Word: glamorama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that they become terrorists--is a good-enough one for a short story of 15 pages, but it's unsustainable at 482. Ellis' writing can be sharp, though, and after the first inanely repetitive 185 pages, the book succeeds in delivering a creepy sense of dread about our culture. Glamorama's contribution to the world may be the motto of its main character, a male model: The better you look, the more you see. As a sum-up of our decade, it's downright Tom Wolfean...
Still, Victor's sense of terror in being unable to distinguish the true from the false is unmistakable. The world of celebrity in Glamorama really is inescapable, not just because Victor is too shallow to comprehend anything beyond it, but because everything--from the public spheres of politics and religion to the private sphere of sex--is part of this world. The plot twists more often than Chubby Checker on speed. Reality alternates with the constructed so often that the constructed becomes real: "everything is altered... everyone will believe this". Even the novel itself borrows Jay McInerney's Alison Poole...
...Glamorama is a book that reads like a movie, and its constant references to Victor's life being filmed ("I think the look they exchange is over-done; the director, surprisingly, does not") without any specific motive is a tidy commentary on the creeping increase of observation. After all, when we put down the book, we can return to the 'real' world and watch When Animals Attack and Cops on prime time television...
...world become just like Ellis describes--one of sheen and brands? The temptation is to respond to Glamorama in a superficial way, merely enjoying the great lines and the action, not seeing it as real. And Ellis, for all his critique of style, is a master of it, using especially cutting lines to describe Victor's shallowness. As one character says, Victor thinks the "Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes", while Alison tells him "the only pet you ever owned was the Armani Eagle...
...slide down the surface of things" runs the constant refrain of the novel, and while Glamorama's 482 pages of vacuous characters provoke a desire to surface, to break out of the trap of celebrity, it also points out the pervasive nature of glamor. Ellis is often more interested in being cool than actual meaning (the novel opens with a Hitler quote); with Glamorama, he seems to be saying that this is the only truth we all share