into it, and Glamorama's reception must therefore have meant for him a personal disappointment akin to that of those fans of his who were eager for a ride worthy of American Psycho.

The sad thing is, this could have been a great book. It approaches excellence at times, only to leave you skimming pages at others.

The plot, which doesn't become obvious for a long, long time, was a clever premise upon which to build an offbeat book. Fashion models were icons of the 90s as they've never been of any time before. Yet though we idolized them, publicized them, fantasized about them, the collectively held sentiment was that they're a bunch of idiots. Fashion models have the perfect cover, in other words, under which to engage in all sorts of devious activities. Unfortunately, we take too long to learn this because we're looking through the eyes of a model who really is an idiot, Victor Ward. As a narrator, Ward is so maddeningly dense that it's hard to figure out when he's just stupid, when he's stoned, and when he's both stupid and stoned, to the detriment of his and our understanding of his surroundings.

I don't believe in the idea that readers have to like a book's narrator or identify with the main character: the success of scores of books built around an anti-hero disproves that notion. But the choice of the narrator is the author's responsibility, and by telling the story through the eyes of the least perceptive character in it, Ellis builds a barrier between this book and any reader frustrated by stupidity. Some of the other characters, in particular Bobby Hughes, the group's venal Capo, and his sneering jackal of a lieutenant, Bentley Harrolds, are well drawn, and Ellis is still a master at conveying time and scene through his selection of songs and brands. But the book's single noteworthy sex scene 3/4 of the way through and the all-too-brief cameo by Patrick Bateman are ultimately just the bittersweet reminders of unfulfilled promise.

In AP and Less than Zero we learned what Ellis is capable of. I'll eagerly await his next work in hopes of finding him again.

Rating:
Summary: Had to read it twice
Review: It took me two or three reads to fully the comprehend the scope of this brilliant work. the first time i read it I was confused and dissapointed, but I patiently reread it and realized that BEE has taken American Psycho and improved on it to levels comparable with Pynchon and Joyce. Wouldn't it be something if they made this one into a movie?

Rating:
Summary: fashion as the new (dys)function
Review: A peek at Baudrillard would probably help out the lost souls wanting to make sense of this book. If "we slide down the surface of things..." we are sure to be left with nothing to hang onto, no friction, no depth. The book is about the interchangeability of reality and media. Film crew, police crew, J. Crew, all the same blur of surface and effect (special or otherwise). None of these people have any real context or connection, how the hell could their story hold any kind of center? Ellis is probably the best there is at writing well and punching right at the heart of what ails us here and now. The "middle passage" on the cruise ship is such an amazing chunk of satire that it alone would would be worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: A Genius Idea
Review: The novel takes subjects America is obsessed with -- celebrity, beauty, glamour, youth -- and renders their surfaces so ugly that every reader of People, every person that gazes at ...[the media] is a real target of Ellis' satire. ...[You'll] know how insipid and vain it is, yet you'll keep watching through the commercials after teasers hint ...[at] beauty secrets and the horrors of the World Trade Center disaster. You will keep reading for the same reason, indicting yourself. Through the book, you'll idealize a model's perfect skin and then her mangled corpse. Maybe you'll have a moment of clarity, maybe you'll turn off the tube... The novel should change the way you look at the culture industry and your role in it, whether you live in Dubuque or South Beach.

Rating:
Summary: take a step back...
Review: when i first began GLAMORAMA, i hated it. after 50 pages, i didn't want to be reading it. i despised the central character, but eventually that's what made me keep coming back. to see what kind of mess this fool would fall into. i feel like you would have to be in a coma to miss the razor sharp social commentary embedded in this book. granted, it takes a bit of getting used to, but come on, IT'S SATIRE. fans of AMERICAN PSYCHO should already be used to ellis's style. i enjoyed reading a full page of words with scarcely a period to be found. it's as if you're listening in instead of being told. finishing this book was like a victory, and i felt glad after i had. "WE LIVED IN A WORLD WHERE BEAUTY WAS CONSIDERED AN ACCOMPLISHMENT" enough said.

