Glamorama - Softcover

Easton Ellis, Bret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330536311 ISBN 13: 9780330536318

Publisher: Picador, 2011

Synopsis

In Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis shows us a shadowy looking-glass world, the juncture where fame and fashion, terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives.

The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn’t been and with people he doesn’t know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind . . .

About this title

Review:

Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than 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 break up, 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 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

Review:

A master stylist with hideously interesting new-fangled manners and the heart of an old-fashioned moralist. (Observer)

Gets under the skin of our celebrity culture in a way that is both illuminating and frightening. (Daily Telegraph)

Does for the cold, minimal ’90s what American Psycho did for the Wall Street greed of the ’80s. You name it, he manages to get it all in. (Vogue)

Brilliant . . . He is fast becoming a writer of real American genius. (GQ)

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0330536311
• ISBN 13: 9780330536318
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496