Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

I'm not really sure how to review this book except to tell you it is unlike anything I have ever read and it will stay with me for a long time. My initial reaction after closing the book was wow this is brilliant and seriously crazy all at the same time.

On the surface this is an extreme satire of post-modern society and the celebrity-obsessed culture as we know it. Ellis combines models, celebrities, drugs, pop culture, violence, sex and terrorists to convey a sense of confusion, emptiness and dispair. The first half of the book focuses on establishing this plastic, superficial culture and the ladder twists it into a violent ball of mayhem that begs the reader to consider exactly where our society is headed.

While I did enjoy the book I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. If you can't read Chuck Palhunak you most definitely can't read Bret Easton Ellis. That being said, Ellis has the gift of combining great writing with a great story - albeit a very dark and shocking story.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Year of First Edition: 1998

With 546 pages this book puts me at 2,227 pages for the 2010 Summer Reading Challenge.

Friends with Death

"You've got to make friends with death. And you have to let things go. Because if you don't, then your life really is shit"

-Bret Easton Ellis via Herald.ie

My First Bret Easton Ellis

Reading now: Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

"Hey baby, we're all in this together," I grunt, my hands dusted with chalk. "Yeah, I wanna give all this up and feed the homeless. I wanna give this all up and teach orangutans sign language. I'm gonna bike around the countryside with my sketchbook. I'm gonna - what? Help improve race relations in this country? Run for fucking president? Read my lips: spare me."

This is my first Ellis novel and so far, it is unlike anything I have ever read - save White Noise by Don DeLillo but much more intense. I'm about half-way through the novel and the story is finally starting to pick up. It seems Ellis used the first 200 pages or so to establish the hollow and celebrity-obsessed world of the 90's, where the protagonist, a male model, communicates using song lyrics and considers himself very important because "the better you look, the more you see". Like Delillo's White Noise, Glamorama is conveying a sense of post-modern trepidation and is considered a staple in post-modern literature (something I wasn't aware of until I started reading the book).

Ellis is the author of American Psyco and while I didn't read the book I remember the movie. If Glamorama is anything like that, it should get quite interesting.