Word: victor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easily. Celebrity by itself teeters so often into self-parody that it seems too easy to bash it. Fortunately, Ellis does more than that, injecting Glamorama with a sharper plot than those of earlier novels, a plot which kicks in about a quarter of the way into the novel. Victor, for a $300,000 fee, is sent by the mysterious F. Fred Palakon (whose name echoes G. Gordon Liddy's neatly enough to hint at the web of deceit to follow) to London to look for a former Camden College friend, Jamie Fields, now a model. Slowly, he gets entangled...
...vampires populate this particular Ellis work, but it's hard to believe that any warm blood flows in Glamorama's characters. Victor Ward, fashion's latest "It Boy of the moment," is the novel's memorable protagonist, an uberstereotype of the male model. "The better you look, the more you see," goes Victor's pithy saying, and he believes it. His lifestyle is the extreme of everything the current culture worships: he can't avoid thinking in brand names and image and speaks with lines from pop songs ("do you have the time to listen to me whine?"). Even honesty...
...whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem is the namedropping. Supposedly meant to satirize Victor's obsession with looks, one cannot help but feel that it just reflects the author's attraction to glamour...
...masturbatory lists of famous names--"Brooke Shields; John Stamos, Stephanie Seymour, Jenny Shimuzu [sic]". And so many brand names make an appearance, from Alaia to Prada to Yohji Yamamoto, you'd think he had a product placement contract. It seems to be Ellis' convenient shorthand for character sketches. When Victor undergoes a transformation to a law student, we know he is different because he now wears a Brooks Brothers suit and drinks Diet Coke. London and Paris become nothing more than a different collection of recognizable proper nouns (Notting Hill and Irvine Welsh in the first case; Chez Georges...
...comes across like an effort to give a soundtrack to the entire book. Perhaps this is all a parody of how celebrities or people in general think in the modern world, but surely the point could be made with less. As it stands, all the names merely detract from Victor's troubles...