I thought Lunar Park was where the horror-thriller writing peaked for Ellis, but oh lawd was I mistaken. This one is bizarre, to put in vague and uncertain terms. There's a sub-plot I particularly enjoyed concerning a film crew. I find it hard to say much about this one without spoiling it. If you already like his other works then go for it, but if you weren't sold by another of his novels already, then I doubt this will be the one to do it.

How to put this?

GLAMORAMA is many many things. GLAMORAMA is one very very long novel; GLAMORAMA is one of those books you’ll probably find on a 500-level English MA course; GLAMORAMA is not easy to read and GLAMORAMA is something of a work of genius. Now, it may not be as lengthy as say, Adam Levin’s THE INSTRUCTIONS or Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD but GLAMORAMA has so much going on behind the scenes and so much that is ultimately left unexplained to the reader and features so many different characters doing different things and introduces so many different themes and ideas and offers so many instances of writing genius that in the end, it all feels a bit overwhelming—a recurring theme in GLAMORAMA.

Abstractly, GLAMORAMA is to Bret Easton Ellis’ writing what FIGHT CLUB is/was to Chuck Palahniuk—and here, I am not talking plot or characters or success, rather, breadth and scope—but also, I feel that it is important to add that Palahniuk’s TELL ALL (with all its name-dropping-ness and discussion on celebrity stuff) feels like a terribly-flawed and less interesting GLAMORAMA but it’s also unfair to compare two books that are not that similar in reality. And at first, GLAMORAMA feels like it could have been two different books written by two very different authors but GLAMORAMA is one of those stories that feels absolutely (and this needs to be emphasized) confusing during the read but then, after it is all over, and in reflection, it (gradually) begins to make sense, sort of.

Again, GLAMORAMA is not an easy read, and really good books sometimes aren’t, and you have to be patient with this one, but like I said earlier, a lot of things will go unnoticed after a first read, and Ellis (purposefully) throws in a bunch of red herrings and several what the hell moments—and he does this with super explicit sex, amazingly graphic violence and several scenes featuring confetti—but when it all comes down to the nit-picking, I guess GLAMORAMA is really a story about excess and superficiality and the limits of control. And also, it’s about: sex, drugs, guns, super models, New York life, the cult of personality, extreme wealth, terrorism, Paris, celebrity, conspiracies, imposters, photo manipulation, hallucinations, ultra violence, pop culture, deception, confetti, music, the movie-making process, memories and dreams, post-modernism, expectation and eventually, regret. And while some reviews claim that GLAMORAMA is a jumbled mess of a novel—I agree, it is something of a beautiful mess; it’s not perfect, and it’s not supposed to be.

The first part of the book will read like an annoying YA book written for adults. It’s packed with: famous people names, the word “baby” in almost every line of dialogue, a severe amount of (what seems like) throw-away dialogue, a plot that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, characters who all sound alike, a story that really isn’t a story, super-hyphenated-made-up-terms and did I mention, a nonexistent plot?

An example of the super-annoying YA-like dialogue from the fist part of the book:
“Yoki Nakamuri was approved for this floor,” Peyton says.
“Oh yeah?” I ask. “Approved by who?”
“Approved by, well, moi,” Peyton says.
“Who the fuck is Moi?” I ask. “I have no fucking idea who this Moi is, baby.”
“I’m Moi,” Peyton says, nodding. “Moi is, um, French.”

And ironically, this is the sort of setup—annoying dialogue and vague story with super-shallow people in boring situations—that is necessary for the second part of the book to truly shine. It’s a classic (and simple) case of opposites and role reversals.

In the second part: New York becomes Paris, Victor’s position of power becomes a lack, his drug of choice becomes a necessity and he switches to Xanax, the vapid tameness becomes dynamic brutality and even the way Victor thinks and speaks changes dramatically.

An (extreme) example:
“The mannequin springs grotesquely to life in the freezing room, screeching, arching its body up, again and again, lifting itself off the examination table, tendons in its neck straining, and purple foam starts pouring out of its anus, which also has a wire, larger, thicker, inserted into it...there is, I’m noticing, no camera crew around.”

And though we are never sure that everything Victor says or sees is real—and here we have the classic case of the unreliable narrator—GLAMORAMA is really a story that is less worried about the (satisfying) conclusion and more concerned with the process, meaning: the characters, the dialogue, the bizarre scenarios, the violence, the ambiguity, the—everything; that’s what matters most in a story.

