Glamorama
The evil twin of fellow brat-packer Jay McInerney's Model Behavior, Ellis's (The Informers) bad trip through glitterary New York has everything his fans (and critics) have come to expect: graphic sex, designer drugs, rock 'n' roll allusions, splatterpunk violence and characters as deep as 8"x10" glossies. Protagonist Victor Ward, a "model-slash-loser," is opening his own trendy Manhattan club while cheating on his supermodel girlfriend and back-stabbing his partner. After some adventures in clubland, the plot takes a turn for the paranoid. Victor is recruited by a mysterious figure, F. Fred Palakon, to track down a former girlfriend gone missing in London. There he becomes unwillingly drawn into a terrorist group?run, like so much else in the novel, by a supermodel?that bombs fashionable hangouts, hotels and jetliners. Throughout, Ellis clutters his hallmark proper-noun realism with excessive name-dropping and strung-out plotting. The satirist in Ellis seems to want to indict celebrity-obsessed, materialistic and superficial contemporary culture. With this novel he, perhaps unwittingly but certainly ironically, provides Exhibit A. 100,000 first printing. - Publishers Weekly
Comments
I just finished this bad boy tonight and I'm walking away with a Blue Velvet taste in my mouth. The surreal moments in this novel which signal that something is not quite real or right with this unreliable narrator just seem to pile up after 500+ pages. You're left with an ambiguous ending and an endless questioning of what was real and what was psychogenic. Ellis taunts you with the hope of clear answers... then he betrays you quite heartlessly.
I loved it.
This is one of those reads I'd hardly recommend to anyone. One of those massively acquired tastes developed from supersaturation in obtuse literature and surreal movies. Frankly, I certainly don't want to read something like this all the time, but if you're in the mood for the inexplicably bizarre and a pseudo-psychological adventure delivered by a character that's more of a literary construct than a realistic clinical profile of a human being, this one might be up your alley.