Bret Easton Ellis: Glamorama
I picked up an almost new paperback of Glamorama at K. Ervasti (Helsinki’s best used bookstore) maybe a year ago. I was wary to read it because I was afraid it was going to be too much like American Psyco, a book I’ve decided to stay away from. I saw the movie and have no interest in reading the book.
Glamorama is nothing like I feared it would be. It’s not a great book, the beginning and ending are a bit boring even, but I enjoyed the whole nonetheless. Ellis’s style is intact, if a little harder to penetrate than in Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction. The plot in totally unbelievable, but this is a flaw only in that the it subtracts from the unreality of the lives it centers around.
Ellis’s repetitive koan-sentences are yet again present (my favorite signature phrase: “the better you look, the more you see”). It’s only unfortunate that my exposure to Coupland and Palahniuk has made this device about as effective as numbering the chapters in reverse order.
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