Book Review: Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

April 14, 2000

It's just a fad; Ignore it

The good news is that, unlike anything he's ever written before, Bret Easton Ellis' fifth work of fiction, Glamorama, actually has a plot. The bad news is that he shouldn't have bothered. Does the premise of a deadly terrorist cabal composed entirely of American models make you giggle? Yeah, me too.

Not one of the gimmicks Ellis incorporates into this 400+ page novel works. The chapter numbers go from high to low instead of the traditional ascension but if this is supposed to stimulate suspense, as the LCD readout of a terrorist's bomb might, it doesn't because the book is divided into six sections. So what we then have is a countdown until the main character, Victor Ward, leaves NYC and then another countdown until the QE2 brings him to London, etc. What's the point?

Ellis' manipulation of his character's reality to reflect his views of this world are juvenile and poorly handled. Characters are chilly and "breath steam" no matter where they go, sometimes even seeing stores and apartment floors and walls covered with ice (it's a cold world out there). They're inundated by flies (they're dead inside) and smell excrement (the world is a cesspool) constantly. During the book's final third, one of Victor's various limbs falls constantly asleep (he's now numb to the carnage around him). At the halfway point, Victor starts imagining that his every move is followed by a film crew and that every location he visits is a film set. Fine. Of course a "model-slash-actor's" nervous breakdown might actually start like this but when this figment of his imagination, these people who are not even there, start moving plot-important items around and actually start influencing the direction of the story, I just finally threw up my hands and asked "Why bother?" There are certain rules, I thought, one must follow when writing fiction and Ellis seems to be going out of his way to break every single one of them.

In American Psycho, Ellis absolutely pummeled his readers with paragraph after long paragraph of mind-numbingly detailed description of what brand-name designer clothes its characters wore, what elitist restaurants they frequented, etc. This was supposed to represent how shallow and image-conscious they all were. In Glamorama, all that's changed is the milieu; instead of greedy Wall-Streeters from the 80's, we're given shallow celebrity wannabes from the 90's and, as a result, page after page of lists of famous people that these fictional characters see where ever they go. Of course, none of these stars ever step forward and interact with Victor or anyone else in the book (would that even be legal?) so we train our eyes and our brains fairly early on to just skip down one paragraph whenever we come across the beginnings of one of these lists; it's all just so much meaningless window dressing. Reading should not be this big of a chore and it seems to me that this results in an awful big waste of paper

The aforementioned brain-damaging waste of ink isn't the only technique Ellis apes from Psycho. In that novel, none of the characters could tell each other apart, they were all as shallow and well-dressed as the next guy. In Glamorama, the slight variation is that people are constantly coming up to Victor and referring to an interaction with him that he denies being present for. At first I thought this was an example of one of his character flaws, that this was Victor's way of avoiding responsibility for his reprehensible behavior (he's not only cheating on his girlfriend but his mistress). But then Ellis starts to drop clues that the terrorists might actually have the power to "double" people and I thought "Ok, this will eventually be explained." It's not. Ever. By the time we get to the last couple of pages in the book and one character is actually in two places at once (I am not making this up), it's obvious that Ellis either doesn't have an iota of respect for his readers and fans or that he simply does not have the capacity to put down on paper anything resembling coherence. Late in the book, it's revealed that the terrorists have the ability to alter pictures, film negatives and videotape into portraying anything they want. This, the novel suggests, is one of their strengths, one of the ways in which they hope to bring the world to it's knees. There's a kernel of a point in this, a suggestion that they who put blind faith in images - read: image - are easily manipulated and destroyed but haven't all of us in the real world been able to do this, in Windows, years ago? The fact that this is presented as one of the terrorist's greatest strengths is not nearly as mind-boggling empowering as Ellis presents it.

Another example of Ellis resting (Sleeping? In a coma? Dead?) on his laurels is his re-introduction of characters from past novels. In fact, in Glamorama, he goes this one better by "stealing" a fictional character from another author's work! I thought the name Alison Poole sounded familiar and, upon doing a little research, I was reminded that she was the main character from Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. But the problem with this seemingly cool bit of pilfering is that Ellis' version of Ms. Poole in no way resembles McInerney's original woman. Once again, it's just a shallow and pointless trick. When American Psycho's killer, Patrick Bateman, shows up in Glamorama for three paragraphs with "weird looking stains" on his suit, that's cool. When other past characters show up and don't even come close to resembling who we originally were told they were is lazy. Again, Ellis has duped the people who are paying his salary.

All this is really a shame because I honestly believe Ellis is intelligent. He's an expert at descriptions of locations that are just slightly off kilter and still, even after 5 crap books, occasionally exhibits the writing skills and effort that can make my jaw drop. At the end of Glamorama, Victor returns to the terrorist's headquarters one final time to retrieve his belongings and finds it empty save for endless piles of cell phones and pentagrams on the walls. It's an eerie sight that won't soon leave my memory.

I also believe he has important points to make and that, in his heart, he is a moralist and is deeply disturbed at the state of today's world. I think that he's exactly right in blaming our lessening of standards on bad parenting (in Less Than Zero) and image-over-substance beliefs (American Psycho and Glamorama). I think he's right in criticizing our society's indifference. I think he's right in that a lot of us have lost our souls long ago and that those of us who yet haven't feel our humanity slipping away bit by little bit with every passing moment. Sometimes the world is a cesspool! But his novels are all but unreadable. Why bury these thoughts amidst pages of descriptions of designer bottled water and stomach-churning violence and meaningless, unfeeling sex? Ellis' characters are especially fond of masturbation. I, for one, look forward to the day when he learns the difference between writing fiction and the latter. Until then, I can't recommend Glamorama, or any of his past works, to anyone.