Reviews for Glamorama

The average rating for Glamorama based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-20 00:00:00 Arianna Lamarre One of the best novels of the 90s for me. Easy. OK, at first I really wasn't sure about this, and it felt a little too brash and full of people that I generally took a dislike too; and was probably supposed to, and where Manhattan is presented as the greatest place on the planet, basically putting the middle finger up to the rest of the world, with its flawless skinned, Xanax dependent, loud and supercilious, label-obsessed, lying and cheating, glossy magazine characters. But of course that's the point. And if that's the point, then Bret Easton Ellis does a bloody good job of it. But then this is his forte, so it was never going to be wrong was it. And the amount of real celeb names that get mentioned here - HUGE! At least it was the 1990s, when a younger me generally liked celebs more. Not like now. It took a good 100 pages or so to feel my way into the story - of a male model whose life basically spirals out of control in ways you simply couldn't imagine - but, the more I read: especially when the narrative travelled to Europe: London, Paris, Italy at the end, and took a more chilling and uncomfortable route, the more I got sucked into Victor Ward's paranoid and menacing world, and was, in the end, left gasping, gripped, feeling sick, stunned, bemused, wildly entertained, and surprisingly: for a Bret Easton Ellis novel, quite moved in places. And all throughout the narrative I was constantly thinking just what is real and what is not. What is the truth, and what is a lie. Why are there cameras here? Hmm. . . Whoa, who's this creepy dude? And then later on - Holy shit! - really? Speechless. And that was the beauty of it, always being kept on my toes with no time to relax, and things really did take a turn at about the half way point - and oh my god! - I wasn't prepared for what would follow. Second half of the novel felt a little like DeLillo's satire, only we go to a much darker and depraved place. Wow. Just wow. Not many books leave me in a state like this one did. Some scenes are just impossible to forget now. For me, better than American Psycho - less repetitive and harder to put down.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-25 00:00:00 George Horton Pure disgust for humanity, in every single sentence. Might be true, in certain ways, might be well written, but it made me feel subhuman and aggressively angry for weeks. I do not see any point in immersing oneself in this kind of violent, sex-driven hate relationships, based on a primitive animal instinct to mate and kill. I have read many dark accounts of humankind's degeneration, but this is just filth. And a desire to shock an audience that has heard, seen and read it all, and thus needs more brutal violence, more complicated sex positions, more vicious competition to satisfy numb senses. If this is reality, I opt for escapism.