Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant! Wallows in the Depths of Postmodernism
Review: And I thought American Psycho was a great read...
This book is American Psycho to the nth. The writing is phenomenal and the interwining of surreal and real to the point of insanity (that parallels the main character's) is exquisite.
This book is a satire on many levels. First on the shallow level of fame, money, and narcissism ("We slide down the surface of things."). Secondly as a joke of typical American thought and behavior. For instance, Victor knows the name and lyrics of every pop song ever, yet can't remember anything of significance even when his life depends on it. Thirdly, and most deeply, it's a satire of the pathological postmodern thought. This book has a plot, but nothing is unravelled, concluded, or resolved. You finish the book wondering what the hell happened, and what was it all for? Precisely, it's a mockery of valueless, nihilistic thought that's become so en vogue intellectually, by presenting a valueless, nihilistic life that not only is wretched and unrealistic, but it fails to even make sense after awhile.
If your are in on this inside joke, this book is uproarious, and I can't recommend it enough.
Rating:
Summary: Laugh-Out-Lound Funny
Review: Fine work by Ellis. Ellis continues to expose society's general emptiness and love of celebrity through his well crafted, biting satire.
Additionlly, this book qualifies as a first-class thriller that takes place in New York, aboard the QE II, London, Paris, and Milan.
Rating: 
Summary: We'll slide down the surface of things, baby
Review: Glamorama is Ellis's fifth novel and his most daring achievement thus far. The novel starts off in Manhattan, the time is 1990s, and the main character is Victor Ward. Victor is a supermodel, the IT boy for the moment, who is a womanizer, a would-be actor and musician, and overall man-about-town. He is about to open a very trendy nightclub but things don't go as Victor plans. Through a variety of circumstances Victor is plunged into a world of violence, conspiracy, and international terrorism. By the end of the novel Victor and the reader is left in a profoundly different mind set compared to the beginning of the book. One of the strengths of this book is Ellis's keen ear for dialogue. Victor's speech has a crsip flow that is well crafted by Ellis. In the novel Ellis gives us a surreal atmosphere with poetic and disturbing descriptions. I can honestly say that I will never look at a pool party the same way after reading the segment of how Victor meets his girlfriend Chloe. His characters run the gambit of either being hip or sad or funny or extremely dangerous. Eight years in the making, and it shows, Ellis had given the world a modern day masterpiece that will be read a hundred years from now.
Rating:
Summary: And the point of this book is?
Review: I am a huge fan of Elli's work, I read them all and I love them all, but when I picked up Glamorama, I thought I was in for a good read, but I was proven wrong. Glamorama is about a fashion model named Victor Ward; if you read The Rules Of Attraction, then you know who I am talking about, but even if you didn't, don't worry you didn't miss much, who is opening his own club in Manhatten. He is being constanly interviewed since he is the 'it-boy' of the moment getting his 15 minutes of fame. The first 200 pages I found were kind of boring and repetitive (American Psycho is too), but he is then followed by a mysterious man, so now he decides to take a break from the life he lives. He takes a trip to Europe and that is when thing's go awkward. He then becomes part of a terrorist network making bomb's, so now he is a fashion model/terrorist. The rest of the novel lead's to more of a Chuck Palahniuk kind of ending. The point of the novel? I didn't find one, but still I thought I should give it 4 star's because the novel is VERY DIFFERENT from any work done by Ellis. This is not my favorite novel by Ellis, but I suggest that you read his earlier work like Less Than Zero to The Informers. If you like Chuck's work (like I do), then you will like this novel, but this novel is not for everyone. Some people will like it, some people won't. You make the choice either to read it or just get out of the library. Just get it out of the library and judge the book for yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: NOTHING gets resolved.
Review: I do not understand the people giving this book a five. My guess is that they're little Ellis puppets and treasure whatever he does, even if it's crap like this book was. This is the most UNSATISFYING read you'll ever endure, unless you like paying $10 for bits and pieces of lukewarm erotica. This book is not at all thought-provoking. There is no point to this book.
