Glamorama

Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs who exists in magazines and gossip columns and whose life resembles an ultra-hip movie, is living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. And then it's time to move on to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially.

Set in the mid-1990s (1996), the novel starts out in New York City, following a hip, 27-year-old model and nightclub manager, 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 F. Fred 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, the most obvious example of this being Victor. Lauren Hynde and Bertrand Ripleis both return from The Rules of Attraction to play major roles in the novel. There are also brief appearances by Mitchell Allen, Sean Bateman and Patrick Bateman, some of them only in reference and others where the character is actually present in the scene. Alison Poole is also a returning character: Ellis first used her in American Psycho, but she originally appeared in Jay McInerney's novel, Story of my Life.

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

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the major Generation X authors and was regarded as one of the Brat Pack. His novels feature a "flat affect" and a glossy, empty style that garners him extremely polarized reviews. Ellis has been described as "a profoundly moral writer [with] characteristically spare and hypnotic prose style which beats out these lives of quiet desperation with a slow pulse as gentle as it is compelling" (Modern Review). He has called himself a moralist, while he has been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacuous people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it. Ellis prefers to set his novels in the 1980s, utilizing the overt commercialism of the entertainment industry of the decade as a symbol. The novels are also linked by common, recurring characters, and dystopic locales (such as Los Angeles and New York).

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- Less Than Zero (1985)
A raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation.

- The Rules Of Attraction (1987)
A startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future--or even the present--who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle.

- American Psycho (1998)
Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

- The Informers (1994)
A chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces.

- Lunar Park (2005)
Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution.