Word: victors
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...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, now a model. Slowly, he gets entangled...
...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...
...whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem is the namedropping. Supposedly meant to satirize Victor's obsession with looks, one cannot help but feel that it just reflects the author's attraction to glamour...
...hard to figure out why we look to the athletic arena for heroes. No ancient Greek dramaturge would turn his back on material like this: one man tested in crisis; the victor emergent from the sweat and roil of combat; gifted with superhuman size and godlike strength; and, perhaps most important, confronted with the brutal and inescapable vulnerability that all great athletes must face--the daily threat that an inferior force might vanquish them. Athletic heroism attains the heights of glory through its very proximity to defeat. And it dramatizes the worth of workaday values we want our kids...
...Melchior. No operatic appearances in 1998 were as eagerly awaited as Heppner's Lohengrin at the Met and Tristan und Isolde at the Seattle Opera, and the critical verdict was passionately positive. Small wonder: the Wagner excerpts included on his latest CD, Ben Heppner Sings German Romantic Opera (RCA Victor Red Seal), are by turns warmly lyrical and resplendently powerful...