Rating: 
Summary: This is the worst book I have ever read
Review: I read this years ago, and am still haunted by the experience. The author was so celebrated, the cover was so cool, the title was perfect. I heard that my favorite writer was reading it.
So I read the whole freaking thing. Model terrorists, explosive Prada... I can not scratch the tip of the ridiculous iceberg that is this incredible waste of natural resources. So awful was this story that I really thought Ellis might be using the badness to make a point that, through a decication to finishing the book, I would be rewarded with understanding. The numb realization that this was not going to be the case after almost 500 pages left me feeling truly hoodwinked.
Years later the book continues to look really good on my bookshelf. Also, there is one incredibly homoerotic scene somewhere towards the end. Some of the shallow dialogue is really funny, and often spot-on. As a final bonus, whenever guests say anything about the book, I have a lot to say about it in return. A conversation piece! These are some of the reasons that I am glad to have read it.
But really. Just save some time and read Paluhniuk instead. If you loved Less Than Zero or American Psycho and you absolutely have to read this book, please but it used. Look... there are even people selling it used on Amazon.com right now!
Rating:
Summary: Not just a "Book for the 90s"
Review: It was hard for me to admit, after finishing "Glamorama," but Ellis is one of the most original satirists we have working today. Hard because I used to buy the criticism about his trendiness, the endless pop-culture references masking a lack of vision. Not so: in fact, one great irony of our ironic fin-de-siecle culture is that so many critics fail to recognize real irony! Folks, the vapidity and the inconsistency of the pop culture cataloging is done deliberately--deliberately--to invoke a sense of the impermanence and interchangeablity. I've read the hacks who think pop culture references are substitutes for cultural commentary; hell, most of them write for magazines, TV and Hollywood. Ellis, if you're willing to cut him the slack you'd cut any other writer who isn't Ellis, is cut from a different and classically American jib. His is a moral satire akin to some of the works of Hawthorne, West, even Fitzgerald. The use of surrealism in this work is probably it's shakiest premise because it asks you, de facto, to surrender your need for clear cut reality; this really is nothing new in writing. Glamorama works when you accept its surrealism instead of working against it. Why people work so hard to put this writer down, especially after the knee-jerk reaction to the underrated American Psycho (a very funny book!), is not hard to see. They mistake the writer for the soulless, vapid yuppie partyboys of his novels. Here's the news: Ellis is really one of the most talented and traditional writers working today. He deserves at least a little credit.
Rating:
Summary: Glamour Rocking Model Terrorists and Nose Drugs!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: Like American Psycho, Ellis' Glamorama acts as another brilliant social commentary, although this time without as many ravaged corpses and workout sessions. If American Psycho is an overcrowded room at the Ritz erupting in flames, Glamorama is the bloated feeling one gets when overeating caviar. Ellis has taken a step away from wrathful mutilations and embraced the art of name dropping. Victor Ward, our beloved romping protagonist and hippest cat east of Hollywood, is a male model, who's dating one model, and sleeping with another...one that happens to be his boss's girlfriend. Victor accepts a job to open a new night club, hopefully succeeding before his fame has elapsed. In the meantime, the apathetic Ward plans to open his own club, working around his boss. Learning that Ward's having sex with his girlfriend, and planning to uproot the club and open his own, Ward's Boss forces him into financial (in this case worldly) turmoil. Soon enough though, he accepts a commission to go to France to find an old college roommate, Jamie. Little does he know that she, a model, and her counterparts are wrapped up in terrorist activity (I'm not joking). The plot turns here into a cliché story of thriller commentary and eventually the text breaks apart into babble. All the while, the characters are forgetting their script lines in a world that is, "just a stage." Now Ward, who is called upon to be an unlikely hero, comes to the rescue, but only with a traveling film crew that joined him on the way to Europe. And so the question stands: Could anyone other than Ellis polish this fashion runway to a brilliantly force fed poignant literary sheen?