A FEW SPOILERS, SORT OF
And no, I can’t tell you why everything’s always “freezing” or too cold, and I can’t tell you why there’s confetti everywhere, and I couldn’t tell you why only Victor notices that it smells like shit, and I couldn’t say if: the cameras, the PA’s, the best boys, the film crew, the whole shebang was really real or just a fabrication, and I don’t really know how they were able to impersonate Victor, Lauren, Bruce, Jamie or everyone else and I don’t know if Palakon ever really told Victor the truth and I don’t know what really happened to Marina and I couldn’t tell you why Christian Bale keeps showing up and I don’t know why there is an entire chapter that is basically an explicit sex scene between three people and I don’t know what it means when Victor keeps saying “we’ll slide down the surface of things…” and I couldn’t tell you what it means when Victor keeps telling people that “the better you look, the more you see” and I couldn’t begin to explain the quote “it’s what you don’t know that matters most”—but does it really matter?
END OF SPOILERS

Or rather, consider this. Is it better (and easier) to admit that the entire story was maybe just a movie? And that—the dialogue, the memories, the people, the bodies, the sex scenes, the bombings, all the crying and all the dying and all the inconsistencies, the plot holes—none of it was real—just part of some movie script?

jeg leste denne ved poolen og falt inn og ut av plottet mellom sippene med limoncello, men supermodell-terrorister som går fra klubben til torturkjelleren er peak brat summer

{Contains Some Spoilers}

Victor Ward aka Victor Johnson is a male model living in Nineteen-nineties Manhattan. Victor is a vapid, soulless character, devoid of meaningful content, obsessed by celebrity culture and living an existence that revolves around social connections and physical appearance, abdominals being a particular obsession.
Prior to moving to New York, Victor attended the illustrious Camden College, which is evidently a haunt of the elite with many of Camden’s former students residing in Manhattan and appearing in the book. Victor is in a long-term relationship with model girlfriend Chloe, but has no qualms about seeing a host of other women, who include wealthy Damian’s girlfriend Alison. Victor had been planning to open a nightclub with Damian, but matters go awry when Damian discovers the affair.
Shortly thereafter Victor, who is increasingly suffering from mental turmoil, is visited by a mysterious private investigator, by the name of Palakon. Palakon persuades Victor to leave New York and travel to London, his mission to locate Jamie Fields, a former female pupil of Camden, who is apparently still in love with our protagonist. We follow Victor’s escapades, first on the journey across The Atlantic on the QE2 and then in London and later Paris as he finds his life entwined with a group of fashion models turned terrorists, led by the dangerous former male model Bobby Hughes. A confused and increasingly Xanax dependent Victor struggles to comprehend the events that he finds himself unwittingly involved in.
Glamorama can essentially be viewed as a satirical work, which is adept at capturing the hedonism of New York during this era. In typical Ellis fashion, the text is punctuated with numerous pop-culture references, in addition to the occasional vivid description of violence and prolonged graphic sexual encounters, which are not in every instance heterosexual in nature. The author is widely regarded as the master of dialogue and his skills are in evidence throughout the book’s four-hundred and eighty-two pages, with layer upon layer of speech and continual torrents of conscious thought. As a result the book though often comical and engaging is at times difficult and often extremely confusing. The reader is left undecided as to whether many of the events, particularly in the second half of the book, are actually real or are merely part of a constantly mentioned film set. It could be argued that the film set is not real and its presence is allegorical or maybe merely a comment on the protagonist Victor’s world view. At any rate it is not clear and there are many other bewildering elements such as the bizarrely numbered chapters of vastly varying lengths, which are for sections of the book in descending order while during other parts seemingly random.
To appreciate this book it is essential that the reader does not become overly obsessed with the myriad of unanswered questions, but instead allows themselves to surrender to the endless display of surfaces and be engulfed by the convoluted world of confusion, more akin to Burrough’s Naked Lunch than a novel, so unconstrained is it by the burden of plot. Glamorama is a polarising work by a polarising author that is unique, exploratory and free-flowing, in which the author evaluates how reality is actually structured.

Welcome to the vapid, vacuous, vacant world of Bret Easton Ellis. For those of you familiar with Ellis' other novels like American Psycho and Less Than Zero, Glamorama is yet another deep dive into the garbage heap of humanity, a raging dumpster fire of nihilism, selfish indulgence, vanity, and crass consumerism among people who can barely string together a sentence that doesn't involve mention of someone famous (most are '90's-era celebrities who barely register in 2021), a trendy restaurant/club, or an expensive designer item. The story centers around Victor Ward, a model/actor/“It boy,” so stupid he can barely remember his name, though no one around him seems to care because he's got cheekbones that could cut glass, rock-hard abs, and good looks go far the the world of fashion. After 100+ tiresome pages of Victor's endless haze of inebriation, club openings, and fashion shows, the plot abruptly shifts to something like a spy novel, and suddenly he's on a cruise ship traveling overseas to rescue a former ex-girlfriend, to the tune of a $300K payout. From there, it gets even stranger, and, true to form, Ellis breaks out some of the ultra-violence and sex scenes he's so infamous for from previous novels. I don't know if I'm becoming more sensitive in my old age or perhaps I'm simply reacting to all the violence and chaos going on in the world RIGHT NOW, but reading about people's body parts becoming propulsive devices after multiple terroristic incidents gave me a sickening feeling that I couldn't shake. Not to mention that most, if not ALL, of the characters in this novel were completely reprehensible caricatures of actual human beings. I get that it's the POINT of all this, that it's meant to be a cynical representation of people that deserve their comeuppance, but this book just doesn't age well.

