Glamorama (1998) is Bret Easton Ellis’ fourth novel. It followed a short story collection called The Informers (1994). The protagonist and narrator, Victor Ward, is a twenty-seven year old Manhattan model and actor. The first section of the novel finds him preparing to open a nightclub, carousing in many others, and cheating on his model girlfriend Chloe, with Alison, girlfriend to the owner of said soon-to-be nightclub. Victor knows many people, many of them at least minor celebrities, but when they mention running into him somewhere he often seems to have forgotten. It may be simply that he has been taking too much Klonopin, or it may not; Victor Ward had already appeared as Victor Johnson in The Rules of Attraction (1987), and Ward is as much defined as the version of Victor who followed fame as he is given his own discreet unity. After much rushing around for business and pleasure, Victor’s choices will be narrowed. A strange man named F. Fred Palakon offers him $300,000 to go to London recover a missing Camden College classmate, Jamie Fields. It’s a yes or no question. Things get catastrophic with the club opening and with Chloe, and though the answer has been delayed, his yes sets him aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, and the story has really begun. He won’t get back to New York anytime soon. Victor’s life will be even more glamorous all across Europe when he falls in with a group of models lead by his modelling hero Bobby Hughes, and perhaps even more horrible.
Formally, Glamorama contains little that was not already attempted in American Psycho (1991). There is much parataxis and many run-on sentences. These are essentially ways of listing rather than connecting: So and so did this and did that and did that, or so and so did this, such and such did that. The habit that Ellis enjoyed most frequently by describing designer outfits in American Psycho is here indulged as far as listing celebrity invitations for club nights on a fax paper, fifty in one breathless go. It should also be noted that in all but the last of Glamorama’s six parts, the chapter numbers are reversed, starting a couple times as high as the thirties and ending with zero, for a countdown effect.
The novelty of Glamorama is in the vapid stupidity or stupid vapidity of its narrator. And Victor is a ward, like Bateman whom Ellis imprisoned in hell with the opening inscription “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” on 15th Street and 1st Avenue. But Bateman is sooner to realize and admit that he just wants to fit in, and also that he might not exist outside the page; Ward needs a doppelganger better adapted to his world, and the dread of literary death, to realize those things.
Some readers may have missed the joke in American Psycho, the satire that was so obvious as to be imperceptible. Glamorama’s Victor is stupid enough to laugh at, so that anyone can laugh at this book. It should be said that Ward is actually well adapted, but to the stupid parts of his world. “Would you like a Mentos?” he offers one of many love interests. Branding and advertising is so boldly typed in his mind that he wouldn’t think “Mentos” a plural inflection. Or perhaps it was explicitly marketed as one Mentos, two Mentos. He asks Alfonse, a busboy, for mineral water “con gas”. His Spanish is better than his French; underling Peyton admits that an errant designer for the new nightclub was “Approved by, well, moi”, and Victor immediately wants to know who this “Moi” is, what authority he has. He knows at least that things which sound bad are probably bad. A DJ’s death in the New York section is the first really bad thing to happen in the novel, and no, she did not OD, “She was eviscerated, Victor.” The TV joke response that follows from Victor nonetheless wouldn’t quite fit in any sitcom: ‘“Oh my God,” I gasp, holding my head, and then, “What does eviscerated mean?”’ He can say or be reported to have said things that sound half interesting in the New York Times Styles section, such as “In the uterus of love we are all blind cave fish.” There is maybe an insight for him when he catalogues his girlfriend’s feelings: “Arousal for Chloe: Sinead O’Connor CD, beeswax candles, my cologne, a lie.” He certainly understands his father, (at least well enough for the novel’s purposes), whom he calls a “contrivance” and a “plot device”.
Section 2, Victor’s transatlantic journey, is the shortest and best in the novel. At sea, Victor is reflective. It surprises a little, but one should recall that Victor is for the first time in the action alone, feeling cast out of New York for his professional and personal failures. “It’s impossible to believe that any kind of life sustains itself beneath this flat, slate-gray sky or in an ocean so calm and vast, that anything breathing could exist in such limbo,” Victor writes. Later in that very long sentence, his tendency to think in brands (or Ellis’ absorption of Kmart realism) produces something at the very least distinctive: “the air seems vaguely transparent and disposable, with the texture of Kleenex”. Is this tissue flourish with the brand name too literal, dare one say too on the nose? Elsewhere his clichés become absurd in isolation: ‘“I’m . . . a party person,” I muttered to no one.” In this somber mode he can register the inconsistency between how he sees, i.e. with more critical apprehension than we had thought, and how he wants; dining among the “elderly and the Japanese” now, no longer the fast set, he studies a magazine:
and the entire issue was filled with bruises and scars and underarm hair and beautiful, shiftless-looking guys lounging improbably in front of empty 7-Elevens at dusk somewhere in the “heartland” and all I could think about, holding back tears and wincing, was: that should have been me.
