* Patrick McCabe * HarperFlamingo * $22 Famed Gen-X novelist Bret Easton Ellis newly told Rolling Stone he doesn't identify as gay after all.

* Patrick McCabe * HarperFlamingo * $22

Famed Gen-X novelist Bret Easton Ellis newly told Rolling Stone he doesn't identify as gay after all, on the other hand 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 common agrees, but what on earth is going onward in the poor guy's mind?

plenteous 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 insureds his reputation as the Jeffrey Dahmer of novelists--dangerous and deranged, now you have to hand it to him: When it be deriveds 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 acknowledges the story of one Victor Ward, a model-club entrepreneur and boyfriend du jour of Chloe Byrne the chiefly 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 tavern downing Snapple, changing clothes, chewing Mentos, bumming Marlboros. further it turns out this is just a proem to the book's real affect Victor is offered a large aggregate amount of money to find a woman who was formerly in love with him, and after he penetrates 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 from Northwest for our times, clogg with Prada-wearing terrorists, electronic equipment that can do the greatest in number amazing things, and innocent the community being killed in the greatest in quantity gruesome ways possible--all described in long more detail than necessary.

Glamorama is the full fin de siecle novel--overripe, cynical, decadent, weighed down by means of years of too much sex and violence, too many put drugs intos and brand names. It has a great deal of more plot than it extremitys 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 immediately after it, I can't think of another novel that deals to such a degree imaginatively with the media-driven technological and ideological cesspool that has become present life.

Glamorama does not advance across as being written through a gay man, and perhaps that's just as well. Another late novel that does, even although 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 favorably 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, one horrific--are infinitely truer and more moving than anything Victor Ward draw nears up against. Still, I have self-same little doubt as to who will obtain all the attention.

Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding and regard with affection Junkie.

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