Glamorama

About 2 years ago I read American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis’s satire on banking culture. Afterwards I really wasn’t sure if I would read another book by him. There’s no doubt he has a fantastic writing ability, but I really couldn’t decide if it was worth reading more by an author whose main achievement (to me) was that he was pushing literature to an extreme I hadn’t experienced before. For those of you who don’t know what I mean, let me explain: Graphic violence, graphic sex, and quite a lot of both at once. It was not enjoyable, it was extremely tough going at times, and it really took a lot out of me.

That I ended up reading Glamorama should come as a shock. Especially so, considering the advice I had from two friends who had read it. One said that they stopped reading halfway through because it was too much, the other advised they seriously considered stopping (although they remain a fan). As it turned out, I loved it.

The style is similar - all his novels are narrated in the first person, and the narrator is always excessively vain. The endless celebrity name dropping has been taken to an extreme, with frequent lists of them intentionally placed as a reminder of the narrators priorities. Victor Ward is obsessed with his own identity. The idea that forms the story is a gem: He is caught in a thriller but is too vain (and stupid) to either narrate the story coherently, or realise the importance of what is going on. Terrorist plots are unfolding in the background while he worries which nightclub to go to. The plot cleverly plays within the thriller structure, with the underlying satire of Wards sense of identity being teased throughout.

So why do people think it pushes things too far? I don’t feel it does. The scenes in American Psycho felt so shocking because they were narrated by a sociopath. In this book the shock value of the terrorist plot is largely filtered out by the narrators self obsession, it blurs the violence from the reader. The sex, while as graphic as ever, lacks the violence that made American Psycho so disturbing. I should note that there is material to offend the casually homophobic among you, although I have little sympathy for such people. I mention this more to describe that yet again, I found my self reading Bret Eason Ellis and thinking ‘I’ve never read anything like this before…’, except, this time it was kinda fun.