An awesome reckoning of the American Century at endgame. In Glamorama,
a young man is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy
looking-glass of high society and then finds himself trapped on the
other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family
and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At
once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every
turn, he ultimately discovers -- back on the other, familiar side --
that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which
hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.
Bret Easton Ellis accomplishes the transitions from comic to surreal to
horrific to humane with astonishing confidence. Matching ambition with
artistic maturity, Glamorama is at once hilarious, savage in its
worldly observation, and compassionate in its vision: a defining novel
of our times.
"One of the passing delights of Glamorama is to imagine how scholars
of postmodern fiction will explain it a century hence...Ellis invests a
fresh hell on every page...[And] through all this mayhem the style
remains mysteriously elegant." (The New Yorker)