In the novel Ellis flexes his completely ruthless and satirical critique of western culture. His characters are brand names, just like everything else. Virtue graces the stage from behind the curtain only when the camera is rolling. Glamorama's characters are so shallow and narcissistic that it makes the reader's job of identifying, or even having empathy toward them impossible. They are the social progenies of an insane social reality. A society which morbidly consumes its beautiful by dressing them in Kevlar-lined Armani suits! Ellis' world is one of the inflated pop-culture, where celebrities rule the world, not because of merit but because of beauty. His world is one where the effects of the consumerist age of the late 80s hairspray period in American history transpire into the morally malnourished coke binging elitists of the nineties. His world...is one that could create Patrick Bateman.
Ellis gives the voice of countless marketing ploys and advertisements a social echo. Wear this, do this, be cool, be rich, buy Stridex or you will get pimples, and if you have pimples no one will like you and you will die lonely, unemployed, without a nice pair of cuff-links and miserable. The books depiction of the current state of consumerism is eerily reminiscent to an inflated capitalist society. While warning the reader about the escalating consumerist culture, he also mocks his author counterparts by using a cliché like thriller plot with the babbling sentence structure similar to the current post-modern movement. Whether Ellis is sincere in this presentation of current affairs, or whether he is launching martini soaked spitballs at his audience, and at the world becomes meaningless, what has been said has been, and by the ferocity of which Ellis writes, needed to be.
Ellis' acute eye for societal endangerments and his complete disregard for anyone's emotions and psyche have led his novels to the front of contemporary American literature. I can imagine Ellis, sitting on a papier-mâché couch of glamour magazines, in front a sixty three inch plasma television, blasting the E channel, smirking like the Mona Lisa at all the minds he has sent squirming. Deservedly so, He has gained fame for his exploitation and satirical wrecking ball of western culture and the state of modern assimilated literature. And, just like American Psycho, Glamorama is a book that can be hated, loved, praised, or dismembered with an axe, but one thing that it cannot be is ignored. This kind of social commentary is very rare, lucky for us though; we have Ellis to deliver this social gouging with the figurative ease of stuffing a kitten into an ATM.
P.S. Huey Lewis f-ing rocks!
Rating:
Summary: Johnny Bravo becomes real...
Review: The main character, Victor Ward (or Johnson) is as clueless and lightheaded as the Cartoon Network chump. He think he is gorgeous, cool, trendy, and everything that you would ever wanted to be. But also he is as shallow as a kiddie pool. He hangs around with all the supermodels, actors, actresses, writers and producers that you can imagine -and Ellis doesn't miss the opportunity to kick some heads and mock some of our favorite stars-. Huge amounts of cocaine, alcohol, parties and (some) sex add some spice to the history. And frankly, that's the boring part of the book. Almost the first half.If you are resilient enough and you endure the first half of the book, you'll get into a darker territory. Everything becomes more surreal, and strangely enough, Victor's character becomes more and more real -he becomes human, and that is what saves him and saves the book-. A friend lend me the book and it took months for me to read the first half. But after that, it will grab you, and you'll end the book in hours. I give 4 stars to it because it has some flaws, the worst perhaps is that this book became outdated in the moment that it was printed since it talks about fashion, fashion, fashion... and bombs. Not for everyone, Glamorama will demand some IQ from the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Dead On 90s
Review: This book has all the details right. The setting of this book is in the mid 90s, a time I remember pretty vividly. Cyber space? I remember that. Pulp? Oasis? Everything But The Girl? I remember all that stuff too. This book is spot on about the horrible, horrible mish-mash of 80s decadence and self righteous babble that pop culture had turned into. Victor Ward is vainglorous, but not any more than the other characters; he is however, a bit more idiotic. I especially likes his responses to the MTV interviewers questions. This is a fun read and I recommend it to anyone that likes Bret Easton Ellis, Don Delillio, or anything darkly comic. Don't get confused by the plot; it's not really there (and neither are the characters)!
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