For everything else, the novel is a sort of passage from innocence to experience. In going to London and finding Jamie Fields, Victor is welcomed back to the glamorama, where Ralph Fiennes and the people from People are, where “it’s all happening, it’s all familiar.” If any lessons were learned on the boat, they’re stored in a folder somewhere to be brought out later. Victor is young and dumb again, and his new associates too, apparently. Led by Bobby Hughes, they’re all models, and all American expatriates, though little of that latter fact is made explicit. Victor’s first meeting with one of them, Bruce Rhinebeck, contains this quick and cryptic exchange:
“Nice eyebrows, bud,” I tell Bruce.
“Thanks, he says. “They’re mine.”
We don’t get Victor’s reaction to this, and Bruce will have little opportunity to demonstrate if this was the sort of joke that mocks its own stupidity. Similarly, the flamboyant son of the Korean ambassador, Sam Ho, judges Victor’s ignorance with a bizarrely applied cliché.
“One of them [his pair of bodyguards] usually carries a bottle of hydrochloric acid and is basically very stern.” Sam pauses. “They used to work at the Israeli embassy.”
“Is that a club?”
Sam Ho stops smiling and relaxes and touches the side of my face tenderly. “You’re so mainstream,” he murmurs.
The references to weapons and embassies are of course a preview of what the coterie of clubbers gets up to away from the camera flashes. Sam Ho only has a few pages left to explain himself, so it’s Victor’s misapprehension that one remembers better. A few pages later, as it happens, there is a horrific, i.e. well executed execution scene, which however obviously set up can be rather upsetting to read. It’s more than three hundred pages in that Glamorama thusly reveals itself as a macabre, and it might take a few dozen more to recover. When one has, Victor’s incuriosity and camp idiocy become comedy through contrast.
After his initiation, Victor still calls all the women in his life, intimates of his or not, “baby”. His promiscuity is in no way compromised by his manipulation and coercion at brutal Bobby’s hands, nor by the many things he’s made to see and do. He has, as Bobby insists, a lot to learn. There’s a covert meeting with some international operatives who might be helping him, and Jamie Fields, who it turns out is part of Bobby’s gang, catches him with one of these accomplices, Russell. They’re in Paris, so he tells Jamie that his friend is giving him French lessons. The friend somehow passes himself as Christian Bale, but then Victor flubs his part:
“Peace,” he says, moving off. “Victor, I’ll be in touch. Au revoir.”
“Yeah man,” I say shakily. “Bonjour dude,” I’m saying. “Oui, monsieur.”
To protect Bobby’s interests, there’s some very complicated business with digital manipulation of photo and video, consigning even more of the plot to the doubt pile, but there are some convenient glimpses of monitors over shoulders. Victor is still struggling: “On the computer screen are the words BRINK OF DESTRUCTION and automatically I’m thinking, Who’s Brink? and I’ve never heard of that band.” There is to be a radical college lesson which Victor did not take in at Camden, now impressed through Bobby and through implication in his plans. The quotation oughtn’t reveal too much of the plot:
“The government is an enemy.” Bobby turns to face me. “My god, you of all people should know that, Victor.”
“But Bobby, I’m not . . . political.” I blurt out vaguely.
“Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby says, turning away again. “It’s something you can’t help.”
My only response is to gulp down the rest of the Cosmopolitan.
Is there a joke here in that Victor’s drink choice already places him culturally, if not politically, on the international scene, and his involvement with Bobby’s insurgency is a kind of fulfillment? Probably not. But Bobby’s italics allude to Victor’s father, a U.S. senator, from whom Victor has separated himself by changing his surname, and by choosing bottle service and fashion magazines over law school, respectability, and civic influence. Victor’s willed naïveté will come to look more like sensible objection later in this conversation with Bobby:
“We’re killing civilians,” I whisper.
“Twenty-five thousand homicides were committed in our country last year, Victor.”
“But . . . I didn’t commit any of them, Bobby.”
It’s not that Ellis is terribly interested in such questions of moral implication after globalization, rather that Victor’s struggle against his external restraints inevitably points to them. On the more immediate level, there is still in captive Victor that wish for the older Bobby’s approval, even for his approval of Victor’s dumb innocence. This will come to look like Stockholm Syndrome, but Victor had fawned over Bobby before any of the violence began. Victor is stupid enough to laugh at, and easily enough manipulated, maybe even enough to cry for.
The comedy and the pathos are of course connected. The following scheme has been hatched elsewhere, but is worth repeating for Glamorama’s sake: it’s funnier if you think you’re smarter than Victor, and less sad. It’s more sympathetic if you think you’re about as smart as him and wouldn’t do any better in his situation, and less funny. There may be other combinations for other readers, and the ending is neither sad nor funny, but most readers would have one of those two experiences, and most of most would have the first. A second reading, though, can complicate as much as a second reader. If there is a literary progression in the intelligence regression between Bateman and Ward, making Glamorama the funnier novel, there may also be a new problem: you can get the joke, but feel that it’s on you as much as on Victor.