Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Bret Easton Ellis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bret Easton EllisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-03-21
ISBN: 0375703845
Number of pages: 560
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)
Book Review: Fashion Victim
Summary: 5 Stars
Hey, you look marvelous, baby! Have you been exfoliating? Is that a new Prada coat? And is that a Steyr STG .77 Assault Rifle in your Armani pants, baby, or are you just happy to see me?
So here we have "Glamorama", baby, and it's all Chordite on the Catwalk, it's a blazing, glorious, sick, possibly diseased, flesh-slicingly engaging blood sacrifice to of the IT-girl (and IT-guy, baby, don't get all worked up!): it's all about beautiful, baby, and the better you look, the more you see.
Glamor, shadow, fakey-fake, sorcery of a sort. No doubt.
Whatever. So Bret Easton Ellis has loaded up his cannon with this wickedly acid, nasty little high-style and uber-pomaded little broadside all about the beautiful people, the rich, the decadent, the gorgeous, the airbrushed sleek-featured glamor-dripping workout-to-glorious-perfection fashionistas & supermodels & society mavens & club-tycoons and jet-setters, and the glitterati and A-and-B-list celebs, swooping down from limos & helicopters on the roof to the VIP lounges of high-octane parties from Hollywood to Manhattan to London to Paris, even as the hyper-predatory vultures of the papparazzi swoop down upon them.
Hunter, hunted.
And the hunt is captured within the flash of a tele-photo lense, frozen by the pop of a cork from the virginal mouth of a Cristal bottle. And what in the Christ is with all the guys lurking around with cameras, and the *two* separate film crews, and sticking to the script, and all the p*ssed off assistant directors and props people?
At its hungry-but-hip and very techno heart of darkness, it's all about supermodel & clubster Victor Ward, who pouts up at you from all the magazine covers (seen his cover for Youthquake, baby?) and smirks down at you from all the billboards. Victor Ward, twenty-six, toned to perfection, abs of steel, on the precipice of mad fame, about to open a terrifyingly hip new club with his partner and nemesis Damian, whose girlfriend---and deep-pocketed uber-model financier---he's nailing.
So take a peek in the Prada cauldron: we've got sex, and high style, and fashion, and betrayal.
We've got a club opening deep in the black, rotten heart of Manhattan, and I'm not talking just any club, baby! I'm talking big, Titanic big, Demi Moore preggers on the cover of Vanity Fair big: Victor is helping buddy/techno-thug/arch-nemesis open up the hippest, most happening new Manhattan nightspot of the second, which is where we are air-dropped into Glamorama.
Victor is the Man of the Moment, baby! He's hot, he's sleek, he's happening. He's surrounded by the glitteriest of stardom's glitterati, with plenty of names and faces you'd dig: Quentin Tarantino, Elvis Costello, Steven Spielberg, Ione Skye, Joaquin Phoenix, Seal, John-John Kennedy, even Patrick Bateman makes an appearance.
Victor is also broke: he drives into Chemical Bank on his Vespa, only to find he's overdrawn by 100 bucks. And his dad, who---well, let's say for now he *works* in Washington---wants him to get his life together.
So---he does, takes a flyer on the QE2 to London, takes a gig to find an old college flame, and "Glamorama" takes a turn for the seriously deranged.
Should you read this book? Absolutely, if you're cool with Bret Easton Ellis's sick little tendency to let the prose go insane on you, to seduce you, and sicken you, with his home-brewed brand of literary lunacy. I wouldn't worry so much about the social commentary: what you have in "Glamorama" is equal parts fun, fury, sex, debauchery, flagrant snort-laughing stupidity, and terrorism.
Terrorism? Oh yeah, did I mention things in Victor's life go from merely annoying to---well, involving lots of plastique explosive and buildings (and people) getting blown to sh*t? No? "Glamorama" is all about the finely drawn intersection between the fake and the real, between the hype and the horror, between terror and titillation. Ellis, as always, is a consummately engaging writer: it takes a steady hand to provoke a giggle over splattered viscera.
Oh, and did I mention "Glamorama" is genuinely unsettling and positively creepy? Filled with massive betrayal and mind-f*ckery? A sordid, sick, gratuitous, delicious rewarding little death spiral of the young, the fun, the hip, the happening, and the totall damned? No?
Just read it. "Glamorama" literally takes the fashionista catch-phrase "You Da Bomb!" to a whole new level.
JSG
Summary of Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries)
The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs who exists in magazines and gossip columns and whose life resembles an ultra-hip movie, is living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. And then it's time to move on to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.
Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.
You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 o's. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo
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