Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis ( 1998 )
Smile!
The life and times of cool daddy-o Victor Ward (or is it Johnson?) and his celebrity pals. Look, there’s Fred Durst, Lil’ Kim, Puff Daddy, Robbie Williams, Tara Reid and Gwyneth Paltrow. They came with Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp (a few meters away from her), Sugar Ray, Dj Sash, David Bowie and Renee Zellweger.
Give me some loving, baby!
I had a few problems with my friend. We were going to start this great bar and I just can’t shake the people from Telehit. They are doing this new reality show and decided to film the life and times of an upstart like me. I have Caifanes, Silvia Pinal, Jose Alfredo Jimenez’s unlawful kids, Antonio Banderas, Pedro Armendariz Jr, RBD and Lolita Ayala coming tonight to the great opening.
It would be fine if only I wasn’t banging Alicia, the girlfriend of Max, the guy I’m opening the bar with. It would be okay, but this idiots from Sonika have a picture of me and Alicia kissing at the last Zero Fest (even if I wasn’t there, although everyone says they saw me). This is okay, since we got along pretty good and my girlfriend Martha is so out of it on Xanax and Bacardi that she would barely notice. Not that I feel guilty. I’m uncapable of being guilty. I’m too good looking to be guilty.
I’m trying to avoid my father, keep searching the rags to see if I made it again on the front cover (I was in La Mosca last month) and some stupid guys in black cars keep following me.
But life is good, baby, I’m meeting Chetes, Ximena Sariñana, the cast from Avenida Q (only those who are gay for real, I want integrity on my musicals), Horacio Villalobos and Daniela Lujan for some fusion sushi at La Condesa. I wonder if there’s an afterparty?
Is there, like, any moving pictures of this?
Movies are overrated, baby, use your imagination. Or some E with a nice Chablis.
Tell us, is this an exit?
With Bret Easton Ellis, there’s no such thing as an exit.
Out of all the zany (but not in a good way) characters from Rules of Attraction, I gotta admit my favorite always is and always was and always will be good ol’ Victor Johnson (or is it Ward?). His drug/sex/madness inducing trip to Europe was the standout point from the movie and one of the best parts from the book (and it helps that the actor portraying Victor looks a little like Beck, a fave musician of mine).
Anyhoo, you’d think I liked this book a lot and would praise it up to heaven, but no, actually no. It’s quite a mixed book. It has a point to drive, sadly, it drives it to the ground, takes out, gives it a shake or two, and then continues to pummel it. Show, don’t tell.
There’s endless and endless paragraphs talking about how many celebrities are at each party, so much that it looks like a bad article from Entertainment Weekly. So many names are dropped upon you and I know it’s to prove the point that society is celebrity obsessed, but once you’d made your point, you should stop unless you want to make the book a chore.
Sadly, this keeps going. The whole first part of this humongous book (it’s 546 pages long) goes on and on about celebrity obsession in society and granted, there’s some very good stuff here, but it’s too repetitive. Then there’s the twist. This twist is what made basis for Easton Ellis’ plagiarism remarks about Zoolander (strangely enough, Ben Stiller is name dropped in the book) and after the book, y’know what? It was a very, very frivolous lawsuit.
So, after 140 pages or so of funny Victor Ward living the good life, we get a barrage of social commentary and acts of random violence that although entertaining, they become repetitive. I kid you not, Victor is described as “weeping” almost in every single page in the second and third parts of the book. He’s always weeping. Thesaurus, Bret?
The story starts to go very, very far out on the left field and I do like this sort of stuff, but it takes ages for something, anything to happen. When it happens, it’s so gory it ends up being just, well, boring. You can take up so much gore until you are numb to it all and just don’t give a flying monkey.
I skipped one chapter that was one long sex scene. Sorry, it was absolute tosh. Nothing to see here, move along.
As the book nears its end, it goes way too crazy, extremely dreamlike and the ending is quite open-ended. I might dare to say it’s the most open-ended book by Easton Ellis I’ve read. At least with American Psycho you have to choices (he’s a serial killer or it’s all in his head) and in Rules of Attraction you get the point (life just goes by for these people, floating like driftwood), but here… it’s so bizarre that the only thing I know is that I’ll probably read this in a few years and like it.
Anything to share with the other stars?
Excerpts:
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