Resumo de Glamorama : The Cult Of "celeb" Of A Sick Society?

The more I read, the more I loved this novel. You perhaps need to devour it in large chunks to appreciate the stylistic virtuosity of the whole. At times I felt the cascade of references to '90s fashion/pop art icons and celebs threatened to skewer the novel to its time and place and subvert its enduring quality beneath reportage. How do you capture ephemera for future readers unaware/uncaring of the historical/contextual referents? As it is, the wider canvas of the text raises it above its characteristically pointillist lists of the hip (cf. Ellis's refrain "We'll slide down the surface of things") to provide a stunning exposure of the corruption and violence feeding the narcissism of a society whose icons are high on the drugs of fame, money and glitz. This is surely the logic of the surreal violence depicted in the latter half of the novel, where some of the (literally) "model" successes of the US screen and fashion scene transmute into model terrorists attacking the very societies on whose values they've grown rich and then even turning on each other. As it happens, this story-line has gained new currency in the light of recent and ongoing events. But the violence is not cliched. This is surreality in its true use as an art-form heightening our perception of the reality hidden or barely perceived beneath "the surface of things". Which is more "real", the world of the glitterati hooked on superficialities or the seemingly grotesque violence of a novelist's imaginings? For me the device of the "filming crews", after initially seeming contrived, captured this "through-the-looking-glass" sense of characters initially seen as effete products of a superficial and materialistic society suddenly transmuted into ruthless terrorists. Beneath their vacuity and artifice these ?icons? conceal shadow personalities with attributes of cruelty and self-aggrandizing ambition equal to the social and economic jungle within which they have had to operate to claw their way to the top. The device is also suggestive of a society fictionalising extremes of violence (in movies, novels etc)as a means of detaching from and denying the gross violence and exploitation of its dehumanising system. Against this background the character of Victor, the naive and suggestible protagonist of the novel, becomes more attractive the more he becomes exposed to and revolts against the sickening reality of his hip peers. At one stage he seems almost representative of a ?holy fool?. However, the ending is ambiguous. Which Victor finally represents reality? Which is the real Victor and which the fictional movie character? The ?reformed? (? still naive) ex-model now settling into patrician respectability and law school; or the Victor who turned in his terrorist fellow models and is now in a protection programme but whose initiation into harsh reality was perhaps bought at the expense of madness now veering into the same murderous violence he had seemingly repudiated? Perhaps both. This is a great novel, addressing fundamental ethical and existential issues, with a sure sense of style, structure and verbal virtuosity that transports the reader's imagination, engages the mind and feeds the soul. Cool, Brett baby!

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