* Bret Easton Ellis * Knopf * $25 Famed Gen-X novelist Bret Easton Ellis lately told Rolling Stone he doesn't identify as gay after all.* Bret Easton Ellis * Knopf * $25 Famed Gen-X novelist Bret Easton Ellis lately told Rolling Stone he doesn't identify as gay after all, if it were not that I'm not sure if that's a minus or a plus. His parts are either vapid (Less Than Zero) or misogynistic (American Psycho); the talent is there, everyone single agrees, but what on earth is going in succession in the poor guy's mind? earnestly more than we possibly could have imagined, it bends out. His new book, Glamorama, is sick, twisted, and possibly brilliant--or "brill," as Ellis-speak would phrase it. It stables his reputation as the Jeffrey Dahmer of novelists--dangerous and deranged, at the same time you have to hand it to him: When it arises to dismembering body parts and storing them in the fridge, nobody does it better. The skill, the precision Clearly, here is a man who is doing what he was born to do. Glamorama mention one by ones the story of one Victor Ward, a model-club entrepreneur and boyfriend du jour of Chloe Byrne the in the greatest degree famous supermodel in the world. At first it delineates their frantic lives as they race from runway exhibit to to club opening to TriBeCa loft to Four Seasons house of entertainment downing Snapple, changing clothes, chewing Mentos, bumming Marlboros. moreover it turns out this is just a preliminary to the book's real be of importance to Victor is offered a large sum total of money to find a woman who was formerly in love with him, and after he take downs his first-class stateroom on the QE2 Glamorama changes locale to London and Paris and changes genre from clubland tell-all to a sort of North by means of Northwest for our times, clogg with Prada-wearing terrorists, electronic equipment that can do the principally amazing things, and innocent the bulk of mankind being killed in the greatest in number gruesome ways possible--all described in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more detail than necessary. Glamorama is the consummate fin de siecle novel--overripe, cynical, decadent, weighed down on years of too much sex and violence, too many medicines and brand names. It has greatly more plot than it needinesss and it drops so many names that I began to seriously suspect--then hope--that mine might be nearest a rather unlikely occurrence considering that I live in a trailer park in Florida. yet for all its faults and for all the scorn that will undoubtedly be heaped concerning it, I can't think of another novel that deals in such a manner imaginatively with the media-driven technological and ideological cesspool that has become recent life. Glamorama does not get to across as being written by dint of a gay man, and perhaps that's just as well. Another modern novel that does, even however it wasn't, is the marvelous Breakfast in succession Pluto by the Irish writer Patrick McCabe, author of The Butcher lad Breakfast on Pluto also deals with terrorism--the Irish variety--but while Glamorama is favorably disgusting, McCabe's book is luckily exhilarating. Its narrator and undisputed star is the unsinkable transvestite hooker Pussy Braden, part Mother Courage, part Mitzi Gaynor. Her amorous and political adventures--some hilarious, a horrific--are infinitely truer and more moving than anything Victor Ward reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] points up against. Still, I have true little doubt as to who will memorize all the attention. Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding and like Junkie. COPYRIGHT 1999 Liberation Publications, Inc. |
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