Our Father, Who Art in Spy Bar...

by Ram Murali

Bret Easton Ellis is the self-appointed poet laureate of the shallow. His novels deal with the world of the beautiful and damned, those bright sparks who manage to be in seventy magazines at once without having any kind of talent or intelligence, people who name-drop and whose names are dropped. However, in the end, Ellis is a severe, almost puritanical writer: his characters get their comeuppance for their superficial lives. Modernity and materialism lead to monstrosity.

His latest book, Glamorama, is strangely uneven. At times the book's reflections upon superficiality are so believable that they become superficial themselves, and Ellis runs the risk of becoming what he scorns. But by the end it is clear that, at heart, Glamorama is intended to be a morality tale of what happens when you fall headfirst into the fast-lane world of beauty. At its best, it's incredibly thought-provoking, dark, humorous, and bizarre. At its worst, it's infuriating.

Almost all of Ellis's books use some of the same characters, and in Glamorama many of the characters come from his 1987 book The Rules of Attraction. The protagonist, Victor Ward, is the misguided son of a Washington scion, hopelessly and willingly sucked into the world of fashion, club openings, and pretention; a professional “it-boy.” Lost in a world of VIP lists and club openings, Victor Ward is the ultimate child of media attention: he quite simply doesn't exist outside the pages of his magazine profiles. In spite of Victor's education (he, strangely, attended my high school in New York City and a liberal-arts college in New Hampshire), he is completely addled and does not have rational thought processes. His bizarre vacuousness leads to some very funny moments. “`Please, bring your guest,' Lorrie says. `It's okay if I bring someone?” I ask. `Oh good - a quartet,' Stephen says. `Actually, she's an American.'”

Ellis is well-versed in all aspects of pop culture, and he passes this trait on to his protagonist. When given the title of a song, Victor can immediately spout out the length of the track, the performer, the album title, and the year. In fact, Victor often speaks in song lyrics, as if he is incapable of communicating on his own. He has no personality. This is a typical example of Victor's thought progression: “Damien's sipping a vanilla hazelnut decaf iced latte, holding a Monte Cristo cigar he keeps threatening to light but doesn't, looking very studly in a Comme des Garçons black T-shirt under a black double-breasted jacket, a Cartier Panthère watch wrapped around a semi-hairy wrist, Giorgio Armani prescription sunglasses locked on a pretty decent head, a Motorola StarTac cell phone next to the semi-hairy wrist. Damien bought a 600SEL last week, and he and the goons just dropped Linda Evangelista off at the Cynthia Rowley show and it's cold in the room and we're all eating mueslin and have sideburns and everything would be flat and bright and pop if it wasn't so early.”

The first half of the book is very funny and unself-consciously satirical, and deals with the grand opening of a trendy new club in New York City. Victor is trying desperately to come up with the ultimate guest-list for the party, and is simultaneously trying to get cast in the new film Flatliners 2. There are long sections of the book that are just names listed, one after another. Honestly, it's not quite as annoying as it sounds. The book becomes the non-airbrushed version of People magazine. Celebrities are nothing but their public personas.

Then the book takes a turn for the bizarre, and a turn for the worse. After the disastrous opening of the club, Victor is fired from his job as a club promoter, but is offered $300,000 to go to Europe to attempt to find a girl he knew in college, about whom he says “Condoms didn't necessarily mean anything to her but she knew every guy on campus who had herpes (through some kind of deal with a lesbian nurse in Health Services who was in love with her), so it was all moot. Shakespeare `irritated' her.”

While Victor is sailing to Europe on the QE2, Ellis introduces the notion that Victor's life isn't his life and he's actually just starring in a scripted movie.

“Occasionally the crew converged and the camera would follow me at a discreet distance, shots mainly of Victor on the upper-deck starboard railing, trying to light cigarettes, some rolled with marijuana, sunglasses on, wearing an oversized Armani leather jacket. I was told to look sad, as if my world were falling apart.”

We get the picture, that Ellis is saying that “life is just a movie,” but it's kind of an annoying idea and Ellis does not develop it nearly enough.

For the rest of the book, Victor will occasionally talk to a cinematographer and say something like, “What the hell's going on with the script?”, but it doesn't really make sense. Ellis attempts, a bit too obviously, to show the readers how pretentious and meaningless the lives of the characters are, but falls short and only succeeds in unconsciously making his story slightly pretentious and meaningless.

And then - I'm not making this up - Victor falls in with a group of pseudo-terrorists headed up by a former male model. The group kills children of diplomats and performs random explosions, and at this point the book descends into almost total incomprehensibility, with the terrorist plot tying into the movie plot, and Victor spouting rubbish like “It could be 1978 or 1983. The sky could be black with spaceships. I could be a lonely girl draping scarves over a dorm room lamp. All week I've been having dreams made up entirely of helicopter pull-away shots, revealing a giant metallic space, the word `beyond' floating above that space in white and gold letters. Someone from the crew hands me a tambourine.” Absolute nonsense, interspersed with scenes of the most grotesque violence, make up the last third of the book.

I'm not going to give away the ending, which comes as a surprise, and a welcome one.

The ending of the book just about makes up for the last one-hundred-fifty pages of blather you have to sit through first, and establishes Ellis, in spite of his superficial non-subject matter, as a paradoxically moral, fatalistic, and ascetic writer. By the time it comes, you're so annoyed with most of the characters that it is a pleasure to see them get theirs.

With Glamorama, Ellis attempts to write a modern Greek tragedy. Though he comes up a bit short, the effort is laudable.

In Glamorama, Ellis tries to show the decline of celebrity, modernity, and media. It is simultaneously a Herculean and easy task. Walking the line between satire and literal-ness is a tough task for the best of authors, and Ellis occasionally falls into the crevice.

However, in the end, the message of the book is undoubtedly powerful. Victor's ultimate fate at the end of the book is general and specific at the same time. When a name and a face become famous, the personality, the identity, and the humanity attached to them become expendable.