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Glamorama
by: BRET EASTON ELLIS

Used Price: $6.60
Third Party New Price: $19.61

Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 481
Publication Date: December 29, 1998
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: December 29, 1998
Sales Rank: 595685
Studio: Knopf

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
We'll slide down the surface of things . . .

From his first novel--Less Than Zero, published when he was still a college student--to his most recent--the fierce American PsychoBret Easton Ellis has been a powerful and original presence in contemporary literature, whether giving voice to a previously inchoate generation or provoking a controversy that raged throughout the culture.

Now he takes a quantum leap forward: an awesome reckoning of the American Century at endgame. In Glamorama, a young man in what is recognizably fashion- and celebrity-obsessed Manhattan is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society, there and in London and Paris, and then finds himself trapped on the other side,
in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every turn, he ultimately discovers--back on the other, familiar side--that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.

Time and again, the novel confounds one's expectations of it, and Bret Ellis accomplishes the transitions from comic to surreal to horrific to humane with astonishing confidence. Matching ambition with artistic maturity, Glamorama is at once hilarious, savage in its worldly observation, and compassionate in its vision: a defining novel of our times.

Amazon.com Review:
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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- You have to read the whole book
Yes, it does seem like a lot of name dropping and hipsterisms in the opening hundred pages or so, but that is just laying the foundation for the huge story to come. This is probably my all time favorite novel, way better than American Psycho.

Rating:

- Just a lot of name dropping
I honestly did not finish the book-I only read maybe 50 pages. Every other paragraph was filled with a who's who name drop of the mid 1990's, which may be fine for exemplification of the story, but did little to entertain, especially reading it 10 yrs after it was published. The mixing of chapter parts had the potential to be interesting; I just didn't care enough to continue.

Rating:

- Baby, Baby, This Book Is Like, Too Very
From word one, you are dunked under the surface of reality and submerged into Victor's world. The book holds your head under while you struggle against the name-dropping onslaught of party boy conversations and narration. Ellis paints the 90s like a photograph.

Just when you think you know the book's tone, just when you've become accustomed to vacuous Victor, cloying Chloe, antagonistic Allison, dangerous Damien...the book flips you on your head and the entire thing changes. I'd give too much away if I said anything else.

Man, is it cold in here to you? Clean up that confetti over there before you go.

Rating:

- A very interesting book
This book goes by really quickly in the first half, and I was hooked. The second half went a little slower, but it seemed deliberate. There's so much imagery in this book that keeps re-occurring, and the author did an excellent job in setting moods with each "portion" of the book. I say this because it's structured in three small portions---one with our protagonist in New York living a fast and glamorous life, one where he is stuck on a cross-Atlantic ship in a dreamlike state, and one in Europe, where he's almost catatonic as everything around him spins out of control. I don't want to spoil the plot here, so I'll conclude with a definitive "Read it." It's not a "Must Read," but still very enjoyable.

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