This is a bizarre book. It's a weird amalgamation of Ellis's earlier works (specifically"American Psycho", more on that later) and a Jack Ryan movie.
The first third of the book is almost unbearably boring, being Ellis's typical descriptions of the minutia of the vapid, hollow lives of socialites. All the people care about is clothing, who is seeing who, and fame. In fact, entire paragraphs of this book are nothing but names of famous people. None of the people seem even close to real.
Victor Ward, the main character and narrator , is a very minor celebrity, having had some success as a model. He is also a totally unreliable narrator, which is part of the reason I didn't enjoy this book so much. Whereas in "American Psycho" I enjoyed that Patrick Bateman was an unreliable narrator because he is, well, a psycho, this book wrestles with whether Victor is stable or not. For most of the book, Victor inexplicably thinks everywhere he is is freezing cold, even inside, to the point where he describes ice in hotel rooms and in stairwells. He also thinks everything happening to him is part of a movie that is being shot. Yet at the same time, it's all narrated as though all the events are happening for real. I think this hurts the book because I do believe the events are happening to Victor and he is having trouble coping, but because there is still some uncertainty, I found the book less enjoyable.

Still, the terrorist plot is intriguing (if not run out too long. This book could have been shorter) and is full of Ellis' typical graphic depictions of sex and violence (a scene involving a woman poisoned with RU486 made my stomach churn and I don't typically have trouble with fantasy depictions of violence and gore).

Oh, and the plot never really resolves, which is frustrating. Lots of plot points are just left sort of opened ended and the book just randomly finishes on a nothing sort of scene.

I might actually have liked this one more than "American Psycho," now that I think about it. It's actually kind of a 90's version of what AP was to the 80's, a sort of indictment/celebration(?) of materialistic/consumer culture, at least at the begining. Featuring a main character just as vapid as Patrick Bateman, Victor Ward is a male model who spends the first 200 pages going to night clubs and hanging with tons of equally vacant celebrities. Ellis's style makes this all pretty funny, but then the book takes a total 180, and Victor gets pulled into a world of model terrorists and loses sense of who's who and what's what in a haze of sex and violence. This book is just fucking awesome. And yes, it can definitely be described as "Zoolander" meets "Fight Club."

this was beyond immensely insane, mr. ellis is fast becoming my absolute favourite, finished this so fast even with working every day since i started it

The young, rich, white elite of the American glitterati skizz through drug binges and forgotten jaunts of bored promiscuity; party after party and the camera’s rolling and the paparazzi’s glut divines the tenor of aqueous evenings sloshing in the zeitgeist of vapid, shallow voids; then somewhere along the jitzy route the stutter of the camera is now the vicious patter of bullets and bombs and the empty American glamorama careens butter-smooth into terrorism and torture, a blitz of haywire fluxion toward total chaos, all safely contained within pages, upon a screen, in the glassy stillness of an image, so it can’t touch you, and you’re so safe and someone else suffers while you guzzle privilege and wilt from your American excess, just waiting for the terror to materialize, and really all you have to do is look in the mirror.


Five stars earned for:

⭐️The zippy, rude dialogue
⭐️The brilliant character development and disintegration
⭐️The blunt critique of distinctly American narcissicm and the numb blindness to any tragedy or crisis that isn’t our own
⭐️The hyper-saturated descriptions of violence and sex and decadence
⭐️The almost unwieldy scale of the narrative; Ellis is a ballsy, muscular writer who deftly blurs and fuses several genres in this long, verbose novel. There are scenes of almost unbearably intense violence balanced with those of dark, humorous satire.

Kunde bantats ner en hel del. En del bra delar och förvånansvärt sympatisk huvudperson. Mycket onödigt kryptiska saker som känns som att de är där bara för att vara kryptiska.

En bisarr bok som är lika härlig som störig. Kaotisk, obegriplig och fantastiskt underhållande.

Well shit, that was the wildest thing I've read from Bret Easton Ellis. By far. Perhaps even the best too, I'm not quite sure yet.

There are two main reasons why this book isn't talked about anymore in 2023: 1) it's too similar to American Psycho (it is, but it's better in every respect) and 2) it features terrorists attacks, including a nightmarish plane hijacking, and three years after it came out the 9/11 bombings would make airplane hijacking uncool forever. But Glamorama is a great, challenging, shapeshifting novel that transcends genre and era. It's about celebrity, purpose, meaning (or lack thereof), it's ironic at times and heartfelt at others. It feels like you've grown alongside Bret Easton Ellis reading this.That you accessed different parts of him.

It's awesome. Full review on Dead End Follies this friday. There a LOOOOOT to unpack.