The First Two-Thirds of Glamorama Is My New Favorite Book
I had been avoiding Glamorama for years, afraid that it would be terrible, so imagine my surprise and delight to find the novel starts off American Psycho–amazing. It took me a minute to adjust to the POV of the protagonist, Victor Ward, a semi-famous model-actor who’s not only dumb as a brick but also so impossibly shallow, he practically has no interior life. In the days leading up to opening a club for his boss, disaster seems imminent. Victor is cheating on his famous model gf with his boss’s famous actress fiancée (and then cheats on HER with his boss’s actress-model mistress) all while secretly opening a club of his own. The atmosphere becomes increasingly filled with dread and paranoia, and the tone is sweet, hilarious satire.
Set in the 90s, the peak of Empire culture, Glamo captures the excess of glamour and celebrity worship with an uncanny mix of grandeur and absurdity. Two decades later it holds up, a nostalgic dream evocative of a time when even I, teenaged Jesse, not only paid attention to celebrities but built a shrine to them on my bedroom walls.
Here we see master prose stylist Ellis at his best. Chic sentences packed with all the mind-numbing microdetail of American Psycho. Trailing lists as long and seductive as runway model legs. Recurring motifs glittering like the mysterious piles of confetti Victor keeps finding everywhere. And all delivered with Ellis’s deadpan coolness that has always captivated me — prose that wears designer shades indoors. And somehow a third of the way into the book, it gets even better. In a state of PTSD, Victor starts to imagine he’s being filmed in a movie, adding a layer of haunting surreality.
In his podcast you’ll hear Ellis rant about aesthetics over ideology in art — not an untimely conversation nowadays. Glamorama is the distillation of his platform — pure, transcendent aesthetics reigning supreme.
But alas, Comrade Bret — the Idealogue — emerges, his rally cry: AESTHETICS FOR THE SAKE OF AESTHETICS, AT WHATEVER COST. He has leaned so hard toward his belief in aesthetics that it has become an ideology in itself.
Not to mention, Ellis’s particular brand of aesthetics is not for the squeamish. The thread of satire — the idea behind the art, what Ellis seemed initially to be saying—is wiped out in a reign of red terror: the fictional streets of London and Paris run with blood and intestines and severed limbs and purple anal foam. Oh and confetti too. 🎉
One casualty of this crazed worship of aesthetics is consistency. First, our protagonist is suddenly endowed with complexities and real feelings. Quite a departure from a dude whose notes on Schindler’s List are: “One, the Germans were NOT very cool; two, Ralph Fiennes is SO fat; and three, I need more pot.”
There’s so much inconsistency in the world Ellis has built, it almost takes on the whimsical nature of one of those fantastical satires that I loathe, such as the recent Temporary by Hilary Leichter, which takes place in an improbable world where a girl can have 15 boyfriends — who never get jealous of each other — and do temp work as a pirate, an assassin, a barnacle, and even a skyscraper all in an epic quest for a permanent job.
The rules and logic of a world build its tension. When anything goes, things get bor-ing. The last third of the book is like stepping into the imaginary game of a (disturbed) child: Now we’re cats! Now the floor is lava! … Now they’re all terrorists! Now Victor’s father is a U.S. Senator! Now there’s a second film crew! Now Victor is bi and so is the evil hot model dude who’s holding him hostage and they’re going to fuck for six pages!
The biggest letdown is that the satire is gone, replaced by a baffling earnestness, present not only in Victor’s character but in the author himself, who seems lost now in his delusional single-mindedness like a Xanax-addled director bent upon completing a fiasco of a movie.
And yet … as a biased Ellis fan I can't help but give this ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. Even though in some ways it’s Ellis at his worst, for the first two-thirds-ish, he’s at his peak.
Those of you who love this one, come on … do you really love the whole thing?