Word: glamorama
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This is funny enough but gets tired easily. Celebrity by itself teeters so often into self-parody that it seems too easy to bash it. Fortunately, Ellis does more than that, injecting Glamorama with a sharper plot than those of earlier novels, a plot which kicks in about a quarter of the way into the novel. Victor, for a $300,000 fee, is sent by the mysterious F. Fred Palakon (whose name echoes G. Gordon Liddy's neatly enough to hint at the web of deceit to follow) to London to look for a former Camden College friend, Jamie Fields...
Combining the world of celebrity and conspiracy theory, Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis' first full novel since 1991's American Psycho (1994's The Informers was a series of vignettes), takes on the classic Ellis topic: the amoral world. This time, that world is not just New York (as in American Psycho) or Los Angeles (The Informers, Less Than Zero) but that of international celebrity, taking in the glitterati axis of New York-London-Paris which Woody Allen has visited recently, but more lightheartedly--in contrast, Ellis is cold, cold, cold...
...vampires populate this particular Ellis work, but it's hard to believe that any warm blood flows in Glamorama's characters. Victor Ward, fashion's latest "It Boy of the moment," is the novel's memorable protagonist, an uberstereotype of the male model. "The better you look, the more you see," goes Victor's pithy saying, and he believes it. His lifestyle is the extreme of everything the current culture worships: he can't avoid thinking in brand names and image and speaks with lines from pop songs ("do you have the time to listen to me whine?"). Even honesty...
Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho and a longtime McInerney buddy, doesn't seem too worried about the feelings of models either. His next book, Glamorama, due out this winter, is a screed against models and celebrity. McInerney says the passages he has read are dark, something he avoided. "I deliberately wrote a comic novel because you don't go chasing butterflies with sledgehammers," he says...
...supplying baby sitters and nurseries. In California, for example, the Futurama Bowl near San Jose has a $2,600,000 layout that includes a five-acre parking lot, nursery facilities for more than 180 children, a restaurant-bar, a dressing room, semiautomated food and beverage service, free coffee, a "Glamorama Room" with physical therapist, body-building equipment and steam room. Says Owner Nick Bebek Jr.: "These women start to take inches off their behinds, build their bust up two inches. They go insane! Then their complexions start to get clearer and they wonder why, and then they realize...