Rating:
Summary: "Sliding across the surface of things....."
Review: Having just finished completing the oeuvre of Bret Easton Ellis, and planning on re-reading Glamorama, i decided to write a review of it. I read almost all of the other reviews--actually, almost none of them--to get a good perspective on what i should have to say so that you won't read them.
I couldn't come up with anything other than that it's most similar to American Psycho in terms of its style. Like Kubrick's The Shining and any song by Aerosmith, every single second of it is interesting in its own right, but the whole is slightly less than the sum of its parts.
That said, some and many parts are good. Funny. Laughable. And so on.
For those who want a plot-synopsis, you should try to overcome this desire.
The book starts off in the fashion-conscious world of New York and then Victor takes a cruise to Europe where we are confronted by the quintessentially Philip K. Dick-ian question: "What is real?" And as with American Psycho, the question cannot be resolved.
Then there are the abrupt shifts in tone and content.
People who liked Invisible Monsters should like this as the inverted version. The mirror image as it were.
So in the end we are left with yet another victory of style over substance, as well as a book which can only be called an ultra-violent Zoolander....

Rating:
Summary: Two Thumbs Down
Review: Since so many other people have raved about this book, I'm going to put in my own opinion of it simply for the fact that it differs so vastly from the reviews I have read so far.

This is probably the most frustrating book I have ever bothered to actually finish. I'm a huge, huge fan of American Psycho, which I thought was brilliantly written. Clever, revolutionary and extremely well-crafted are all adjectives I would apply to that book. I also read The rules of Attraction which, though not my style of story, was a reasonable read nonetheless. Glamorama, however, falls well short of the mark and I felt cheated after battling through it.

My main gripe is that this story has no significance, direction or purpose. American Psycho made some huge social comments and revealed vast intricacies of the main character, whereas Glamorama basically establishes Victor as a spoilt little fool very early and then does nothing with it. At the end of the book, I liked Victor LESS than at the beginning. The story does not explain itself very well at any stage, instead meandering aimlessly through page after page of vague, uninteresting plot. There are numerous displays of potential, but these go off the boil before they can get going because the story immediately plunges off on another tangent just as things look like getting interesting.

Basically, this book has it's moments but overall I simply didnt like it. True, the cameo of Patrick Bateman is great, but all it did for me was make me wish for another story about him - his character was like a ray of light on an otherwise cloudy day.

I wasnt hoping for American Psycho 2 (though I'd buy that without thinking once if it was ever released) and dont think my expectations were tinted by such an expectation.

In summary, this book made little sense to me and was, at the end of the day, annoying because of it. It sets up promises all the way through, then fails to deliver. It doesnt even end properly, it just stops. You might find yourself wondering if someone has pulled a few pages out of the back of your copy. Again, nowhere near the calibre of American Psycho, which I thought ended just right.
In my opinion, Glamorama is simply, and unexpectedly, not very good.

Rating:
Summary: Undecided
Review: I recently finished reading "Glamorama" and found myself without an opinion of the book. Maybe I'm just not well-read. I enjoyed the beginning of the novel. I found Victor to be hilarious and somewhat contradictive. I couldn't help but laugh at him. However after the club opening, I thought I was reading another book! It took a weird twist and I was left thinging "what's the point?" I did have to write an essay on this, so of couse, I had to find a point.

If you're really absorbed in pop-culture (as I am), I think you'll find the beginning of this book to be absolutely hysterical. As for the rest of the book, I won't say that it was boring, because Ellis certainly hit me with a few surprises, but if you're merely a teenager who isn't well-read (like myself), the book may not turn out to be what you expect.

Rating:
Summary: A Horror Novel?
Review: I consider myself a fan of Mr. Ellis' writing. Each of his books has a different point of satire, and each skewers its target mercilessly. Glamorama surpassed surpassed all of his works before it.

This is, without a doubt, one of the most horrific, hilarious, and many other words starting with "h" novels I have ever read.

Victor Ward and his "friends" are everything I've ever dreamed and feared New York City society is like. At first, the book seems to be about quite possibly the most insipid male model in history. But Ellis had a lot more in his sights: what celebrity does to our perceptions of ourselves; how we can let ourselves become passengers in our own lives; and how we've become inured to violence in the media and movies.

This book has such an incredibly slowly developed sense of menace and spiraling insanity, that I didn't even realize it was there until it was already too late. Which is exactly what happens to Victor in the novel.

I'll say this. I read this every morning on the subway into work, and found myself alternatingly cackling with laughter, and clutching the handstrap for support. I don't think I've ever had such a visceral reaction to a book before.

One of the most shocking, surprising, novels I've ever read. It's definitely not for the easily queasy, but otherwise, I cannot recommend it enough.

*A little note: I'd also recommend reading Rules of Attraction before picking this up.