One unavoidable fact: Bret Easton Ellis is an extraordinary writer. It takes remarkable talent to stake out fresh territory so decisively amid the modern publishing crush, and to balance such accomplishment with commercial success is more remarkable still.
This could be the work of absolutely no-one else. Its opening half-ish is astounding: austere, severe, icily cold and yet furiously readable, full of vicious wit and merciless satire. Nothing new, perhaps, merely a relocation to New York to track down old subjects amid celebrity circles, but Ellis has never written better, and his marbled prose - oddly sympathetic to Murakami's, albeit much less gentle - has never achieved more than in documenting the ghostly disintegration of Victor Ward's impossibly glamourous, utterly vacuous world.
But, unfortunately, he can't bring the same clinical composure to the novel's climax: the European scenes, following our anti-hero's involvement with a motiveless terrorist network, are somewhat over-excited, losing the beautiful, delicate thread amid the bloodshed and the pastiche. That's a shame, for it means that "Glamorama" is some way short of the masterpiece that it might've been. It's just a great novel. Another great novel, defeated by its own rather beautiful, greatly immodest ambition.
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