Glamorama

Glamorama is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis. It was published by Vintage in 2000 (ISBN 0375703845).

Set in the mid-1990s, the novel starts out in New York City, following a hip, 27-year-old model and nightclub owner, Victor Ward, who spends his days and nights organizing parties and worrying whether the A-list celebrities will turn up. Eventually he is given a task by a mysterious diplomat named Palakon, which involves going to London to search for one of Ward's ex-girlfriends, who has gone missing. Things begin to take a worrying turn as Ward ends up mixed up with a group of terrorists in Paris.

Just as American Psycho was a satire of greed and obsession with consumerism, Glamorama is a satire of society's obsession with celebrities and beauty, and features a great deal of violence, black humor and surrealism.

The novel keeps up Ellis's tradition of using pre-existing characters from previous novels. For example, a significant character is Sean Bateman, who was the primary character in The Rules Of Attraction and was Patrick Bateman's brother in American Psycho (Patrick himself makes a brief cameo in Glamorama.)

A movie adaptation is planned, but although it was originally scheduled for release in 2004, it has been delayed and is still awaiting production.

Whilst the first half primarily introduces the characters and sets the scene, the second-half of Glamorama, when the action shifts from New York to London and then Paris, contains a great deal of extreme violence, in particular two gruesome torture sequences that feature castration and electrocution. There are also many bomb attacks, with detailed descriptions of men, women and children being blown apart, burned alive and mutilated.

The terrorists themselves are all supermodels or ex-supermodels, of both sexes, and though they appear to have a leader amongst them it is apparent that they get both their orders and their resources from some external backers who are never seen. The supermodels are presented as vacuous, arrogant and self-centered, these traits presumably being why they were recruited for terrorism.

To add to the often surreal nature of the second-half of the novel, the motives and ideology of the terrorists are never revealed. However, there are clues that it relates to the Middle East, and also that it may be somehow linked to Victor Ward's father, who is a powerful US Senator and is tipped as a Presidential Candidate.

The novel switches back and forth between first-person narration (by Ward) to third-person. Another more surreal literary device employed by Ellis is when Ward – when he's narrating events – starts mentioning a director and film crew who follow him about and offer him advice on what to say or what emotion to express. Who this film crew are – and more importantly, whether they really exist – is not fully explained, although it is implied that they are the products of Ward's imagination, his way of dealing with the horrific terrorist activities that he is involved in (he is virtually a prisoner of the terrorists, blackmailed and threatened into helping their campaign, rather than an enthusiastic volunteer). Imagining himself to be in a movie, and that the dead bodies that he sees in the aftermath of bomb attacks are just fakes, reduces his guilt.