Ew

A top model, who is also a not as successful actor, Victor and his quasi-famous friends live decadent and highly consumptive lives, when a quarter of the way through the book you realise what's really going on, only to be thrown in a typical Ellis' dark, relentless and well written descent into a living Hell!

A book of many faces that holds a camera up to the characters, the capitalist consumptive world and us the voyeurs that spend so much time watching it on our screens. Another tour de force, also another book laden with hyper detail from anything from how to have two girlfriends, through to how to run a terrorist cell and torture people! 8 out of 12, fierce Four Star read that has to be
'Horror' shelved!

2009 and 2018 read

was going to say this is one of the best American novels of the 90s, but I think it is more accurate to say that this novel heralds the end of the 90s. Its obsession with terrorism and constant surveillance is not only prescient but the final curtain on the decade of relative peace and prosperity (though of course this is not actually the case for most of the world in the 1990s). The vapidity of the age is embodied wonderfully in Ellis' dipshit male model protagonist, who likely sets a record for most utterances of "baby" in a novel. While the first third of Glamorama reads more like a tabloid (names are dropped with the frequency of the average reader's blinking habits) the final third features Ellis' best prose, he's simply never had that energy ever again despite clearly trying to channel it in the climax of the recent The Shards. There are passages towards the end of this novel that I genuinely believe rival McCarthy in their horrifying and sublime beauty.

[March 29 - You know it's a bad sign when you continue reading a book purely to figure out how best to describe what's wrong with it.]

Someone once said that writing a bad review of a novel is like destroying an ice cream cone with a sledgehammer. And generally I agree with that. But books that are glaringly dedicated to nothing but the machinery of commerce are begging to be smashed. Such a book is Glamorama. I don't mind the content which - a relentlessly dull litany of petty pretty people and their petty concerns - still could be an enjoyable confection if mixed right. But the narrative is so devoid of (for lack of a better term) 'heart' that the process of reading it feels like biting into what should be a truffle to find just baker's chocolate inside.

And yet something keeps me reading... for the time being... and that something is... well, the occasional distant reminder of Less Than Zero which did everything right that this book does wrong, including, possibly most importantly, a respect for brevity.

But Less Than Zero, excuse me, had aspirations to explore the human condition rather than giggle and simper and gossip about it. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was vision, talent, a stroke of inspiration. In any case, in my opinion, since then, BEE has been content to (or condemned to) serve up ever larger, ever duller reminders of the original.

PS - confession - I haven't actually read LTZ in 25 years, but I think I'll go back and see if it holds up. I'll keep you posted.